In a surprising result from today’s Romania, most citizens believe that Nicolae Ceaușescu’s so-called “Golden Age” saw the country take better care of its citizens and foster more cooperation between Romanians.
According to respondents in an INSCOP research survey, 66.2% of Romanians believe that Ceaușescu was a good leader, with only 24.1% voicing a negative view.
Even the communist regime seems to fare well in the opinion poll: for 55.8% of the respondents, it was rather a good thing for Romania, whereas only 34.5% disagreed.
An overwhelming majority of respondents were fully aware of the lack of freedom under the communist era: 80% stated that there was none, while 9% believed that there was more back then.
Data was collected using the telephone interview method on a sample of 1,505 people aged 18 years and over.
Ceaușescu’s repressive and iron-fisted communism was the only regime in central Europe that ended in bloodshed and a revolution in the late 1980s.
The result looks shocking for a country that is a member of both the EU and NATO. Many in Romania believe that selective memory and nostalgia for simpler times, which have been revived recently by Russian propaganda, are to blame.
Decline and fall
Ceaușescu was at the head of communist Romania from 1965 until December 1989, when his regime was overthrown by a ten-day revolution, only a month after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
They were the last months of the Cold War. The communist regimes of central and eastern Europe were drastically changing or falling peacefully one after the other, marking the end of the Yalta Order: Hungary, Poland, and East Germany.
On 21 December, following days of deadly repression in the western city of Timișoara, the dictator was supposed to address 100,000 supporters who marched into central Bucharest.
Yet unexpectedly in a few minutes the cheering turned into booing as Romanians were fed up after years of misery and repression by the communist regime.
The repression forces fired into the demonstrators, and 24 hours later, Ceaușescu and his wife Elena had to flee Bucharest hastily.
On the run from Bucharest, Ceaușescu and his wife Elena were captured and then executed by the army and the new revolutionary political leadership, in Târgoviște,** some 70 kilometres from the capital,** on 25 December 1989.
Official reports say that a military court pronounced the death sentence after a one-hour summary judgement, while the orders were given by the National Salvation Front Council.
This was an emergency executive body, whose creation was announced on 22 December, the day after the beginning of the unrest in Bucharest and Ceaușescu’s escape from Palace Square, nowadays Revolution Square.
Timișoara’s mutiny, the spark that lit the flame
On 16 December 1989 the Hungarian minority in the western city of Timisoara staged a small protest against the Ceaușescu regime for the repressive measures adopted against the ethnic Hungarian protestant pastor László Tőkés for the criticisms he expressed on the Hungarian TV against the communist political system.
This was the seed of an uprising. The city’s population joined the small protest, galvanising it into a full-blown anti-communist revolution. The demonstrators stormed the local headquarters of the Communist Party and destroyed the symbols of Ceaușescu’s cult of personality.
The army and the feared secret police, Securitate, fired into the demonstrators on 17 December, causing dozens of fatalities, while the whole city rose up against the communist regime. On 20 December, after three days of violent repression, the army withdrew, and the city became free of communism.
The echoes of Timișoara’s uprising spread throughout the entire country and to Bucharest, paving the way for the regime’s epilogue.
Root causes of economic turmoil
The causes that led to the fall of Ceaușescu’s regime were determined by both external and internal factors, including the end of the Cold War and the unbearable weight of the communist autocracy imposed by the Ceaușescu family and its power circle.
By the end of the 1980s, the Romanian people were exhausted by a decade of economic restrictions and increasing repression of fundamental freedoms by a regime based on the cult of personality.
The propaganda referred to Ceaușescu as the “Genius of the Carpathians” or simply the “Conducator”, the same title used by Ion Antonescu, the head of the Romanian fascist regime during World War II.
Ceaușescu took advantage of the 1977 devastating earthquake to start building a new Romania inspired by the principles of two communist leaders such as China’s Mao Zedong and North Korea’s Kim Il-sung, grandfather of Kim Jong-un, in what was labelled “systematisation”.
This was a somewhat dystopian infrastructural urban and agricultural planning initiative intended to pave the way for the complete collectivisation of Romanian society.
Old towns and villages were demolished, and Bucharest, the Banat, and Transylvania regions’ urbanism were in upheaval. Entire populations were forcibly displaced to create new rural and industrial centres based on production models inspired by Mao’s China.
Ceaușescu’s grand design was economically unsustainable for an impoverished population with central European traditions and a country burdened by a heavy foreign debt.
As a consequence, widespread dissatisfaction grew, and the regime thought to solve the problem by increasing repression against any form of dissent or simple criticism.
The underground opposition called him “the Danube of the Thought” to mock his irrational political, social and economic policies.
Harsh repression and dystopia
The regime established strict control over society through the Securitate, which had a vast and extensive network of informants.
Any communication was intercepted and closely controlled. The security services registered all the typewriter machines in the country.
The Securitate had complete freedom to torture and eliminate opponents, even abroad.
Artists and intellectuals were systematically persecuted, as were the ethnic minorities.
The regime banned all contraception and abortion with the sole goal of increasing the demographics and the future workforce. The authorities strictly controlled pregnancies.
Multifaced dictator
Nevertheless, Nicolae Ceaușescu enjoyed some political respect on the international scene until the early 1980s.
The West saw him as an autonomous voice vis-à-vis Moscow within the Warsaw Pact. Ceaușescu’s Romania was the only country in the Soviet-run alliance that did not send troops to Czechoslovakia to suppress the Prague Spring.
From the late 1960s onwards, Romania developed a foreign policy that was often at odds with the broad lines dictated by the Soviet Union to its communist satellites. This allowed Ceaușescu to establish political relations with both the West and Mao’s China, a communist country opposed to Moscow.
It was precisely the Romanian dictator who contributed to the preliminary steps that led to the great rapprochement between the China of Mao and Zhou Enlai and the US of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.
This world policy enabled Romania to obtain foreign credits from western banks, to the point of being one of the few socialist countries to become a member of the IMF in the early 1970s.
In 1974, Romania was the only socialist country to sign a preferential tariff treaty with the European Community, which later evolved into the EU.
The 1972 oil shock gave Romania relative power in international markets. The country was in fact a small producer of crude and had preferential agreements with Iran and Iraq.
The price of oil brought great benefits to Ceaușescu’s policies.
In the 1970s, this allowed the regime to implement expansive policies with relatively beneficial outcomes for the population, which, for the first time in its history, had access to mass consumption and a fairly generous welfare state.
From the early 1980s, falling oil prices and misguided economic policies forced the country into severe austerity measures, with the aim of eliminating its foreign debt.
The result was a drop in productivity and mass impoverishment, not a context of harsh political repression, an explosive mixture that led to the violent end of the regime in 1989.
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