Nicolae Ceaușescu was a RomanianCommunist politician.

He was general secretary of

the Romanian Communist Party from 1965 to 1989, and hence the second and last Communist
leader of Romania. He was also the country's head of state from 1967, serving as President of
the State Council, from 1974 concurrently as President of the Republic, until his overthrow in
the Romanian Revolution in 1989.
Born in 1918 in Scornicești, Olt County, Ceaușescu was a member of the Romanian Communist
youth movement. Ceaușescu rose up through the ranks of Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej's Socialist
government and, upon Gheorghiu-Dej's death in 1965, he succeeded to the leadership of
Romania’s Communist Party as General Secretary.[3]
Upon his rise to power, he eased press censorship and openly condemned the Warsaw Pact
invasion of Czechoslovakia in his speech on 21 August 1968, which resulted in a surge in
popularity. The resulting period of stability was very brief, however; his government very soon
became severely repressive and authoritarian, and was considered the most Stalinist in Eastern
Europe. His secret police, the Securitate, was responsible for mass surveillance as well
as severe repression and human rights abuses within the country, and he suppressed and
controlled the media and press, implementing methods that were among the harshest, most
restrictive and brutal in the world. Economic mismanagement due to failed oil ventures during the
1970s led to skyrocketing foreign debts for Romania; in 1982, he exported much of the country's
agricultural and industrial production in an effort to repay them. The shortages that followed
drastically lowered living standards, leading to heavy rationing of food, water, oil, heat, electricity,
medicine, and other necessities. His cult of personality experienced unprecedented elevation,
followed by extensive nepotism and the intense deterioration of foreign relations, even with
the Soviet Union.
As anti-government protesters demonstrated in Timișoara in December 1989, he perceived the
demonstrations as a political threat and ordered military forces to open fire on 17 December,
causing many deaths and injuries. The revelation that Ceaușescu was responsible resulted in a
massive spread of rioting and civil unrest across the country.[4] The demonstrations, which
reached Bucharest, became known as the Romanian Revolution—the only violent upheaval of a
communist government in the turn of the Revolutions of 1989.[5] Ceaușescu and his wife, Elena,
fled the capital in a helicopter, but were captured by the armed forces after the armed forces
changed sides. On 25 December, after being tried and convicted of economic sabotage
and genocide,[6] they were immediately executed by firing squad,[7] and Ceaușescu was
succeeded as President by Ion Iliescu, who had played a major part in the revolution. Capital
punishment was abolished shortly thereafter.

Arrested in 1936 when he was 18 years old, Ceaușescu was imprisoned for two years at Doftana Prison for
Communist activities.
Ceaușescu was born in the small village of Scornicești, Olt County, on 26 January 1918, being
one of the nine children of a poor peasant family (see Ceaușescu family). His father, Andruță,
owned 3 hectares (7.4 acres) of agricultural land and a few sheep, and he supplemented his
large family's income through tailoring.[8] Nicolae studied at the village school until at the age of
11, when he ran away from his extremely religious, abusive and strict father to Bucharest. He
initially lived with his sister, Niculina Rusescu, and then became an apprentice shoemaker.[8]
He worked in the workshop of Alexandru Săndulescu, a shoemaker who was an active member
in the then-illegal Communist Party.[8]Ceaușescu was soon involved in the Communist Party
activities (becoming a member in early 1932), but as a teenager, he was given only small
tasks.[8] He was first arrested in 1933, at the age of 15, for street fighting during a strike and
again, in 1934, first for collecting signatures on a petition protesting the trial of railway workers
and twice more for other similar activities.[9] By the mid-1930s, he had been in missions in
Bucharest, Craiova, Câmpulung, and Râmnicu Vâlcea, being arrested several times.[10]
The profile file from the secret police, Siguranța Statului, named him "a dangerous Communist
agitator" and "distributor of Communist and antifascist propaganda materials".[10] For these
charges, he was convicted on 6 June 1936 by the Brașov Tribunal to 2 years in prison, an
additional 6 months for contempt of court, and one year of forced residence in Scornicești.[10] He
spent most of his sentence in Doftana Prison.[10] While out of jail in 1939, he met Elena Petrescu,
whom he married in 1947 and who would play an increasing role in his political life over the
years.[9]

Ceaușescu and other Communists at a public meeting in Colentina, welcoming the Red Army as it entered
Bucharest on 30 August 1944
Soon after being freed, he was arrested again and sentenced for "conspiracy against social
order", spending the time during the war in prisons and internment camps: Jilava (1940),
Caransebeș (1942), Văcărești (1943), and Târgu Jiu (1943).[10] In 1943, he was transferred
to Târgu Jiu internment camp, where he shared a cell with Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, becoming
his protégé. Enticed with substantial bribes, the camp authorities gave the Communist prisoners
much freedom in running their cell block, provided they did not attempt to break out of
prison.[11] At Târgu Jiu, Gheorghiu-Dej ran "self-criticism sessions" where various Party members
had to confess before the other Party members to misunderstanding the dogma of Marx-Engels-
Lenin-Stalin as interpreted by Gheorghiu-Dej; journalist Edward Behrclaimed that Ceaușescu's
role in these "self-criticism sessions" was that of the enforcer, the young man allegedly beating
those Party members who refused to go with or were insufficiently enthusiastic about the "self-
criticism" sessions.[12] These "self-criticism sessions" not only helped to cement Gheorghiu-Dej's
control over the Party, but also endeared his protégé Ceaușescu to him.[12] It was Ceaușescu's
time at Târgu Jiu that marked the beginning of his rise to power. After World War II, when
Romania was beginning to fall under Soviet influence, Ceaușescu served as secretary of
the Union of Communist Youth (1944–1945).[9]
After the Communists seized power in Romania in 1947, he headed the ministry of agriculture,
then served as deputy minister of the armed forces under Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, becoming a
major-general. In 1952, Gheorghiu-Dej brought him onto the Central Committee months after the
party's "Muscovite faction" led by Ana Pauker had been purged. In the late 1940s-early 1950s,
the Party had been divided into the "home communists" headed by Gheorghiu-Dej who remained
inside Romania prior to 1944 and the "Muscovites" who had gone into exile in the Soviet Union.
With the partial exception of Poland, where the Polish October crisis of 1956 brought to power the
previously imprisoned "home communist" Władysław Gomułka, Romania was the only Eastern
European nation where the "home communists" triumphed over the "Muscovites". In the rest of
the Soviet bloc, there were a series of purges in this period that led to the "home communists"
being executed or imprisoned. That Stalin decided in favor of the "home communists" in Romania
stemmed largely out of anti-Semitism as Pauker, the leader of the "Muscovites" was Jewish, and
thus unacceptable to an increasingly anti-Semitic Stalin[citation needed]. Like his patron Gheorghiu-Dej,
Ceaușescu was a "home communist" who benefited from the fall of the "Muscovites" in 1952. In
1954, Ceaușescu became a full member of the Politburo and eventually rose to occupy the
second-highest position in the party hierarchy.[9]

Leadership of Romania[
When Gheorghiu-Dej died on 19 March 1965, Ceaușescu was not the obvious successor despite
his closeness to the longtime leader. However, widespread infighting by older and more
connected officials made the Politburo turn to Ceaușescu, as a compromise candidate.[13] He was
elected general secretary on 22 March 1965, three days after Gheorghiu-Dej's death.
One of his first acts was to change the name of the party from the Romanian Workers' Party back
to the Communist Party of Romania and to declare the country a socialist republic, rather than
a people's republic. In 1967, he consolidated his power by becoming president of the State
Council, making him de jure head of state. His political apparatus sent many thousands of
political opponents to prison or psychiatric hospitals.[14]
Initially, Ceaușescu became a popular figure, both in Romania and in the West, because of his
independent foreign policy, which challenged the authority of the Soviet Union. In the 1960s, he
eased press censorship and ended Romania's active participation in the Warsaw Pact, but
Romania formally remained a member. He refused to take part in the 1968 invasion of
Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact forces and even actively and openly condemned that action in
his 21 August 1968 speech. He travelled to Prague a week before the invasion to offer moral
support to his Czechoslovak counterpart, Alexander Dubček. Although the Soviet Union largely
tolerated Ceaușescu's recalcitrance, his seeming independence from Moscow earned Romania a
maverick status within the Eastern Bloc.[13]
Ceaușescu's main aim as leader was to make Romania a world power, and all of his economic,
foreign and demographic policies were meant to achieve Ceaușescu's ultimate goal: turning
Romania into one of the world's great powers.[15] For the Conducător (the "Leader"), as
Ceaușescu liked to call himself, "demography was destiny" and countries with rising populations
were rising powers.[15] In October 1966, Ceaușescu banned abortion and brought in one of the
world's harshest anti-abortion laws.[16]

Ceaușescu spending time with French prime minister Jacques Chirac at the Romanian seaside
in Neptun (1975)
During the following years Ceaușescu pursued an open policy towards the United States
and Western Europe. Romania was the first Warsaw Pact country to recognize West Germany,
the first to join the International Monetary Fund, and the first to receive a US President, Richard
Nixon.[17] In 1971, Romania became a member of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.
Romania and Yugoslavia were also the only Eastern European countries that entered into trade
agreements with the European Economic Community before the fall of the Eastern Bloc.[18]

The presidential couple is received by Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace in June 1978
A series of official visits to Western countries (including the US, France, the United Kingdom, and
Spain) helped Ceaușescu to present himself as a reforming Communist, pursuing an
independent foreign policy within the Soviet Bloc. He also became eager to be seen as an
enlightened international statesman, able to mediate in international conflicts, and to gain
international respect for Romania.[19] Ceaușescu negotiated in international affairs, such as the
opening of US relations with China in 1969 and the visit of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat to
Israel in 1977. Also Romania was the only country in the world to maintain normal diplomatic
relations with both Israel and the PLO. In 1980, Romania participated in the 1980 Moscow
Olympics with its other Soviet bloc allies, but in 1984 was one of the few Communist countries to
participate in the 1984 Summer Olympics when most of the Eastern Bloc's nations boycotted this
event.[20]

The 1966 decree[edit]

In 1966, Ceaușescu, in an attempt to boost the country's population, made abortion illegal and
introduced Decree 770 to reverse the low birth rate and fertility rate. Mothers of at least five
children would be entitled to significant benefits, while mothers of at least ten children were
declared "heroine mothers" by the Romanian state. Few women ever sought this status. Instead,
the average Romanian family during the time had two to three children (see Demographics of
Romania).[21]
The government targeted rising divorce rates, and made divorce more difficult—it was decreed
that a marriage could be dissolved only in exceptional cases. By the late 1960s, the population
began to swell. In turn, a new problem was created by child abandonment, which swelled the
orphanage population (see Cighid). Transfusions of untested blood led to Romania accounting for
many of Europe's pediatric HIV/AIDS cases at the turn of the 21st century despite having a
population that only comprises 3% of Europe's population.[22][23]

Speech of 21 August 1968

Main article: Ceaușescu's speech of 21 August 1968
Ceaușescu's speech of 21 August 1968 represented the apogee of Ceaușescu's rule.[24] It marked
the highest point in Ceaușescu's popularity, when he openly condemned the Warsaw Pact
invasion of Czechoslovakia.

July Theses
Main article: July Theses
Ceaușescu meeting with North Korea's "Great Leader" Kim Il-sungin 1971
Ceaușescu visited China, North Korea, the Mongolian People's Republic and North Vietnam in
1971. He took great interest in the idea of total national transformation as embodied in the
programs of North Korea's Juche and China's Cultural Revolution. He was also inspired by
the personality cults of North Korea's Kim Il-sung and China's Mao Zedong. Journalist Edward
Behr claimed that Ceaușescu admired both Mao and Kim as leaders who not only totally
dominated their nations, but had also used totalitarian methods coupled with generous shots of
ultra-nationalism mixed in with communism in order to transform both China and North Korea into
major world powers.[25] Furthermore, that Kim and even more so Mao had broken free of Soviet
control were additional sources of admiration for Ceaușescu. According to Behr, Elena
Ceaușescu allegedly bonded with Mao's wife, Jiang Qing.[25] The British journalist wrote that the
possibility that what Ceaușescu had seen in both China and North Korea were "vast Potemkin
villages for the hoodwinking of gullible foreign guests" was something that never seemed to have
crossed his mind.[25] Shortly after returning home, he began to emulate North Korea's system.
North Korean books on Juche were translated into Romanian and widely distributed inside the
country.
On 6 July 1971, he delivered a speech before the Executive Committee of the PCR. This quasi-
Maoist speech, which came to be known as the July Theses, contained seventeen proposals.
Among these were: continuous growth in the "leading role" of the Party; improvement of Party
education and of mass political action; youth participation on large construction projects as part of
their "patriotic work"; an intensification of political-ideological education in schools and
universities, as well as in children's, youth and student organizations; and an expansion of
political propaganda, orienting radio and television shows to this end, as well as publishing
houses, theatres and cinemas, opera, ballet, artists' unions, promoting a "militant, revolutionary"
character in artistic productions. The liberalisation of 1965 was condemned and an index of
banned books and authors was re-established.
The Theses heralded the beginning of a "mini cultural revolution" in Romania, launching a Neo-
Stalinist offensive against cultural autonomy, reaffirming an ideological basis for literature that, in
theory, the Party had hardly abandoned. Although presented in terms of "Socialist Humanism",
the Theses in fact marked a return to the strict guidelines of Socialist Realism, and attacks on
non-compliant intellectuals. Strict ideological conformity in the humanities and social sciences
was demanded. Competence and aesthetics were to be replaced by ideology; professionals were
to be replaced by agitators; and culture was once again to become an instrument for political-
ideological propaganda and hardline measures. In a 1972 speech, Ceaușescu stated he wanted "
a certain blending of party and state activities...in the long run we shall witness an ever closer
blending of the activities of the party, state and other social bodies."[26] In practice, a number of
joint party-state organizations were founded such as the Council for Socialist Education and
Culture, which had no precise counterpart in any of the other communist states of Eastern
Europe, and the Romanian Communist Party was embedded into the daily life of the nation in a
way that it never had been before.[27] In 1974, the party programme of the Romanian Communist
Party announced that structural changes in society were insufficient to create a full socialist
consciousness in the people, and that a full socialist consciousness could only come about if the
entire population was made aware of socialist values that guided society.[26] The Communist Party
was to be the agency that would so "enlighten" the population and in the words of the British
historian Richard Crampton "...the party would merge state and society, the individual and the
collective, and would promote 'the ever more organic participation of party members in the entire
social life'".[26]

President of the Socialist Republic of Romania[edit]

Standard as President of Romania
In 1974, Ceaușescu converted his post of president of the State Council to a full-
fledged executive presidency. He was first elected to this post in 1974, and would be reelected
every five years until 1989.
Although Ceaușescu had been nominal head of state since 1967, he had merely been first
among equals on the State Council, with his real power coming from his status as party leader.
The new post, however, made him the nation's top decision-maker both in name and in fact. He
was empowered to carry out those functions of the State Council that did not require plenums. He
also appointed and dismissed the president of the Supreme Court and the prosecutor general
whenever the legislature was not in session. In practice, from 1974 onward Ceaușescu frequently
ruled by decree.[28] For all intents and purposes, Ceaușescu now held all governing power in the
nation; virtually all party and state institutions were subordinated to his will.

Oil embargo, strike and foreign relations[edit]

Starting with the 1973–74 Arab oil embargo against the West, a period of prolonged high oil
prices set in that characterised the rest of the 1970s. Romania as a major oil-producer greatly
benefited from the high oil prices of the 1970s, which led Ceaușescu to embark on an ambitious
plan to invest heavily in oil-refining plants.[29] Ceaușescu's plan was to make Romania into
Europe's number one oil refiner not only of its oil, but also of oil from Middle Eastern states like
Iraq and Iran, and then to sell all of the refined oil at a profit on the Rotterdam spot market.[29] As
Romania lacked the money to build the necessary oil refining plants and Ceaușescu chose to
spend the windfall from the high oil prices on aid to the Third World in an attempt to buy Romania
international influence, Ceaușescu borrowed heavily from Western banks on the assumption that
when the loans came due, the profits from the sales of the refined oil would be more than enough
to pay off the loans.[29] A major problem with Ceaușescu's oil-refining plan which led to Romania
taking enormous loans was the low productivity of Romanian workers, which meant that the oil-
refining plants were finished years behind schedule.[29] The 1977 earthquake which destroyed
much of Bucharest also led to delays in the oil plan.[29] By the time the oil refining plants were
finished in the early 1980s, a slump in oil prices had set in, leading to major financial problems for
Romania.[29]
In August 1977 over 30,000 miners went on strike in the Jiu river valley complaining of low pay
and poor working conditions.[15] The Jiu valley miners' strike was the most significant expression
of opposition to Ceaușescu's rule prior to the late 1980s. The striking miners were inspired by
similar strikes along Poland's Baltic coast in December 1970, and just as in Poland in 1970, the
striking Romanian miners demanded face-to-face negotiations with their nation's leader.[15] When
Ceaușescu appeared before the miners on the third day of the strike, he was greeted in the
words of the British historian Richard Crampton "... once again á la polonaise, with cries of 'Down
with the Red Bourgeoisie!'".[15] Hearing reports that his soldiers were reluctant to fire on fellow
Romanians led Ceaușescu to negotiate a compromise solution to the strike.[15] In the years after
the strike, the majority of its leaders died of cancer. After 1989, it was revealed that
the Securitate had doctors give the strike leaders 5-minute chest X-rays to ensure the
development of cancer.[15]
He continued to follow an independent policy in foreign relations—for example, in 1984, Romania
was one of few communist states (notably including the People's Republic of China,
and Yugoslavia) to take part in the American-organized 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.

Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife with Emperor Hirohito during a visit in Tokyo in 1975
Also, the Socialist Republic of Romania was the first of the Eastern bloc nations to have official
relations with the Western blocand the European Community: an agreement including Romania
in the Community's Generalised System of Preferences was signed in 1974 and an Agreement
on Industrial Products was signed in 1980. On 4 April 1975, Ceaușescu visited Japan and met
with Emperor Hirohito.
In June 1978, Ceaușescu made a state visit to the UK where a £200m licensing agreement was
signed between the Romanian government and British Aerospace for the production of more than
eighty BAC One-Eleven aircraft. The deal was said at the time to be the biggest between two
countries involving a civil aircraft.[30]

Pacepa defection[edit]
In 1978, Ion Mihai Pacepa, a senior member of the Romanian political police (Securitate, State
Security), defected to the United States. A three-star general, he was the highest ranking defector
from the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War. His defection was a powerful blow against the
administration, forcing Ceaușescu to overhaul the architecture of the Security. Pacepa's 1986
book, Red Horizons: Chronicles of a Communist Spy Chief (ISBN 0-89526-570-2), claims to
expose details of Ceaușescu's government activities, such as massive spying on American
industry and elaborate efforts to rally Western political support.