Nicolae Ceauşescu, the youngest communist ruler in Eastern Europe in the 1960’s, came to power after many years of dedicated service to the Communist Party, but within twenty years, the dictator brought a once self-sufficient nation to a state of poverty and international repudiation. He was executed in 1989.
On December 9, 1967, Nicolae Ceauşescu became president of Romania. Having risen in the ranks of the Romanian Communist Party to reach the powerful position of party secretary-general by 1965, he consolidated his control of the party and the country by gaining the presidency. He strengthened his position by gathering young Communist associates to replace the Old Guard leftovers whom he sent to positions of lesser influence. He removed Romania from the patronage of the Soviet Union and raised his own stature among other world leaders. He introduced policies that eventually caused an uprising among Romanians and, after nearly twenty-four years, toppled him from power.
After World War II, Romania, a kingdom since 1881, was controlled by a communist-led government that forced its monarch, King Michael I, to abdicate and established the People’s Republic of Romania. Romania had surrendered to the Soviet Union in 1944, which allowed the Soviet government to control the country’s politics and governance. However, by the early 1960’s, Romanian leaders were pulling away from Soviet influence and attempting to establish closer ties with Western nations. Though they were communists, these leaders wanted independence from the Soviets.
Ceauşescu was born on January 26, 1918, in Scorniceşti, a farm village of about two thousand people. His family left the village when he was eleven years old and moved to Bucharest, where he joined the Romanian Communist Youth Party in 1932, quickly impressing his superiors with his dedication and zeal. At age fifteen, he was arrested for the first of what would be many times for inciting a strike and distributing antigovernment leaflets. Arrested often, he was labeled a “dangerous Communist agitator” and banished from Bucharest to Scorniceşti. He stayed there only briefly, returning to the city to continue serving the Communist Party. In 1938, he was tossed in a prison cell with Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, who would become president of Romania in 1961; he became Gheorghiu-Dej’s protégé.
In 1946, Ceauşescu married Elena Petrescu, who became his partner and ally throughout his career. They had three children, one of whom was adopted because Ceauşescu wanted his family to be a model to other Romanians, who were encouraged to adopt some of the many parentless or abandoned children for which Romania was becoming infamous.
When Gheorghiu-Dej became Romanian premier in 1952, he made Ceauşescu deputy head of the ministry of agriculture. Soon Ceauşescu became head of the ministry of armed forces. Still quite young to have advanced so far so fast, by 1955 he was a full member of the Romanian Workers’ Party Central Committee. He soon became a member of the Politburo, the powerful policy-making, governing body of the party. He supported Gheorghiu-Dej’s ongoing campaign to loosen Soviet control over Romania, a campaign that included changing all Romanian publications that described the Soviets as the heroes of World War II to show instead that Romanians were the heroes. Furthermore, the schools discontinued the requirement to learn the Russian language.
When Gheorghiu-Dej died in 1965, Ceauşescu was chosen for the daunting task of leading a country with a baleful relationship with the powerful Soviet Union and with a floundering economy. A population of nearly 20 million had only about ten thousand automobiles. Many other consumer goods were in short supply, and what few were available, if made in Romania, were often lacking in quality or variety. Nevertheless, Ceauşescu immediately made some changes. He declared unequivocally that Romania was an independent entity with no subservient relationship to any other nation—especially the Soviet Union—and he changed the name of the country from the People’s Republic of Romania to the Socialist Republic of Romania.
Ceauşescu had the Securitate
Ceauşescu’s economic policies
Nicolae Ceauşescu around 1965.
Hasty industrialization,
Even with such misfortunes, Romania’s national assembly made Ceauşescu “president for life of the republic,” a vote of confidence that encouraged him to give in to a personal prejudice he had against Romania’s minority Hungarian population.
Ceauşescu’s presidency began to falter in 1978, when the head of his secret police, Ion Mihai Pacepa, defected to the United States and told the world about Ceauşescu’s crimes and Romania’s deplorable conditions and faltering economy. Ceauşescu gave Pacepa two death sentences and put a bounty on his head. As the repression of its citizens and the corruption of its leaders stirred protests and demonstrations against the regime, things came to a head
When Ceauşescu became president of Romania, his intentions were likely good. He believed in communism’s promise for the working class. He was undone and corrupted by ambition and the acquisition of power. He took Romania from an agricultural country that had been more or less self-sufficient over its long history and turned the country into a pauper.
Although he lessened the Soviet Union’s hold on the country, his own policies repressed thousands of Romania’s citizens, bringing ill health, famine, poverty, degradation, and death to the very people he had sworn to lead and defend. His was a stunning example of how ill-conceived economic policies and arrogance can bring a nation to its knees.
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Berglund, Sten, and Frank Aarebrot. The Political History of Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century: The Struggle Between Democracy and Dictatorship. Lyme, N.H.: E. Elgar, 1997. Detailed examination of the oscillation between freedom and totalitarian regimes in pre- and postwar Eastern Europe. -
Câmpeanu, Pavel. Ceauşescu: The Countdown. Translated by Sorana Corneanu. Boulder, Colo.: East European Monographs, 2003. A memoir written by a political-prison cell mate of Nicolae Ceauşescu in the days before Ceauşescu became president of Romania. Provides details of the dictator’s early life from previously unavailable documents. An “insider’s” account. Highly recommended. -
Deletant, Dennis. Ceauşescu and the Securitate: Coercion and Dissent in Romania, 1965-1989. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1995. A history of Romania’s secret police under Nicolae Ceauşescu, and a discussion of how Romanian society was revolutionized. Based on research using Securitate archives, on memoirs of Communist terror victims, and on interviews with dissidents during Ceauşescu’s regime. -
Kligman, Gail. The Politics of Duplicity: Controlling Reproduction in Ceausescu’s Romania. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. A study of Ceauşescu’s draconian policies against abortion and birth control, policies that came to define Romania to a shocked world, as images of Romanian orphans and other children—those with birth defects, the severely ill, those dying from AIDS and from neglect—came to light after Ceauşescu’s downfall in 1989. -
Pacepa, Ion M. Red Horizons: The True Story of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu’s Crimes, Lifestyles, and Corruption. Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1990. Written by the former chief of Romania’s foreign intelligence service, this work discusses Ceauşescu’s government corruption, his “brutal machinery of oppression,” his personal life, and his attempts to win over Western world figures. -
Popa, Opritsa D., and Marguerite E. Horn, comps. Ceauşescu’s Romania. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. An annotated bibliography of North American and Western European social sciences research, including books, doctoral dissertations, reports, periodicals, and government documents covering Romania’s Communist era. Indexed by both subject and author.
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