Nicolae Ceauescu came to power in Romania in 1965 and persisted as the longest-lasting rulers of an orthodox communist state. During the course of his rule, Romania would become more and more isolated politically from the rest of the world, and the nature of his dictatorship continued the Stalinist policies of repression that had marked an earlier era in world communism. As the various communist states began to fall in the late 1980s and as the Soviet Union itself started to break up into discrete national units, Romania seemed to be swimming against the tide by continuing with the policies of old. In 1989, though, the people revolted against the tyrannical rule of Ceauescu, and as they did so they learned much about their leader and his rule that they had not known, including the lavish style of life enjoyed by him and his wife while the people struggled for existence under harsh conditions. An examination of Ceauescu and his rule will include an assessment of his style of leadership, the nature of the human rights violations he committed, and precisely what led to his downfall after managing to cling to power for a quarter of a century.
After World War II, the Romanian Communist Party was at first quite small, attracting scant popular support and with fewer than 1,000 members. Recruitment campaigns then began among the country's workers, intellectuals, and others disillusioned by the breakdown of the country's democratic experiment. These new members were hungry for radical reform, and among their number were many opportunists as well as radicals. There were then two rival factions competing for party leadership, the one the Romanian faction which had operated underground during the war, and the other the "Muscovites" who were primarily intellectuals and nonethnic Rumanians who had lived out the war in Moscow and who arrived in Romania on the heels of the Red Army. Neither faction was a disciplined, coherent organizatio...