World Affairs Institute

Ceausescu Against Glasnost

Author(s): VLADIMIR TISMANEANU
Source: World Affairs, Vol. 150, No. 3 (WINTER 1987-88), pp. 199-203
Published by: World Affairs Institute
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20672144
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 Vol. 150, No. 3 Winter 1987-88
Ceausescu Against
ByVLADIMIR TISMANEANU
Mikhail Gorbachev speedingup
the rhythm of restructuring in the So
With
viet Union, the Romanian leader Nicolae
Ceausescu has become increasingly vocifer
ous in his opposition to any economic and
political reforms. According to him, the his
torical experience of socialism demonstrates
that sweeping reforms cannot but weaken
the Communist party's control over society.
He is, therefore, distrustful of Gorbachev's
promises of democratization of the Soviet
system. He is particularly irritated by the So
viet leader's attempt to reconsider the role of
market mechanisms in socialism.
The current conflict between Ceausescu
and Gorbachev has a historical precedent.
After Stalin's death, when Nikita Khrush
chev strove to expand his partial liberaliza
tion to the countries of the Soviet bloc,
Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, the then general
secretary of the Romanian Communist party,
spearheaded resistance to such a dangerous
course. Romanian leaders, Ceausescu in
cluded, perceived the thaw in the USSR as a
potentially disruptive development. The
Hungarian revolution and the Polish social
turmoil in 1956 further enhanced their mis
givings.
The assessment of Stalin and Stalinism was,
indeed, the major source of the Romanian
Soviet split in the early 1960s. Unrecon
structed Stalinists, Gheorghiu-Dej and his
team resented Khrushchev's tempestuous at
tempts to shake off the privileges of the party
apparatus. On the other hand, they refused
to engage in a full-fledged rehabilitation of
the victims of Stalinist terror in Romania.
To defend their power, this group discovered
the instrumental value of nationalism and
claimed to champion the principles of sover
eignty and equality against Khrushchev's at
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All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
199
Glasnost
tempts to integrate socialist economies. The
declaration of the Romanian Workers' party
?as the Romanian Communist party (RCP)
was then named?in April 1964 consecrated
Gheorghiu-Dej's autonomist pretense and
inaugurated a new era in Romanian-Soviet
relations. This was a most astute maneuver
since it replaced the Soviet Union as a source
of legitimacy for the Romanian communist
elite through reference to the national inter
est. Fascinated with this evolution, many hope
fulWestern observers did not hesitate to re
gard the Romanian experiment as proto
Titoism. It seemed that Romania, once the
Soviet Union's most loyal vassal, had de
cided to embark on a heretical undertaking
bound to culminate in another schism within
the communist world. Furthermore, the Ro
manian challenge was particularly exhilarat
ing because of the country's belonging to
both the Warsaw Pact and the Comecon.
Though itwas obvious that Romanian lead
ers were more than reluctant to tolerate any
form of internal pluralism, theWest was in
terested in encouraging that country's ef
forts to assert its foreign policy autonomy.
When he came to power, inMarch 1965,
Nicolae Ceausescu inherited Gheorghiu-Dej's
political capital accumulated during the con
flictwith Khrushchev. Unlike his predecesor,
however, Ceausescu had not been directly in
volved in the Stalinist purges of the early
1950s. Consequently, he could simulate a
lukewarm de-stalinization without fear of
undermining his own status within the party.
During the first years of his reign, Ceausescu
appeared to aim at an original synthesis of
de-satellization and de-stalinization. To
guarantee the success of his endeavor, he re
quired and received total support from the
middle-range party apparatus, a social group
aspiring to replace Gheorghiu-Dej's asso
ciates.

200_World
At a timewhen the USSR, under Brezhnev
and Kosygin, was turning increasingly con
servative and dogmatic, Ceausescu pro
claimed the need to revolutionize all spheres
of social life. Comparaison n'est pas raison,
but Gorbachev's political language seems
strangely reminiscent of Ceausescu's exhor
tations during his early years in power. For
example, the Romanian leader was referring
to the stagnation, sluggishness, and ineffec
tiveness characteristic of Gheorghiu-Dej's
Unlike other communist countries,which
have subserviently followed the Soviet line,we,
theRomanians, have long since tested these
path-breaking reforms.
times. He was posing as
the paragon of a
new political style,more attuned to the chal
lenges of the scientific and technological rev
olution. At the RCP's Ninth Congress, in July
1965, Ceausescu carried out a dramatic turn
over of the party elite. Infringements on so
cialist legality were severely condemned, and
the party reasserted its supremacy over the
Securitate (political police). In a succession
of spectacular speeches, Ceausescu informed
creative artists that the dogma of socialist re
alism had been abandoned and cultural ex
periments were no longer banned. A relaxa
tion of censorship resulted in the publication
of works long considered ideologically harm
ful or politically subversive. Students in uni
versities could publish their own magazines
and organize discussion clubs. Though only
in a burgeoning phase, the revival of the civil
society appeared to be a rational historical
possibility. New avenues opened in philo
sophical and economic thinking, including
attempts to re-examine the relationship be
tween plan and market in socialism. Needless
to say, all these events occurred under strict
party surveillance. In his peculiar way, Nico
lae Ceausescu anticipated the strategy of re
forms from above. His displeasure with Gor
bachev's new course is therefore not only a
reaction to possible destabilization of the
system, but also an oblique reproach to So
viet ignorance of his role as a forerunner in
the theory and practice of self-limited re
formism. This is, indeed, the leitmotif of
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Affairs
current Romanian propaganda: unlike other
communist countries, which have subserviently
followed the Soviet line, we, the Romanians,
have long since tested these path-breaking
reforms; there is nothing Soviet leaders are
now doing which had not been tried by our
clearsighted leader. Consequently, while
self-congratulatorily advertising his own in
novative experience, Ceausescu warns Soviet
leaders against too much change.
But who is Nicolae Ceausescu, the man
Romanian media depict as the incarnation of
the noblest virtues of his people, a revolu
tionary thinker as great as Marx, Engels, and
Lenin, the architect of the "multilaterally
developed socialist society,'' and the "hero
of international peace"?
Nicolae Ceausescu's career within Roman
ian communism cannot be explained without
reference to the enduring Stalinist nature of
that movement. In his youth he was trained
as a hardened Stalinist militant, Stalinist ten
ets have remained infallible dogmas for him
ever since. Born on 26 January 1918 to a
poor peasant family in Scornicesti (Olt county),
Ceausescu joined the underground Commu
nist party of Romania (section of the Com
munist International) in the mid-1930s. Ar
rested and imprisoned several times, Ceau
sescu joined one of the competing party cen
ters in the political penitentiary, Doftana,
and became one of Gheorghe Gheorghiu
Dej's most faithful lieutenants. With Dej's
support and Moscow's blessing, he was ap
pointed the leader of the Communist Youth
Union (UTC) in 1939. He spent the war
years in the Tirgu Jiu camp where he played
an active role in the intra-party factious
struggles. In April 1944, Dej's group got rid
of the then RCP general secretary, Stefan
Foris, who was executed in 1946 as a spy and
enemy of the people. After the war, Ceau
sescu was elected a member of the RCP Cen
tral Committee and was instrumental in the
reorganization of the UTC. His rise of na
tional prominence coincided with the down
fall of theMuscovite faction headed by Ana
Pauker, Vasile Luca, and Teohari Georgescu
in June 1952. It iswell known that during his
last years, a victim of paranoid delusions,
Stalin decided to purge precisely those com
munists who had spent the war years inMos
cow and whose pro-Soviet credentials
seemed impeccable. Ana Pauker in Romania
and Rudolf Slansky in Czechoslovakia were
thus sacrificed to assuage the Soviet
 Vol. 150, No. 3 Winter
1987-88_201
dictator's morbid suspicions of Zionist be
trayal and conspiracy.
For Ceausescu, this ethnicization of Sta
linist leadership teams in the people's de
mocracies was a real godsend. He did not
spare his zeal to convince Gheorghiu-Dej
and the Soviet advisors in Bucharest of his
total commitment to Stalin's politics. After
Stalin's death, he became a full member of
both the RCP Politburo and Secretariat.
December 1955, speaking to the Seventh party
congress, Ceausescu extolled the "invincible
teachings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin."
Like Dej, he did not harbor but admiration
for the late Soviet leader and was looking
askance at Krushchev's attempts to demolish
Stalin's myth. In March 1956, during the
hectic Politburo meetings in Bucharest,
Ceausescu went out of his way to endorse
Gheorghiu-Dej and deter potential criticism
of crimes and abuses in Romania. Those
who thought Dej should be held responsible
for his role in the Stalinist terror were dras
tically reprimanded. In June 1957, Nicolae
Ceausescu benefitted from the purge of a
Khrushchevite faction within the party and
climbed another ladder in the top hierarchy.
He became a member of Dej's personal
court and was entrusted with supervising the
most sensitive departments of the Central
Committee (cadres and "special organs").
Later, in the early 1960s, when Dej turned
against Khrushchev and announced Roma
nia's neutrality in the Sino-Soviet split,
Ceausescu visited China and held confiden
tial talks with Mao Zedong. He felt pro
found affinities with the Chinese evaluation
of Stalin as a "great Marxist-Leninist." Sig
nificantly, during his 1963-64 trips to China,
North Korea, and Yugoslavia, Ceausescu
started to weigh the advantages of a "na
tional communist" Romanian political plat
form. The same man who had once pledged
indefectible friendship to the USSR, was
now ready to play the "nationalist" card
against the Soviet hegemonist designs. To be
sure, his disenchantment with the USSR had
started with Khrushchev's attack on Stalin.
For Nicolae Ceausescu, as for Gheorghiu
Dej, Enver Xoxha, Mao Zedong, Walter Ul
bricht, Maurice Thorez, and many other sea
soned Stalinists, Khrushchev's de-staliniza
tion amounted to the disintegration of com
munist unity. These people craved for an
idol and abhorred Khrushchev's iconoclasm.
Compelled to choose between the USSR
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Stalin, Gheorghiu-Dej and Ceausescu will
ingly chose the latter. As for their Yugoslav
proclivities, they had more to do with Tito's
non-aligned international policy, rather than
with an interest in developing a Romanian
version of "self-management." Ceausescu
adamantly pursued this national-Stalinist or
ientation after his master's passing away in
March 1965. He imprinted on it themarks of
In personality, the most salient of which has
been a tremendous interest in self-promotion
The basic contradiction of Ceausescu's regime
lies in the discrepancy between the claim to
originality in international behavior and the
utterly orthodox domestic policy.
and international recognition. To preserve
his image of an intransigent fighter for na
tional independence, Ceausescu has often
disagreed with Soviet international actions.
Internally, his regime has remained as re
pressive and autocratic as possible.
For Ceausescu, Brezhnev was a quite com
fortable partner. Certainly, there were crises
inRomanian-Soviet relations, but they never
reached the point of an open clash. The Ro
manian leader skillfully exploited the deep
ening Sino-Soviet conflict to promote his im
age as an advocate of a new system of norms
to govern the world communist movement.
He sought to establish his reputation as a
fighter for a "new international economic
and political order." To attain this goal, he
warmed up relations with Tito, who, in turn,
was delighted to see Romania emulating his
international stances. In August 1968, when
theWarsaw Pact armies invaded Czechoslo
vakia to suppress the reform movement in
that country, Ceausescu thundered against
what he described as a shameless aggression.
Unlike Albania, however, he did envision
withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact. Shortly
thereafter, he backed down under direct
Soviet pressure and shunned any allusion to
events inCzechoslovakia. All of Ceausescu's
moments of personal glory have been short
lived and strikingly fruitless.
Within world communism, Ceausescu ex
pressed qualified support for Eurocommu
and nism. This was not because of his interest in
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

pluralism, but primarily because he needed
good relations with parties outspokenly criti
cal of the Soviet expansionist behavior. First
Enrico Belinguer, then Alessandro Natta,
have often visited Bucharest to meet Ceau
sescu. Santiago Carrillo has been publicly
described as his close personal friend.
The basic contradiction of Ceausescu's re
gime lies in the discrepancy between the
claim to originality in international behavior
and the utterly orthodox domestic policy.
^^^^^^^^^^^^ Foreign policy exploits have not been re
flected in a loosening of the party's grip over
the whole Romanian society. On the con
trary, the official ideology in Romania main
tains that only unconditional support for the
general secretary can ensure the success of
the regime's international initiatives. Con
vinced that his country's global prestige de
pends on his own political image, Ceausescu
has indulged in self-aggrandizing rituals and
ceaseless extravaganzas. An unprecedented
cult of personality has been engineered to
uphold the president's unquenchable thirst
for glory and adulation. Members of the top
party hierarchy who resisted the increasingly
wayward course of Romanian policy were
replaced by sycophantic cronies. Caught
within the self-feeding mechanism of the cult
of personality, Ceausescu himself seems un
able to distinguish between rhetoric and real
ity. His discourses sound like mechanical
repetitions of outworn cliches, replete with
vindictive injunctions and triumphalist state
ments. But the social situation inRomania is
dismal: food and energy shortages have
become the daily lot of the Romanians; in
formation is scarce and television serves only
to publicize the supreme leader's perform
ances; political institutions seem paralyzed
and the country is ruled by direct members
of the Ceausescu clan.
This nepotocracy is indeed the first Euro
pean experiment in dynastic socialism. Elena
Ceausescu, the president's wife, is the party's
second in command, with discretionary power
over the cadres' policy. No less authoritarian
than her husband, she exerts also an absolute
dictatorship over culture, education, and sci
ence. Elena Ceausescu is responsible for the
cultural autarchy that has forced so many
Romanian intellectuals to choose either in
ternal or external exile. She enjoys a parallel
cult of personality, being celebrated as a re
nowned scientist, a brilliant politician, and
an exemplary militant for women's rights.
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202_World
The couple's youngest son, Nicu, is a candi
date member of the Politburo. After having
served as first secretary of the Communist
Youth organization, he was recently ap
pointed first secretary of the Sibiu county
party committee. It is no secret for the Ro
manians that Nicu is groomed to succeed his
father as general secretary. This would be
the ultimate triumph of Ceausescu's long
struggle for political survival: unlike Stalin
or Gheorghiu-Dej, by ensuring the dynastic
succession he would deprive his heirs of the
opportunity to expose him as an execrated
tyrant.Will such a scenario succeed? What
will be the attitude of the Soviet Union to
Nicu's ascent to the ultimate echelon of
power?
Speaking on 26 January 1987, on the occa
sion of his 69th birthday anniversary, Ceau
sescu excoriated unspecified attempts at "so
cialist renewals." target of his remarks
The
was, undoubtedly, Gorbachev's glasnost pol
icy. For Ceausescu, Gorbachev's insistence
on democratization is an embarrassing re
minder of his vulnerability to criticism of his
monarchic conduct. This is the main reason
for the Romanian president's effort to reiter
ate some of the most anachronistic dogmas
of "scientific socialism": "Speaking about
the need to improve and develop socialism,
in my opinion our basis should be the les
sons, the experience, and the practice of so
cialist construction as well as the invincible
principles of scientific socialism, of commu
nism. One cannot speak about socialist re
newal, about perfecting socialism, unless
one starts from these principles. . . .There is
no way of speaking about socialist perfec
tion and [at the same time] about so-called
market socialism and free competition?and
.
all this in the name of objective laws. . . We
must distinguish between the general truths
and laws of socialist development and laws
specific to bourgeois-capitalist society. Capi
talist property is capitalist property, be it
small or large. One cannot speak of a social
ist economy and not assume the socialist
ownership of the means of production as its
basis." (Scintela, 27 January 1987) For
Ceausescu, the best Soviet leadership was a
petrified one, with totally predictable reac
tions and no interest in accelerating the reju
venation of the elites in other countries of
the bloc. After Brezhnev's death, he report
edly placed his bet on Chernenko against
Andropov. Later, after Andropov's demise,
Vol. 150, No. 3 Winter 203
1987-88_

Ceausescu visited Moscow and further tried bachev's visit. On the contrary, to make
to ingratiate himself with Konstantin Cher things even worse, new cuts in electricity and
nenko. Gorbachev's coming to power was gas consumption norms for the population
therefore an unwelcome event from the were announced inNovember 1987.
viewpoint of the Romanian leader. Like As Ceausescu turns 70 in January 1988,
Erich Honecker, Gustav Husak, or Todor Romanians can hardly find a source for opti
Zhivkov, Ceausescu realizes that a dynamic mism. The general mood in that country is
Soviet policy will sooner or later affect the dominated by malaise, anguish, and frustra
precarious status of East European aging tion. But the winter of the Romanian discon
and compromised general secretaries. tent cannot last forever. Reacting to the No
Gorbachev visited Romania in May 1987 vember electricity reductions, thousands of
and made some hints to Ceausescu's harsh workers in the industrial center of Brasov ^^^^^^^^^^^^
ethnic minorities policy and the dangers of demonstrated against the regime's Dracon
nepotism. For the time being, however, ian measures. Ten years after the Jiu Valley
either the Soviet Union cannot, or itdoes not strikes, this spontaneous workers' action
want to expedite the power succession in might be a long-expected catalyst for the
Romania. It is very likely that the Soviet amorphous anti-Ceausescu opposition within
leaders are aware of the high expectations his own party. On the other hand, Gorba
the Romanians placed on Gorbachev's ability chev's policy of glasnost and perestro?ka of
to persuade Ceausescu of the vital need for fers propitious external circumstances for
drastic reforms. No improvement in the so those members of the elite who, even at this
cial or economic situation in Romania has late hour, would dare to act against Ceauses
occurred, however, in the aftermath of Gor cu's catastrophic course.

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