Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Romania (1965–1989)

Nicolae Ceaușescu became general secretary of the party in March 1965, at the age of 47. The first years of his rule were marked by a relative openness: political prisoners were released, censorship was relaxed, the party was renamed the Romanian Communist Party, and the country became the Socialist Republic of Romania (1965). In August 1968 Ceaușescu publicly condemned the intervention of Warsaw Pact troops in Czechoslovakia, which made him popular at home and earned him esteem in the West. In 1969 the American president Richard Nixon visited Bucharest.

The independent foreign policy brought Romania advantages: relations with the United States and Western Europe, membership of the IMF and the World Bank (1972), most-favoured-nation status (1975), and participation in the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, despite the Soviet boycott. At home, however, the regime grew ever harsher. In 1966 Decree 770 banned abortion and contraception in order to increase the population, which led to thousands of deaths among women and to numerous abandoned children. The cult of personality of the leader and his wife, Elena, took on absurd dimensions, especially after the visit to China and North Korea in 1971.

Ceaușescu pursued forced industrialization, based on heavy industry, huge factories and large chemical plants. Although it brought the modernization of towns and a better standard of living in the 1960s and 1970s, the plan was based on foreign loans. At the beginning of the 1980s Romania’s foreign debt stood at over 10 billion dollars. To pay it off, Ceaușescu imposed in 1982 a programme of extreme austerity: massive food exports, reduced energy consumption, rationing of bread, oil, sugar and petrol, and cold and darkness in homes. The debt was paid off in full in 1989, at an enormous social cost.

Under the pretext of “systematization”, entire districts of Bucharest were demolished (between 1984 and 1989), including churches, monasteries and thousands of houses, to build the House of the People (today the Palace of the Parliament), the largest civilian administrative building in the world. The village systematization plan aimed to demolish some 7,000–8,000 villages. The Securitate, with its network of informers, controlled people’s lives, and foreign radio broadcasts were listened to in secret. Freedom of expression, of movement and of assembly did not exist.

Even so, there were acts of courage: the miners’ strike in the Jiu Valley (August 1977), the movement of the trade unionist Vasile Paraschiv, the workers’ revolt in Brașov (15 November 1987), the protest of the teacher Doina Cornea, the letter of the six former Communist dignitaries of March 1989, and the poetry and letters of the poet Mircea Dinescu. The collapse of the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe in 1989 – Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia – showed that Ceaușescu’s era was nearing its end. Here, unlike in the other countries, the end was violent.