History: Nicolae Ceauşescu
Quote:
|
Nicolae Ceauşescu (IPA /ni.ko.ˈla.je ʧau.ˈʃes.ku/) (January 26, 1918 - December 25, 1989) was the leader of Communist Romania from 1965 until shortly before his execution
|
Early life and career
Born in the village of Scorniceşti, Olt County (in the informal region of Oltenia), Ceauşescu moved to Bucharest at the age of 11 to become a shoemaker's apprentice.
He joined the then-illegal Communist Party of Romania in early 1932 and was first arrested, in 1933, for agitating during a strike. He was arrested again, in 1934, first for collecting signatures on a petition protesting the trial of railway workers and twice more for other similar activities. These arrests earned him the description "dangerous communist agitator" and "active distributor of communist and anti-fascist propaganda" on his police record. He then went underground, but was captured and imprisoned in 1936 for two years at Doftana Prison for anti-fascist activities.
While out of jail in 1939, he met Elena Petrescu (they married in 1946)—she would play a growing role in his political life over the decades. He was arrested and imprisoned again in 1940. In 1943, he was transferred to Târgu Jiu internment camp where he shared a cell with Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, becoming his protégé. After World War II, when Romania was beginning to fall under Soviet influence, he served as secretary of the Union of Communist Youth (1944–1945).
After the Communists seized power in Romania in 1947, he headed the ministry of agriculture, then served as deputy minister of the armed forces under Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej's Stalinist reign. In 1952, Gheorghiu-Dej brought him onto the Central Committee months after the party's "Muscovite faction" led by Ana Pauker had been purged. In 1954, he became a full member of the Politburo and eventually rose to occupy the second-highest position in the party hierarchy
Leadership of Romania
A propaganda poster on the streets of Bucharest, 1986. The caption reads "65 years since the creation of the Romanian Communist Party", while in the background it reads "Ceauşescu Era" and "The Party. Ceauşescu. Romania"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. Initially, he was a popular figure in Romania, due to his independent policy, challenging the supremacy of the Soviet Union in Romania.
Also, in the 1960s, Ceauşescu ended Romania's active participation in the Warsaw Pact (though Romania formally remained a member); he refused to take part in the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact forces, and actively and openly condemned that action.
In 1974, Ceauşescu added "President of Romania" to his titles, further consolidating his power. He followed an independent policy in foreign relations—for example, in 1984, Romania was one of only three Communist-ruled countries (the others being the People's Republic of China and Yugoslavia) to take part in the American-organised 1984 Summer Olympics. Also, the country was the first of the Eastern Bloc to have official relations with the European Community: an agreement including Romania in the Community's Generalised System of Preferences was signed in 1974 and an Agreement on Industrial Products was signed in 1980.
However, Ceauşescu refused to implement any liberal reforms. The evolution of his regime followed the Stalinist path already traced by Gheorghiu-Dej. Their opposition to Soviet control was mainly determined by the unwillingness to proceed to de-Stalinization. The secret police (Securitate) maintained firm control over speech and the media, and tolerated no internal opposition.
Ceauşescu had made state visits to the People's Republic of China and North Korea in 1971. He took great interest in the idea of total national transformation as embodied in the programs of the Korean Workers' Party and China's Cultural Revolution. Shortly after returning home, he began to emulate North Korea's system, influenced by the Juche philosophy of North Korean President Kim Il Sung. Korean books on Juche were translated into Romanian and widely distributed in the country.
Beginning in 1972, Ceauşescu instituted a program of systematisation. Promoted as a way to build a "multilaterally developed socialist society", the program of demolition, resettlement, and construction began in the countryside, but culminated with an attempt to completely reshape the country's capital. Over one fifth of central Bucharest, including churches and historic buildings, was demolished in the 1980s, in order to rebuild the city in his own style. The People's House ("Casa Poporului") in Bucharest, now the Parliament House, is the world's second largest building, after The Pentagon. Ceauşescu also planned to bulldoze many villages in order to move the peasants into blocks of flats in the cities, as part of his "urbanisation" and "industrialisation" programs. An NGO project called "Sister Villages" that created bonds between European and Romanian communities may have played a role in thwarting these plans.
The 1966 decree
In 1966, the regime decreed a ban on contraception and abortion on demand, and introduced other policies to increase birth rate and fertility rate - including a special tax amounting to between 10 and 20 percent on the incomes of men and women who remained childless after the age of twenty-five, whether married or single. Abortion was permitted only in cases where the woman in question was over 42, or already the mother of four (later five) children. Mothers of at least five children would be entitled to significant benefits, while mothers of at least ten children were declared heroine mothers receiving a gold medal, a free car, free transportation on trains, etc.; few women ever sought this status, the average Romanian family having 2-3 children (see Demographics of Romania).[1] Furthermore, a considerable number of women either died or were maimed during clandestine abortions.[citation needed]
The government also targeted rising divorce rates and made divorce much more difficult - it was decreed that a marriage could be dissolved only in exceptional cases. By the late 1960s, the population began to swell, accompanied by rising poverty and increased homelessness (street children) in the urban areas. In turn, a new problem was created by uncontrollable child abandonment, which swelled the orphanage population and facilitated a rampant AIDS epidemic in the late 1980s - created by the regime's refusal to acknowledge the existence of the disease, and its unwillingness to allow for any HIV test to be carried out.[citation needed]
The Pacepa defection
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.[2] His treason 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), reveals details of Ceauşescu's regime, such as his collaboration with Arab terrorists, his massive espionage on American industry and his 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. According to the official declaration made by president Ion Iliescu when Pacepa asked for the return of his properties and position, Pacepa was "a confused man" who gathered illegal properties in Romania by using his influential position. The Romanian Supreme Court disagreed (Decision No. 41/1999) cancelling his death sentences, restoring his military rank, and ordering the restoration of his properties.
Personality cult and authoritarianism
Propaganda painting of the Ceauşescus.Ceauşescu created a pervasive personality cult, giving himself the titles of "Conducător" ("Leader") and "Geniul din Carpaţi" ("Genius of the Carpathians"), with help from Proletarian Culture (Proletkult) poets such as Adrian Păunescu and Corneliu Vadim Tudor, and even having a king-like sceptre made for himself. Such excesses prompted the painter Salvador Dalí to send a congratulatory telegram to the "Conducător." The Communist Party daily Scînteia published the message, unaware that Dalí had written it with tongue firmly in cheek. To avoid new treasons after Pacepa's defection, Ceauşescu also invested his wife Elena and other members of his family with important positions in the government.
Ceauşescu's statesmanship
Under Ceauşescu, Romania was Europe's fourth biggest exporter of weapons. Nevertheless, several of Ceauşescu's actions suggest that one of his ambitions was to win a Nobel Peace Prize. In pursuing this goal, he made considerable efforts to act as a mediator between the PLO and Israel. He organised a successful referendum for reducing the size of the Romanian Army by 5%. He held large rallies for peace and wrote a poem that was part of each literature manual. His poem was (in a word for word translation):
Let us make from cannons tractors
From atom lights and sources
From nuclear missiles
Plows to labour fields.
Ceauşescu also tried to play the role of father to poor African countries. He was a close ally and personal friend of Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire. Relations were in fact not just state-to-state, but party-to-party between the MPR and the Romanian Communist Party. Many believe that Ceauşescu's death played a role in influencing Mobutu to "democratize" Zaire in 1990.[3] Also, France granted Ceauşescu the Legion of Honour.
Foreign debt
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.
In the 1980s, Ceauşescu ordered the export of much of the country's agricultural and industrial production in order to repay its debts. The resulting domestic shortages made the everyday life of Romanian citizens a fight for survival as food rationing was introduced and heating, gas and electricity black-outs were becoming the rule. There was a steady decrease in the living standard (and especially the availability of food and general goods in stores) between 1980 and 1989. The official explanation was that the country was paying its debts, and people accepted the suffering, believing it to be for a short time only and for the ultimate good.
The debt was fully paid in summer 1989, shortly before Ceauşescu was overthrown. During that period, state television often showed Ceauşescu entering well stocked stores.
Leadership weaknesses
Ceauşescu's Stalinist control of every aspect of religious, educational, commercial, social, and civic life[4] further aggravated the situation. In 1987, an attempted strike at Braşov failed: the army occupied the factories and crushed the workers' demonstrations.
Throughout 1989, Ceauşescu became even more isolated in the Communist world: in August 1989, he proposed a summit to discuss the problems of Eastern European Communism and "defend socialism" in these countries, but his proposal was turned down by the Warsaw Pact states and the People's Republic of China. Even after the Berlin Wall fell and Ceauşescu's southern comrade, Bulgarian leader Todor Zhivkov, was replaced in November 1989, Ceauşescu ignored the threat to his position as the last old-style Communist leader in Eastern Europe.
Tensions grow
By 1989, Ceauşescu was showing signs of complete denial of reality. While the country was going through extremely difficult times with long bread lines in front of empty food stores, he was often shown on state TV entering stores jampacked with food supplies and praising the "high living standard" achieved under his rule. In the autumn of 1989, daily TV broadcasts were showing endless scrolling lists of CAPs (kolkhozes) with alleged record harvests, in blatant contradiction with the shortages experienced by the average Romanian at the time.
Some people, believing that Ceauşescu was not aware of what was going on in the country, were attempting to hand him petition and complaint letters during his many visits around the country. However, each time he got a letter, he would immediately pass it on to members of his security detail. Whether or not Ceauşescu ever came to read any of them will probably remain an unsolved mystery. According to the rumours of the time, people attempting to hand letters directly to Ceauşescu had to take upon themselves a high risk of adverse consequences, "courtesy" of the secret police Securitate. People were strongly discouraged from addressing him and there was a general sense that things had reached an overall low.
Revolution
Main article: Romanian Revolution of 1989
Ceauşescu's regime collapsed after a series of violent events in Timişoara and Bucharest in December 1989.
In November 1989 the XIVth Congress of PCR (Romanian Communist Party) saw Ceauşescu, now aged 71, reelected for another 5 years as leader of PCR.
Demonstrations in the city of Timişoara were triggered by the government-sponsored attempt to evict László Tőkés, an ethnic Hungarian church minister, accused by the government of inciting ethnic hatred. Members of his ethnic Hungarian congregation surrounded his apartment in a show of support. 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 country, which had no information of the Timişoara events from the national media, heard about the Timişoara revolt from western radio stations like Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, and by word of mouth. A mass meeting was staged for the next day, December 21, which, according to the official media, was presented as a "spontaneous movement of support for Ceauşescu", emulating the 1968 meeting in which Ceauşescu had spoken against the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact forces.
On December 21, the mass meeting, held in what is now Revolution Square, degenerated into chaos. The image of Ceauşescu's uncomprehending expression as the crowd began to boo him remains one of the defining moments of the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe. The stunned couple (the dictator had been joined by his wife), failing to control the crowds, finally took cover inside the CC Building, where they remained until the next day. The rest of the day saw a revolt of the Bucharest population, who had assembled in University Square and confronted the police and the army on barricades. These initial events are regarded to this day as the genuine revolution. However, the unarmed rioters were no match for the military apparatus concentrated in Bucharest, which cleared the streets by midnight and arrested hundreds of people in the process.
Although the broadcast of the "support meeting" and the subsequent events on the national television had been interrupted the previous day, Ceauşescu's senile reaction to the events had already become part of the country's collective memory. By the morning of December 22, the rebellion had already spread to all major cities. The suspicious death of Vasile Milea, the defense minister, was announced by the media. Immediately thereafter, Ceauşescu presided over the CPEX meeting and assumed the leadership of the army. He made an attempt to address the crowd gathered in front of the CC, but this desperate move was rejected by the rioters, who forced open the doors of the building, by now left unprotected by the army, police and Securitate. The Ceauşescu couple fled by helicopter from the top of the CC building in a poorly advised decision (since they would have had safer refuge using existing underground tunnels) [see Dumitru Burlan].
Overthrow
The events of December 1989 remain controversial. Many, including Filip Teodorescu, a high-ranking Securitate officer at the time, allege that a group of conspiring generals in the Securitate took advantage of this opportunity to launch a coup in Bucharest. Some have made more specific claims about the nature of the conspiracy. Colonel Burlan asserts that the coup had been prepared since 1982, and was originally planned to take place during the New Year celebrations, but it was spontaneously adapted to the new developments. It remains a matter of controversy whether there had been any advance conspiracy to stage a coup, and, if so, who was precisely involved. The two main alternative possibilities are that these events were simply a combination of genuine revolutionary drive and inherent confusion, or that various figures in the military simply took opportunistic advantage of public protests, in an effort to capture power for themselves or for others whom they supported.
According to Burlan, the plot leaders were generals Stănculescu and Neagoe, Ceauşescu's closest security advisors; Burlan claims that they convinced him to hold the first mass rally in the Square by the Central Committee building, and that it was prepared in advance with remotely controlled automatic guns. During Ceauşescu's speech, the remotely controlled guns were set to fire randomly over the crowd and agitators started to cry anti-Ceauşescu slogans through loudspeakers. Scared by these developments, the people first tried to run away. However, given the loudspeaker messages stating that they were being shot at by Ceauşescu's forces and that a "revolution" was underway, the people were compelled to join the "revolution". The rally turned into a protest demonstration. The machine-gun fire and the messages over the loudspeakers appear to be universally acknowledged; the other aspects of this remain controversial.
On December 22 the army found itself without a leader: Ceauşescu (the official commander-in-chief of the army) had vanished, being sent by his (possibly conspiring) advisor Stănculescu to the countryside, and defense minister Vasile Milea was dead. (Initially the "revolutionary" leaders claimed that Milea was assassinated on behalf of Ceauşescu. This is possible, but other possibilities abound, notably that he might have refused to join them and been killed on that account. The (still) official account that he committed suicide has almost no credibility.) Confused, the army leadership in Bucharest decided to avoid conflicts and ordered their troops to fraternise with the demonstrators.
Fierce fighting occurred at that time at Bucharest Otopeni International Airport between troops sent one against another under claims that they were going to meet terrorists. There are various reports of other similar events. Filip Teodorescu claims that a number of instigators—possibly a small number, and probably Russians—started various incidents (including the violence in Timişoara); he also alleges that the level of violence was greatly exacerbated by elements within the military who propagated a myth of "securist-terrorists". According to Colonel Dumitru Burlan's book, the generals who were part of the conspiracy (led by general Victor Stănculescu) did their best to create such terrorist stories in order to induce fear and to draw the army on the conspirators' side. Generally, there is a consensus that there were some people instigating terror, and that others effectively caused incidents out of confusion. The relative magnitude of the two factors is not agreed upon, and no individual has ever been charged with or convicted of participating in deliberate acts of terror.
There are any number of popular theories about the motivation of the coup. Some point out that the first law passed by the incoming leadership abolished (without any referendum or legal basis) the constitution article that forbade external debts. At that time, the debts had been fully paid, and there are various allegations about the intended beneficiaries of these new desired debts: corrupt politicians, or international banks. There is no question that some individuals who were active in the December events greatly profited in terms of money and power (especially in the form of ownership in privatised industries), fame, advancement in rank, or merely the settling of personal grievances; it is also possible that any number of foreign interests may have been involved, possibly including the KGB and/or other Soviet interests.
The end of Ceauşescu
Ceauşescu and his wife Elena fled the capital by helicopter together with Emil Bobu and Manea Mănescu. They headed for Ceauşescu's Snagov residence, from where they fled again, this time for Târgovişte. The presidential couple kept moving through the countryside more or less aimlessly. Near Târgovişte, they abandoned the helicopter, having been ordered to land by the army, which by that time had already declared Romania to be restricted air space. The flight included grotesque episodes: a car chase to evade citizens attempting an arrest, leaving their aides behind, a short stay in a school. The Ceauşescus were finally held in a police car for several hours, while the policemen listened to the radio, presumably in an attempt to get a clue as to which political faction was about to win. Police eventually turned over the presidential couple to the army. On Christmas Day, the two were condemned to death by a military kangaroo court on charges ranging from illegal gathering of wealth to genocide, and were executed in Târgovişte. During their trial, and before their execution, the couple recited from the "Internationale". They were shot dead after they sang the fourth word. [citation needed]
The Ceauşescus were executed by an officer named Ionel Boeru who shot them with his sub-machine-gun.
The "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) was released on television for the Romanian public.
Officially, the Ceauşescu couple do not have a tomb; their corpses lie in Ghencea cemetery under the assumed names of two generals who had died at around the same time. According to Jurnalul Naţional,[5] requests were made by their daughter and supporters of their political views to move them to mausoleums or churches built for the purpose of housing their remains, but such requests were denied by the Romanian state.
Other
The Ceauşescus had one adopted son, Valentin Ceauşescu (he was adopted in order to give a personal example of how people should take care of orphans, a big problem in Romania), a daughter Zoia Ceauşescu (born 1950) and a younger son, Nicu Ceauşescu (born 1951). For the death of his parents, Ceauşescu ordered the construction of an Orthodox church, the walls of which are decorated with portraits of his parents.[6]
Ceauşescu's official annual salary was 18,000 lei (equivalent to US$3,000 at the official exchange rate). Of this, some 5,000 lei was deposited in a bank every month for the use of his children. Nevertheless, he used to receive presents (e.g., a golden plated door handle) from countries and organisations that he was visiting, the misappropriation of which was one of the accusations against him at his trial. While he tried to keep account of his finances, his biological son Nicu was much less restrained and rumours abounded that he paid a gambling debt incurred in Las Vegas with a herd of horses belonging to the Communist Party (the herd of Jegalia, formerly administered by the Romanian Royal Cavalry).
Ceauşescu's security detail was relatively small compared to that of the current Romanian government, numbering only 40 people for his residences and for his whole family. His security chief was Col. Dumitru Burlan who claims that his troops had only two guns (insufficient for any serious defense). Col. Burlan claims that Ceauşescu was overconfident that the Romanian people loved him, and believed that he did not need protection. This explains much of the ease with which Ceauşescu was deposed and captured.
Ceauşescu is the only recipient of the Danish Order of the Elephant to ever 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.
Ever since his death, the Romanian perception of Ceauşescu has improved. Mari Români, a popular television show, conducted a poll among Romanians that revealed Ceauşescu to be perceived as the eleventh greatest Romanian of all time.
However, in Romania it is forbidden to publicly praise Nicolae Ceauşescu. According to the journal Gândul,[7] Dinel Staicu received a 250 milion lei (approx 75,000 United States dollars) fine for praising Ceauşescu and displaying his pictures on his private television channel (3TV Oltenia).
A rough sketch of "Ceauşism"
While the term Ceauşism became widely used inside Romania, usually as a pejorative, it never achieved status in academia. This feature can be explained taking in view the largely crude and syncretic character of the dogma.
Ceauşescu attempted the inclusion of his views in mainstream Marxist theory, to which he added his belief in a "multilaterally developed socialist society" as a necessary stage between the Marxist concepts of Socialist and Communist societies (a critical view reveals that the main reason for the interval is the disappearance of the State and Party structures in Communism). A Romanian Encyclopedic Dictionary entry in 1978 underlines the concept as "a new, superior, stage in the socialist development of Romania [...] begun by the 1971-1975 [sic] Five-Year Plan, prolonged over several [succeeding and projected] Five-Year Plans".
The main trait observed was a form of Romanian nationalism,[9] one which arguably propelled Ceauşescu to power in 1965, and probably accounted for the Party leadership that was gathered around Ion Gheorghe Maurer choosing him over the more orthodox Gheorghe Apostol. Although he had previously been a careful supporter of the official lines, Ceauşescu came to embody Romanian society's wish for independence after what were broadly considered to have been years of Soviet directives and purges, during and after the SovRom fiasco. He carried this nationalist option inside the Party, manipulating it against the nominated successor Apostol.
This nationalist policy was not without more timid precedent:[10] for example, the Gheorghiu-Dej regime had overseen the withdrawal of the Red Army in 1956, and it had engineered the publishing of several works that were subversive of the Russian and Soviet image, such as the final volumes of the official History of Romania, no longer glossing over the traditional points of tension with Russia and the Soviet Union (even alluding to an unlawful Soviet presence in Bessarabia). In the final years of Gheorghiu-Dej's rule more problems were brought out in the open, with the publication of a collection of Karl Marx texts that dealt with Romanian topics, showing Marx's previously-censored, politically uncomfortable views of Russia.
However, Ceauşescu was prepared to take a more decisive step in questioning Soviet policies. In the early years of his rule, he generally relaxed political pressures inside the Romanian society,[11] which led to the late 1960s and earliest 1970s being the most liberal decade of Communist Romania. Gaining the public's confidence, Ceauşescu took a clear stand against the 1968 crushing of the Prague Spring by Leonid Brezhnev.
After a visit paid by Charles de Gaulle earlier in the same year (during which the French President gave recognition to the incipient maverick), Ceauşescu's public speech in August deeply impressed the population, not only through its themes, but also by the unique fact that it was unscripted. He immediately attracted Western sympathies and backing, which lasted, out of inertia, beyond the liberal phase of his regime; at the same time, the period brought forward the threat of armed Soviet invasion: significantly, many young men inside Romania joined the Patriotic Guards created on the spur of the moment, in order to meet the perceived threat.[12]
Alexander Dubček's version of Socialism with a human face was never suited to Romanian communist goals. Ceauşescu found himself briefly aligned with Dubček's Czechoslovakia and Josip Broz Tito's Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The latter friendship was to last well into the 1980s, with Ceauşescu adapting the Titoist doctrine of "independent socialist development" to suit his own objectives. Romania proclaimed itself a "Socialist" (in place of "People's") Republic to show that it was fulfilling Marxist goals without Moscow's overseeing.
The system exacerbated its nationalist traits, which it progressively blended with Juche and Maoist ideals, a synthetis that may find a parallel in Hoxhaism. In 1971, the Party, which had already been completely purged of internal opposition (with the possible exception of Gheorghe Gaston Marin),[13] approved the April Thesis, expressing Ceauşescu's disdain of Western models as a whole, and the reevaluation of the recent liberalisation as bourgeois. The 1974 11th Congress tightened the grip on Romanian culture, guiding it towards Ceauşescu's nationalist principles:[14] notably, Romanian historians were demanded to refer to Dacians as having "an unorganised State [sic]", part of a political continuum that culminated in the Socialist Republic.[15] The regime continued its cultural dialogue with ancient forms, with Ceauşescu connecting his cult of personality to figures such as Mircea cel Bătrân (whom he styled Mircea the Great) and Mihai Viteazul; it also started adding Dacian or Roman versions to the names of cities and towns (Drobeta to Turnu Severin, Napoca to Cluj).[16]
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).
Nicolae Ceauşescu had a major influence on modern-day Romanian populist rhetoric. In his final years, he had begun to rehabilitate the image of pro-Nazi dictator Ion Antonescu. Although Antonescu's was never a fully official myth in Ceauşescu's time, today's xenophobic politicians such as Corneliu Vadim Tudor have coupled the images of the two leaders into their versions of a national Pantheon. The conflict with Hungary over the treatment of the Magyar minority in Romania had several unusual aspects: not only was it a vitriolic argument between two officially Socialist states (as Hungary had not yet officially embarked on the course to a free market economy), it also marked the moment when Hungary, a state behind the Iron Curtain, appealed to the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe for sanctions to be taken against Romania. This meant that the later 1980s were marked by a pronounced anti-Hungarian discourse, which owed more to nationalist tradition than Marxism,[17] and the ultimate isolation of Romania on the World stage.
Nicolae Ceauşescu championed a version of the virtually defunct Non-Aligned Movement in the 1970s. While the regime was sought after as mediator of several conflicts between the Arab world and Israel throughout the decade, it moved towards supporting only the Palestine Liberation Organisation and, gradually, showing interest in an alliance with Islamism. As such, Romania was the only Socialist state to openly condemn the Soviet war in Afghanistan.
The strong opposition of his regime to all forms of perestroika and glasnost placed Ceauşescu at odds with Mikhail Gorbachev. In a dramatic twist, Ceauşescu demanded that the Soviet leadership return to its previous stance, even asking for a Soviet crackdown on all Eastern Bloc liberation movements of the second half of 1989.
