Nicolae Ceaucescu and Romania

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 e

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and administration through the mechanism of joint party-state councils, which had no precise counterpart in other communist regimes. These councils went a step beyond the typical Stalinist pattern of interlocking party and state directories in which the state institutions preserved at least the appearance of autonomy. For Ceauescu, his fusion of party and state bodies made it possible to exercise immediate control over many of the functions the Constitution had granted to the Grand National Assembly, the Council of State, the Council of Ministers, the State Planning Committee, and other government entities. Five of the nine joint party-state councils in existence in 1989 were chaired either by Ceauescu or his wife (Bachman,xxi-xxii). Self-promotion was always a part of the rule of Ceauescu. In 1978 a book entitled Homage was published as a tribute to his lifetime achievements, "couched in such extravagantly fulsome prose as to provoke embarrassed laughter in any normal society" (Behr, 1991, p. 170). Another such book was published in 1983 to bring his accomplishments up to date. Officers from the "protocol department" of the Securitate always made certain that Ceauescu appeared in the most favorable circumstances on

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