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| NICOLAE CEAUSESCU |
Nicolae Ceauşescu ( 26 January 1918 – 25 December 1989) was a Romanian politician and dictator who was the Secretary General of the Romanian Communist Party from 1965 to 1989, President of the Council of State from 1967, and President of Romania from 1974 to 1989.
His rule was marked in the first decade by an open policy towards Western Europe, Israel, and the United States, which deviated from that of the other Warsaw Pact states during the Cold War. He continued a trend first established by his predecessor, Gheorghe Gheorghiu Dej, who had tactfully coaxed the Soviet Union into withdrawing its troops from Romania in 1958.
Ceauşescu's second decade was characterized by an increasingly erratic personality cult, nationalism and a deterioration in foreign relations with the Western powers as well as the Soviet Union. Ceauşescu's government was overthrown in a December 1989 revolution, and he and his wife were executed following a televised and hastily organised two-hour court session. One of the executioners later said: "it wasn’t a trial, it was a political assassination in the middle of a revolution."
Early life and career
Born in the village of Scornicesti, Olt Contry, Ceauşescu moved to Bucharest at the age of 11 to work in the factories. He was the son of a peasant . He joined the then-illegal Communist Party of Romania in early 1932 and was first arrested, in 1933, for agitating 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 similar activities. These arrests earned 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 two years at Doftana Prison for anti-fascist activities.
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| Arrested in 1933, when he was 15 years old for "active distribution of communist and anti-fascist propaganda |
Leadership of Romania
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 change the name of the party to The Romanian Communist Party, and declare the country 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, Ceauşescu became a popular figure in Romania and also in the Western World, due to his independent foreign policy, challenging the authority of the Soviet Union. In the 1960s, he ended Romania's active participation in the Warsaw Pact (though Romania formally remained a member); he refused to take part in the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact forces, and actively and openly condemned that action. Although the Soviet Union largely tolerated Ceauşescu's recalcitrance, his seeming independence from Moscow earned Romania maverick status within the Eastern Bloc.
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| The presidential couple is received by Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace in June 1978 |
During the following years Ceauşescu pursued an open policy towards the United States and Western Europe. Romania was the first Communist country to recognize West Germany, the first to join the International Monetary Fund, and the first to receive a US President, Richard Nixon. In 1971 Romania became a member of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Romania and Yugoslavia were also the only East European countries that entered into trade agreements with the European Economic Community before the fall of the Communist bloc.
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| Meeting between US president Richard Nixon, US vice president Gerald Ford and Nicolae Ceauşescu in 1973 |
A series of official visits to Western countries (including the US, France, United Kingdom, Spain) helped Ceauşescu to present himself as a reforming Communist, pursuing an independent foreign policy within the Soviet Bloc. Also he became eager to be seen as an enlightened international statesman, able to mediate in international conflicts and to gain international respect for Romania.Ceauşescu negotiated in international affairs, such as the opening of US relations with China in 1969 and the visit of Egyptian president Anwar Sadad to Israel in 1977. Also Romania was the only country in the world to maintain normal diplomatic relations with both Israel and the PLO.
Foreign debt
Ceauşescu's political independence from the Soviet Union and his protest against the invasion of Czechoslowakia in 1968 drew the interest of Western powers, who briefly believed he was an anti-Soviet maverick and hoped to create a schism in the Warsaw Pact by funding him. Ceauşescu did not realise that the funding was not always favorable. Ceauşescu was able to borrow heavily (more than $13 billion) from the West to finance economic development programs, but these loans ultimately devastated the country's finances. In an attempt to correct this, Ceauşescu decided to repay Romania's foreing debts. He organised a referendum and managed to change the constitution, adding a clause that barred Romania from taking foreign loans in the future. The referendum yielded a nearly unanimous "yes" vote. 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 Romanians a fight for survival as food rationing was introduced and heating, gas and electricity black-outs became the rule. During the 1980s, there was a steady decrease in the living standard, especially the availability and quality of food and general goods in stores. The official explanation was that the country was paying its debts and people accepted the suffering, believing it to be for a short time only and for the ultimate good.
The debt was fully paid in summer 1989, shortly before Ceauşescu was overthrown, but heavy exports continued until the revolution in December.Tensions
By 1989, Ceauşescu was showing signs of complete denial of reality. While the country was going through extremely difficult times with long bread queues in front of empty food shops, he was often shown on state TV entering stores filled with food supplies, visiting large food and arts festivals, while praising the "high living standard" achieved under his rule.
Special contingents of food deliveries would fill stores before his visits, and even well-fed cows would be transported across the country in anticipation of his visits to farms. In at least one emergency, he inspected (and approved) a display of Hungarian produce, which apart from some corn and several melons, was largely constructed of painted plastic and/or polystyrene. Meanwhile, staples such as flour, eggs, butter and milk were difficult to find and most people started to depend on small gardens grown either in small city alleys or out in the country. In late 1989, daily TV broadcasts showed lists of CAPs ( collective farms) with alleged record harvests, in blatant contradiction to the shortages experienced by the average Romanian at the time.
Some people, believing that Ceauşescu was not aware of what was going on in the country, attempted to hand him petitions and complaint letters during his many visits around the country. However, each time he got a letter, he would immediately pass it on to members of his security. Whether or not Ceauşescu ever read any of them will probably remain unknown. It was common knowledge that people attempting to hand letters directly to Ceauşescu risked adverse consequences, courtesy of the Securitate. People were strongly discouraged from addressing him and there was a general sense that morale had reached an overall low.
Revolution
Ceauşescu's regime collapsed after a series of violent events in Timisoara and Bucharest in December 1989. In November 1989, the XIVth Congress of the Romanian Communist Party (PCR) saw Ceauşescu, then aged 71, re-elected for another 5 years as leader of the PCR.
Timişoara
Demonstrations in the city of Timişoara were triggered by the government-sponsored attempt to evict Laszlo Tokes, an ethnic Hungarian pastor, accused by the government of inciting ethnic hatred. Members of his ethnic Hungarian congregation surrounded his apartment in a show of support.
Romanian students spontaneously joined the demonstration, which soon lost nearly all connection to its initial cause and became a more general anti-government demonstration. Regular military forces, police and Securitate fired on demonstrators on 17 December 1989. On 18 December 1989, Ceauşescu departed for a visit to Iran, leaving the duty of crushing the Timişoara revolt to his subordinates and his wife. Upon his return on the evening of 20 December, the situation became even more tense, and he gave a televised speech from the TV studio inside Central Committee Building (CC Building), in which he spoke about the events at Timişoara in terms of an "interference of foreign forces in Romania's internal affairs" and an "external aggression on Romania's sovereignty".
The country, which had no information of the Timişoara events from the national media, learned about the Timişoara revolt from western radio stations such as Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, and by word of mouth. On the next day, 21 December, a mass meeting was staged. Official media presented it as a "spontaneous movement of support for Ceauşescu", emulating the 1968 meeting in which Ceauşescu had spoken against the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact forces.
Overthrow
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| Nicolae Ceauşescu flees Bucharest by helicopter on 22 December 1989 |
The mass meeting of 21 December, held in what is now Revolution Square, degenerated into chaos. The image of Ceauşescu's uncomprehending expression as the crowd began to boo and heckle him remains one of the defining moments of the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe. The stunned couple (the dictator and his wife), failing to control the crowds, finally took cover inside the building, where they remained until the next day. The rest of the day saw an open revolt of the Bucharest population, which had assembled in University Square and confronted the police and army at barricades. The unarmed rioters, however, were no match for the military apparatus concentrated in Bucharest, which cleared the streets by midnight and arrested hundreds of people in the process. Nevertheless, these seminal events are regarded to this day as the de facto revolution.
Although the television broadcasts of the "support meeting" and subsequent events had been interrupted, Ceauşescu's reaction to the events had already been imprinted on the country's collective memory. By the morning of 22 December, the rebellion had already spread to all major cities. The suspicious death of Vasile Milea, the defence minister, was announced by the media. Immediately thereafter, Ceauşescu presided over the CPEx (Political Executive Committee) meeting and assumed the leadership of the army. He made a desperate attempt to address the crowd gathered in front of the Central Committee building. This was rejected by the rioters who forced open the doors of the building, by now left unprotected, obliging the Ceauşescus to flee by helicopter.
During the course of the revolution, the western press published estimates of the number of people killed by the Securitate in attempting to support Ceauşescu and quash the rebellion. The count increased rapidly until an estimated 64,000 fatalities were widely reported across front pages. The Hungarian military attaché expressed doubt regarding these figures, pointing out the unfeasible logistics of killing such a large number of people in such a short period of time. After Ceauşescu's death, hospitals across the country reported an actual death toll of less than one thousand, and probably much lower than that.
Death
Ceauşescu and his wife Elena fled the capital with Emil Bobu and Manea Manescu and headed, by helicopter, for Ceauşescu's Snagov residence, from where they fled again, this time for Targoviste. Near Târgovişte they abandoned the helicopter, having been ordered to land by the army, which by that time had restricted flying in Romania's air space. The Ceauşescus were held by the police while the policemen listened to the radio. They were eventually turned over to the army. On Christmas Day, 25 December, the two were sentenced to death by a military court on charges ranging from illegal gathering of wealth to genocide, and were executed in Târgovişte. The video of the trial shows that, after sentencing, they had their hands tied behind their backs and were led outside the building to be executed.
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| Ceauşescus executed |
The Ceauşescus were executed by a firing squad consisting of elite paratroop regiment soldiers: Captain Ionel Boeru, Sergant-Major Georghin Octavian and Dorin-Marian Cirlan, while reportedly hundreds of others also volunteered. The firing squad began shooting as soon as they were in position against a wall. The firing happened too soon for the film crew covering the events to record it. After the shooting, the bodies were covered with canvas. The hasty trial and the images of the dead Ceauşescus were videotaped and the footage promptly released in numerous western countries. Later that day, it was also shown on Romanian television.
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| Nicolae Ceauşescu's grave in Ghencea Cemetery |
The Ceauşescus were the last people to be executed in Romania before the abolition of capital punishment on 7 January 1990.
Their graves are located in Ghencea cemetery in Bucharest. They are buried on opposite sides of a path. The graves themselves are unassuming, but they tend to be covered in flowers and symbols of the regime. Some allege that the graves do not, in reality, contain their bodies. As of April 2007, their son VALENTIN CEAUSESCU has lost an appeal for an investigation into the matter. Upon his death in 1996, the elder son, NICU, was buried nearby in the same cemetery. According to Jurnalul National, requests were made by the Ceauşescus' daughter ZOIA and by supporters of their political views to move their remains to mausoleums or to purpose-built churches. These have been denied by the government. On 21 July 2010, forensic scientists exhumed the bodies of Nicolae and Elena to perform DNA tests. Later it was determined that they were indeed the remains of Nicolae and Elena.
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