Ceaușescu largely wished to conjure away the living conditions of the Romani, which were ignored by his predecessors and put in place as early as the regime of Ion Antonescu.[36]. [18], A series of official visits to Western countries (including the United States, France, the United Kingdom, Spain and Australia) helped Ceaușescu to present himself as a reforming Communist, pursuing an independent foreign policy within the Soviet Bloc. By all accounts, Elena was crude, not bright, devious, vindictive and intensely concerned with her not so good looks. Ceaușescu's political independence from the Soviet Union and his protest against the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 drew the interest of Western powers, whose governments briefly believed that he was an anti-Soviet maverick and hoped to create a schism in the Warsaw Pact by funding him. Deposed Romanian president Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena have been shot by a firing squad after a secret military tribunal found them both guilty of crimes against the state. In practice, from 1974 onward Ceaușescu frequently ruled by decree. In the 1960s, he eased press censorship and ended Romania's active participation in the Warsaw Pact, but Romania formally remained a member. The deal was said at the time to be the biggest between two countries involving a civil aircraft. [15] In October 1966, Ceaușescu banned abortion and contraception and brought in one of the world's harshest anti-abortion laws,[16] leading to a large spike in the number of Romanian infants abandoned to deplorable conditions in the country's orphanages. At the end of the quick show trial, the Ceaușescus were found guilty and sentenced to death. For other people, see, General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party (1965–1989), President of the Socialist Republic of Romania, Oil embargo, strike and foreign relations, Foreign state orders, decorations and medals, (All Soviet decorations and medals were revoked in 1990). It was previously called The House of the People and The People's House. [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. 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. The other, the Prime Minister of Great Britain Margaret Thatcher, was elected by the people of her country. Those few who refused found themselves never receiving a promotion again or teaching classes in the provinces. Nevertheless, a project organized by Romanian engineer Eugeniu Iordachescu was able to move many historic structures to less-prominent sites and save them. Her enemies, real or perceived, found themselves in dead-end jobs in remote parts of the country, or worse, a bunk in a labor camp or at the end of a rifle barrel. 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". Mr. and Mrs. Ceauşescu in 1970. [10], 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). Upon his death in 1996, the youngest son, Nicu, was buried nearby in the same cemetery. Photo by fototeca.iiccr.ro. This can be seen, perhaps most blatantly, with a motion from the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Romanian Workers Party, which largely laid the foundation for the Ceaușescu regime's policies regarding the rights of ethnic minorities. He was also the country's head of state from 1967, serving as President of the State Council and from 1974 concurrently as President of the Republic, until his overthrow and execution in the Romanian Revolution in December 1989, part of a series of anti-Communist and anti-Soviet uprisings in Eastern Europe that year. This can be explained by the largely crude and syncretic character of the dogma. In his final years, he had begun to rehabilitate the image of pro-Nazi dictator Ion Antonescu. 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. 46 Ionel Boyeru’s hands tremble slightly when he talks about the day he shot dead Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena, beside a toilet block in a freezing courtyard. Upon his return to Romania on the evening of 20 December, the situation became even more tense, and he gave a televised speech from the TV studio inside the Central Committee Building (CC Building), in which he spoke about the events at Timișoara in terms of an "interference of foreign forces in Romania's internal affairs" and an "external aggression on Romania's sovereignty.". Elena Ceausescu (left) with Lyudmila Zhivkova. [46] According to the Jurnalul Național,[47] requests were made by the Ceaușescus' daughter, Zoia, and by supporters of their political views, to move their remains to mausoleums or to purpose-built churches. This was the case even after representation increased for other minorities such as Hungarians and Germans. Roughly eight minutes into his speech, several people began jeering and booing, and others began chanting "Timișoara!" In the 1980s, Ceaușescu ordered the export of much of the country's agricultural and industrial production in order to repay its debts. In 1982, he exported much of the country's agricultural and industrial production in an effort to repay them. Pinstripes and Reds: An American Ambassador Caught Between the State Department & the Romanian Communists, 1981–1985 Washington, D.C.: Selous Foundation Press, 1987. Nicolae Ceaușescu (/tʃaʊˈʃɛskuː/, Romanian: [nikoˈla.e tʃe̯a.uˈʃesku] (listen); 5 February [O.S. Greensboro News And Record, 13 Jan. 1990 (Updated 28 Jan. 2015). [11] 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. Ceaușescu reduced the size of the Romanian People's Army by 5%, for which he organized a mock referendum. After his election as President of Romania, he even had a king-like sceptre made for himself. The resulting domestic shortages made the everyday lives of Romanians a fight for survival as food rationing was introduced and heating, gas and electricity blackouts became the rule. 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. [42] The hasty show trial and the images of the dead Ceaușescus were videotaped and the footage released in numerous Western countries two days after the execution. Nicolae Ceaușescu (left), his parents (center) and his wife, Elena (right). Ceaușism's main trait was a form of Romanian nationalism,[52] one which arguably propelled Ceaușescu to power in 1965, and probably accounted for the Party leadership under Ion Gheorghe Maurer choosing him over the more orthodox Gheorghe Apostol. From 1972 on, however, as her husband solidified his power, she was elevated to more and more powerful government positions. [11] In 1943, he was transferred to Târgu Jiu internment camp, where he shared a cell with Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, becoming his protégé. “CO” for “Carbon-Oxygen” and “doi”, the Romanian for “two”. They abandoned the helicopter near Târgoviște, having been ordered to land by the army, which by that time had restricted flying in Romania's airspace. France granted Nicolae Ceaușescu the Legion of Honour. It was a wrong turn of the events because. [27] Over time, he usurped many powers and functions that nominally were vested in the State Council as a whole.[28]. [12] 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 Behr claimed 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. [68] Ceaușescu even received praise from anti-communists with the leader of Iran Mohammad Reza Pahlavi saying "I would like to salute [Ceaușescu's] intransigent patriotism and ferocious will for independence. Like many other poor people at the beginning of the 20th century, she turned to communism as a means by which the working poor could have a larger (or the only) say in how the country was run. 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. Images of Ceaușescu's facial expression as the crowd began to boo and heckle him were among the most widely broadcast of the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe.[14]. He did introduce some benefits to workers and over the course of his first years in office, made his own way in foreign policy at a time when most communist regimes in Eastern Europe took their cues from Moscow. In his memoir The Artful Albanian, Albanian leader Enver Hoxha remarked "As if Ceausescu and company are to bring down imperialism! He was very displeased when other Warsaw Pact countries decided to try their own versions of Gorbachev's reforms. Over the course of the 1970s she was appointed or “elected” to more and more positions within the government and Communist Party, and in 1980, she was made First Deputy Prime Minister – second in power only to her husband. On 4 April 1975, Ceaușescu visited Japan and met with Emperor Hirohito 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. Two years later he was elected President of the Republic. Elena Ceaușescu was arranged to be "elected" to membership of a science academy in the U.S. To execute a massive redevelopment project during the rule of Nicolae Ceausescu, the government conducted extensive demolition of churches and many other historic structures in Romania. 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 spoke of the achievements of the "Socialist revolution" and Romania's "multi-laterally developed Socialist society." In effect, this amounted to a demand for the return of Bessarabia (most of which was then a Soviet republic and since 1991 has been independent Moldova) and northern Bukovina, both of which had been occupied by the Soviet Union in 1940 and again at the end of World War II. After being tried and convicted of economic sabotage and genocide,[6] they were immediately executed by firing squad on 25 December[7] and Ceaușescu was succeeded as President by Ion Iliescu, who had played a major part in the revolution. On 18 December 1989, Ceaușescu departed for a state visit to Iran, leaving the duty of crushing the Timișoara revolt to his subordinates and his wife. In China, she was jealous of the power of Mao Zedong’s wife Jiang Qing (who was eventually imprisoned by Mao’s enemies), and in the Philippines she was jealous of the opulent lifestyle and good looks of Imelda Marcos (also overthrown). The commanders wrote off Ceaușescu as a lost cause and made no effort to keep their men loyal to the government. While in prison, Ceaușescu became a protégé of his cell mate, the Communist leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, who would become the undisputed Communist leader of Romania beginning in 1952. Obituaries: Eugeniu Iordachescu, Romanian engineer who saved condemned churches under communist rule, dies at 89. It was written by Tom Bailey and Greg Jameson, with songs by Allan Stelmach, and depicted Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu and their son Valentin in a piece of meta musical theatre that was also a comment upon celebrity culture and the role social media and political correctness play in creating social pariahs.[80]. "The Political Regrouping of Romanian Nomenklatura during the 1989 Revolution". As Elena traveled the world, she became more and more jealous of what others had.