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| Birth Name(s) : Nicolae Ceausescu |
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Full Nicolae Ceausescu Biography
Nicolae Ceauşescu (IPA /ni.ko.ˈla.je ʧaʊ.ˈʃes.ku/, in English, sometimes (and erroneously) /ʧaʊ.ˈʧes.kju/) (January 26, 1918–December 25, 1989) was the leader of Romania from 1965 until December 1989, when a revolution and coup removed him from power. The revolutionaries held a two hour trial and sentenced him to death for crimes against the state, genocide, and "undermining the national economy." . The hasty trial has been criticized as a kangaroo court His subsequent execution marked the final act of the Revolutions of 1989.
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 rename the party, the Romanian Communist Party, and declare that the country was now the Socialist Republic of Romania rather than a People's Republic. In 1967, he consolidated his power by becoming president of the State Council.
In 1978, Ion Mihai Pacepa, a senior member of the Romanian political police (Securitate), defected to the United States. A 2-star general, he was the highest ranking defector from the Soviet bloc in the history of the Cold War. His defection was a powerful blow against the regime, forcing Ceauşescu to overhaul the architecture of the Securitate. Pacepa's 1986 book, Red Horizons: Chronicles of a Communist Spy Chief (ISBN 0895265702), claims to expose details of Ceauşescu's regime, such as collaboration with Arab terrorists, massive espionage on American industry and elaborate efforts to rally Western political support. After Pacepa's defection, the country became more isolated and the economic growth stopped. Ceauşescu's intelligence agency became subject to heavy infiltration by foreign intelligence agencies and he started to lose control of the country. He tried several reorganisations in a bid to get rid of old collaborators of Pacepa, but to no avail.
Despite his increasingly totalitarian rule, Ceauşescu's political independence from the Soviet Union and his protests against the invasion of Czechoslovakia 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 very favourable. 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 financial situation. In an attempt to correct this situation, Ceauşescu decided to eradicate Romania's foreign debts. He organised a referendum and managed to change the constitution, adding a clause that barred Romania from taking foreign debts in the future. The referendum yielded a nearly unanimous "yes" vote.
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 December 17, 1989. On December 18, 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 December 20, 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 Ceauşescus were executed by a firing squad lead by Captain Ionel Boeru and two other soldiers who shot them with AK-47 assault rifles. After the shooting had stopped, the bodies were covered with canvas. The hasty trial and execution were videotaped. The footage was promptly released in France and other western countries. Several days later, footage of their trial and pictures of their corpses (but not of the execution itself) were released on television for the Romanian public.
Ceauşescu is the only recipient of the Danish Order of the Elephant ever to have it revoked. This happened on December 23, 1989, when HM Queen Margrethe II ordered the insignia to be returned to Denmark, and for Ceauşescu's name to be deleted from the official records.
A new generation of committed supporters on the outside confirmed the regime's character. Ceauşescu probably never gave importance to the fact that his policies constituted a paradigm for theorists of National Bolshevism such as Jean-François Thiriart, but there was a publicised connection between him and Iosif Constantin Drăgan, an Iron Guardist Romanian-Italian émigré millionaire (Drăgan was already committed to a Dacian Protochronism that largely echoed the official cultural policy).
Because Romania was a Communist state, this support is frequently used by some figures to argue against conventional understandings of the Cold War. For example, in response to Robert Kaplan's allegation that Chomsky makes no distinctions between US-backed dictators and Russian-backed dictators using the example of Ceausescu, Chomsky argues that America backed Ceausescu. |
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