Nicolae Ceaușescu
Nicolae Andruţă Ceauşescu [nik-oh-LA-ye ahnd-RU-tsuh cha-ow-SHESS-koo] (January 26, 1918 - December 25,1989) was the leader of Communist Romania from 1965 until shortly before his execution in 1989.
He was born in Scorniceşti village, Olt County, Oltenia, Romania.
Legend has it that while employed as a shoe-maker's apprentice he was wandering through a railway station and stole a piece of luggage. When he was caught by police the suitcase was full of Communist Party flyers; thus he was arrested as a Communist and imprisoned at Doftana together with other Communists. It is said this was his first contact with Communism.
Ceausescu moved to Bucharest at the age of 11 to become a shoemaker's apprentice. He joined the illegal Communist Party of Romania in early 1932 and was first arrested in 1933 for agitational work during a strike. He was arrested again in 1934 first for collecting signatures on a petition protesting the trial of railway workers and twice more for other agitational activities earning him the description "dangerous communist agitator" and "active distributor of communist and anti-fascist propaganda" on his police record. He then went underground but was captured and imprisoned in 1936 for a two year sentence at Doftana Prison for anti-fascist activities. While out of jail in 1939 he met Elena Petrescu (they married in 1946) - she would play a growing role in his political life over the decades. He was arrested and imprisoned again in 1940. In 1943 he was transferred to Târgu Jiu concentration camp where he shared a cell with Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej becoming his protégé. After World War II, when Romania was beginning to fall under Soviet influence, he served as secretary of the Union of Communist Youth (1944-1945). After the Communists seized power of Romania in 1947, he headed the ministry of agriculture, then served as deputy minister of the armed forces under Gheorghiu-Dej's Stalinist reign. In 1952 Gheroghiu-Dej brought him onto the Central Committee months after the party's "Muscovite faction" led by Ana Pauker had been purged. In 1954 he became a full member of the Politburo and eventually rose to occupy the second highest position in the party hierarchy.
Three days after the death of Gheorghiu-Dej in March 1965, Ceauşescu became first secretary of the Romanian Workers' Party. One of his first acts was to rename the party the Romanian Communist Party and declare that the country was now the Socialist Republic of Romania rather than a people's republic. In 1967 he consolidated his power by becoming president of the State Council. Initially, he was a popular figure, thanks to his independent policy, challenging the supremacy of the Soviet Union in Romania. In the 1960s he ended Romania's active participation in the Warsaw Pact (though Romania formally remained a member) and condemned the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact forces.
In 1974, Ceausescu added President of Romania to his titles further consolidating his power. He followed an independent policy in foreign relations—for example, in 1984, Romania was one of only two Communist-ruled countries to take part in the American-organized 1984 Summer Olympics. Also, the country was the first of the Eastern Bloc to have official relations with the European Community: an agreement including Romania in the Community's Generalized System of Preferences was signed in 1974 and an Agreement on Industrial Products was signed in 1980. However, Ceauşescu refused to implement any liberal reforms. The evolution of his regime followed the Stalinist path already traced by Gheorghiu-Dej. Their opposition to Soviet control was mainly determined by the unwillingness to proceed to destalinization. The secret police (Securitate) maintained firm control over speech and the media, and tolerated no internal opposition.
Ceausescu had made state visits to the People's Republic of China and North Korea in 1971. He took great interest in the idea of total national transformation as embodied in the programs of the Korean Workers' Party and China's Cultural Revolution. Shortly after returning home he began to emulate North Korea's dictatorship, influenced by the Juche philosophy of North Korean President Kim Il Sung. Korean books on Juche were translated into Romanian and widely distributed in the country.
Beginning in 1972, Ceauşescu instituted a program of systematization. Promoted as a way to build a "multilaterally developed socialist society," the program of demolition, resettlement, and construction began in the countryside, but culminated with an attempt to completely remodel the country's capital. Over one fifth of central Bucharest, including churches and historic buildings, was demolished during Ceauşescu's rule in the 1980s, to rebuild the city in his personally chosen style. Many people died during the erection of The People's House ("Casa Poporului") in Bucharest, now the Parliament House, the world's second largest building after The Pentagon. Ceauşescu also planned to bulldoze many villages in order to move the peasants into blocks of flats in the cities, as part of his "urbanization" and "industrialization" programs. An NGO project called "Sister Villages" that created bonds between European and Romanian communities may have played a role in hindering these plans.
Like Kim, Ceauşescu created a pervasive personality cult, giving himself the titles of "Conducător" ("Leader") and "Geniul din Carpaţi" ("Genius of the Carpathians,") and even having a king-like scepter made for himself. Such excesses prompted the painter Salvador Dalí to send a congratulatory telegram to the "Conducator." The Communist Party daily Scînteia published the message, unaware that Dalí had written it with tongue firmly in cheek. Ceauşescu also invested his wife Elena and other members of his family with important positions in the government.
Despite his increasingly totalitarian rule, Ceauşescu's political independence from the Soviet Union drew the interest of western powers. Ceauşescu was able to borrow heavily from the west to finance economic development programs, but these loans ultimately devastated the country's financial position. In the 1980s, Ceauşescu ordered the export of much of the country's agricultural and industrial production in order to repay its debts. The resulting domestic shortages made the everyday life of Romanian citizens a fight for survival.
Ceausescu's social policies further aggravated the situation. For instance, it became national policy to forcefully increase the population. A key element of this was the 1966 decree that prohibited abortion and contraception and made divorce more difficult to obtain. While the population did increase, many of the children were abandoned at state-run orphanages by their families who could not support them owing to the food shortages. These institutionalized "decree babies" lived in squalid conditions that caused many deaths. Another disastrous policy was Ceausescu's refusal to acknowledge the presence of AIDS in the population. He forbade testing of the blood supply; because of this and because Romania allowed the use of shared needles in transfusions for orphans, Romania had over half the cases of childhood AIDS infections in Europe.
In 1978 Ion Mihai Pacepa, a senior member of the Romanian intelligence service (Securitate), defected to the United States. This was a powerful blow against the regime, forcing Ceauşescu to overhaul the architecture of Securitate. Pacepa's 1986 book Red Horizons: Chronicles of a Communist Spy Chief (ISBN 0895265702) reveals details of Ceauşescu's regime such as his collaboration with Arab terrorists, his massive espionage on American industry and his elaborate efforts to rally Western political support.
Ceauşescu's regime collapsed after he ordered regular military forces and Securitate to fire on anti-Communist demonstrators in the city of Timişoara on December 17, 1989. The demonstrations were triggered by the government-sponsored attempt to evict a popular church minister. The rebellion spread to Bucharest, perhaps aided by Ceauşescu's ill-advised decision to hold a mass rally; this turned into a protest demonstration. On December 22 the army fraternized with the
demonstrators. On the same day Ceauşescu and his wife Elena Ceauşescu fled the presidential palace in a helicopter—an aide held a gun to the pilot's head. The pilot landed near a farm-house after falsely claiming the helicopter was being targeted by anti-aircraft radar. The presidential couple continued fleeing through the countryside more or less aimlessly. The flight included grotesque episodes: a car chase to evade citizens attempting an arrest, the desertion of the aides, a short stay in a school. The Ceauşescus were finallly held in a police car for several hours, while the policemen listened to the radio, presumably in order to understand which political option is about to win. Police eventually turned the presidential couple to the army. On December 25, the two were condemned to death by a military kangaroo court on a range of charges including genocide, and were executed by firing squad in Târgovişte. Romania was the only Eastern Bloc country to violently overthrow its Communist regime.
After Ceauşescu's fall, Ion Iliescu won the Romanian presidential election in 1990.
The Ceauşescus had one adopted son, Valentin Ceauşescu, a daughter Zoia Ceauşescu (born 1950) and a younger son, Nicu Ceauşescu (born 1951).
See also
Bibliography
- Edward Behr, Kiss the Hand you Cannot Bite, ISBN 0679401288
- John Sweeney, The Life and Evil Times of Nicolae Ceausescu, ISBN 0091746728 ---