By James Aitchison

His rule in Romania lasted 24 brutal years.  Incredibly, it ended on Christmas Day 1989 when he and his wife were executed by firing squad. 

Like many dictators before and since, Nicolae Ceausescu (pronounced Chow-shes-ku) refused to believe that his regime had run out of time.  Rebellion was in the air, obvious to everyone except him.

In hindsight we can only wonder why it took so long for such an extremely repressive regime to be toppled.  Ceausescu was a dictator.  His secret police, the Securitate, conducted a ruthless programme of mass surveillance and human rights abuses.  Dissidents were tortured.  The State controlled the media and the press.  Yet when the people rose against him, it was all over in three days.

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Born in 1918, Nicolae Ceausescu was the descendant of a family of shepherds.  His father was a local mayor, his mother devoutly religious.  Ceausescu started work as an apprentice shoemaker.  In 1932, he became a member of the illegal Romanian Communist youth movement, was arrested several times, and spent World War II in prisons and internment camps. 

After the war, and the abolition of King Michael’s monarchy, Romania’s government was socialist.  Ceausescu rose through its ranks becoming a member of the Great National Assembly and Deputy Minister of Agriculture.  In that role he crushed a peasant revolt with 80,000 arrests and 30,000 imprisoned.  Then — with no military experience — he was appointed a Major General in charge of the armed forces.  By 1965, Ceausescu was general secretary of the Romanian Communist Party — in effect, its leader. 

At first, Ceausescu enjoyed surging popularity.  His personality cult was unprecedented.  He pursued an independent foreign policy much to Moscow’s annoyance.  His stated aim was to make oil-rich Romania a “great world power”.  Ceausescu’s idols were China’s Mao Zedong and Korea’s Kim Il Sung.  He admired how they dominated their nations and employed totalitarian methods and ultra-nationalism to achieve greatness.

Under Ceausescu, the Communist Party controlled every aspect of daily life in Romania, more so than in any other Communist country.  Despite his earlier popularity, it soon became clear that his was a totalitarian government, considered the most repressive in the Eastern bloc.  In fact, in 1967, he consolidated power by becoming President of the State Council.  He purged thousands of political opponents, sending them to prison or psychiatric hospitals.  It was even rumoured that secret police doctors gave some dissidents 5-minute chest X-rays to ensure they developed cancer.

Ceausescu’s social engineering policies were notorious.  In 1966 he made abortion illegal to boost the flagging birth rate; mothers with five children received significant government benefits, while mothers of ten children were “heroine mothers”.  Next, he introduced laws to reverse rising divorce rates.  One result was a steep increase in child abandonment.

Ceausescu courted western banks and investors, and political leaders of every stripe.  On a state visit to the UK, celebrating a landmark licensing agreement between British Aerospace and the Romanian government to build aircraft, he received a knighthood from the Queen.

Ultimately, his economic mismanagement brought Romania to its senses.  In the 1970s he embarked on a soulless North Korean-style urban planning project — the mass construction of high-density apartment blocks.  Villages vanished, replaced by huge apartment blocks.  His goal: to turn Romania into “a multilaterally developed socialist society”.   In the 1980s, he became obsessed with building himself a grandiose palace in the heart of Bucharest; eight square kilometres of historic buildings were demolished — churches, monasteries, synagogues, and a sports stadium.  The Palace of Parliament boasts 1,100 rooms, many of which remain empty.  Not only is it the world’s largest government building, but it is also the world’s heaviest: containing 700,000 tonnes of steel and bronze and a million square feet of marble.

Next, he decided that Romania should pay off all its debts to foreign banks (somewhere north of US$13 billion).  Chaos erupted.  Banned from borrowing, the industrial base grew obsolete.  The standard of living plunged.  Energy and food rationing were imposed.

By November 1989, anti-Communist revolutions were happening throughout Eastern Europe.  Student protests in Romania were put down by the secret police.  Ceausescu denounced them as “fascist agitators”, never once believing that his own people were about to rise against him.

Totally misjudging the people’s mood, he called a public meeting in Revolution Square, Bucharest, on 21 December.  It was to be “a (so-called) spontaneous movement to support Ceausescu”.  He addressed the huge crowd from a balcony of the Central Communist Committee building, just as he had always done, the supreme leader extolling his regime’s achievements — and then the unthinkable happened.  The crowd began booing and jeering.  A bewildered Ceausescu held up his hand for silence, but the crowd was out of control.

He and his wife Elena took cover inside the building.  Rebellion broke out across the country.  The defence minister committed suicide.  Soldiers, believing he had been liquidated, joined the protests.  When rioters burst into the committee building, Ceausescu and his wife escaped by helicopter from the roof.  They did not get far.  Ordered to land by the army which had once been so loyal, the Ceausescus were taken to a show trial held on Christmas Day.  There, accused of genocide and theft of state property, they were found guilty and sent outside to be shot.

The execution was broadcast on state television.  Hands tied behind their backs, Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu dropped in a hail of bullets.

Years later, an official claimed that the trial and execution were “shameful but necessary”.  Another said that without it, the Ceausescus would have been “lynched on the streets”.

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In 1989, the Eastern European countries were changing beyond recognition.  One by one, Communist regimes were forced out.  On 9 November, the Berlin Wall fell.  Yet still Nicolae Ceausescu clung to power with a rigid grip, even electing himself as president for another five years.  One of his strongest critics was Mikhail Gorbachev, who likened Ceausescu to a Romanian Hitler.

As many dictators have learned to their cost, when a regime unravels, it can take little more than hours for the unthinkable to happen.