This research paper presents the essential features of the regime of Nikolae Ceausescu in Romania (1965 1989). That period was the most macabre chapter in Romania's turbulent modern history. Ceausescu became Party Secretary in 1965 and ruled the country until he and his wife, Elena, were executed by a firing squad after they had been condemned to death by a secret military tribunal in the wake of the successful revolution of mid December, 1989. The Ceausescu regime was characterized by political repression, ruinous economic policies, an idiosyncratic foreign policy and a bizarre, divisive and ultra nationalistic social agenda.
Ceausescu was born in 1918 in the province of Oltenia, a member of a large and poor peasant family which was dominated by his drunkard and abusive father. Oltenia was the poorest and most Oriental part of modern Romania. Its peasantry had been brutalized by the Turks for centuries. Ceausescu was born with a speech defect. In his youth, he experienced "rejection, privation and imprisonment" (in 1936 and 1940 for his communist activities), which Binder believes may help explain his later craving for adulation from his followers (37). Ceaucescu had been a protege of Party Secretary Gheorghe Gheorghiu Dej, whom Josef Stalin hand picked to run Romania after World War II during which the Russians invaded Romania (in 1944). The Romania over which Ceausescu assumed power in 1965 after Gheorghiu's death had a painful introduction to the modern world.
Of ancient Latinate and Byzantine origins, the principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia joined forces as an independent kingdom in 1881. That independence was secured by force of Russian arms, but from the 1830s onward, Romanians had to contend with Russia's "heavy handed interference in Romanian internal affairs" (Hutchens 1064). An ally of the Central Powers after 1883, Romania joined the Allied side during World War I and became Greater Romania in 191...