In the center of Bucharest is a huge neoclassical palace. One might think that the building has been around for centuries, but this is actually not the case. In fact, it was built in the 1980s by order of the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. Today it is a highly visible reminder of one of the most repressive communist regimes in Eastern Europe.
Born in the small village of Skornicesti in southern Romania, Nicolae Ceausescu was one of nine children in a family dominated by an overbearing and aggressive father. After running away to Bucharest at the age of eleven, Ceausescu began working as an apprentice shoemaker to a man named Alexandru Sendulescu. Sandulescu was a fanatical communist and it wasn’t long before Ceausescu was heavily involved in the communist cause. Membership in the Communist Party was illegal in 1930s Romania, and soon Ceausescu was regularly in and out of prison.
When World War II broke out and Romania sided with Nazi Germany, Ceausescu spent most of the war imprisoned in various internment camps. In one of these camps he met the man who became the first communist leader of post-war Romania – Gheorghe Georgiou-Dej. The two men got along well, and after the Communists took control of the country in 1947, Ceausescu quickly rose through the party ranks until he became second in line in the new government.
Georgiou-Dej died on March 19, 1965. Three days later, Ceausescu was elected General Secretary of the Communist Party and leader of the country. He would remain in this post for the next twenty-four years.
A man in a low calm voice offers his opinion and is escorted from a building by security men and the police.
How very like Ceausescu the Romanian ruler who starved his people. pic.twitter.com/G7p7qBfZOW— Crescent Radio (@redrum57) October 3, 2023
Ceausescu was initially considered the most liberal of the Soviet bloc leaders. He refused to take part in the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and even gave a speech condemning the action. It also eases press freedom at a time when other Warsaw Pact countries are cracking down on dissent. It even ended its active participation in the pact, although Romania remained a member until the end of the 1980s.
Unlike his colleagues from the other Warsaw Pact countries, Ceausescu’s bold ambition is for Romania to become a world power and not isolate itself from the rest of the world. Romania was the first Soviet bloc country to recognize the legitimacy of West Germany; joins the International Monetary Fund; conducts an open policy of friendship with the United States and even concludes trade agreements with the European Economic Community. This makes Romania unique among the countries of the Eastern Bloc, which until the end of the 1980s remained hostile to the West.
Unfortunately, Ceausescu’s relaxed attitude towards freedom of the press and his country’s move away from the totalitarianism of the other Warsaw Pact countries did not last longFr. By the mid-1970s, the increasingly authoritarian Ceausescu began to rely more and more on one of the most feared secret police forces in the world, the Securitate. The Securitate is tasked with rooting out all forms of dissent in Romania, and they undertake this task with gusto.
Securitate began to divide the population, pitting neighbor against neighbor, friend against friend, family member against family member. Midnight arrests and confessions obtained through torture are commonplace; opponents of the regime are killed; almost every phone in the country is tapped, and a vast network of informants has everyone looking around. Any serious attempt to create a resistance movement proved impossible.
Security was absolutely ruthless. When, for example, a miners’ strike brought traffic to a standstill in the country in 1977, it was noticed that many of the miners’ union leaders soon began to die early. It was later revealed that the Securitate subjected the leaders to five-minute chest X-rays that promoted the development of cancers. Towards the end of the 1970s, Romania was one of the most repressive countries in the world.
Ceaușescu used the massive earthquake that caused massive damage to Bucharest in 1977 as an opportunity to carry out one of the most destructive peacetime reconstructions of a city ever undertaken. The dictator dislikes Bucharest’s charming cobbled streets and wealth of stately public and ecclesiastical buildings, but envisions a modern city to rival Kim Il Sung’s Pyongyang, with sweeping boulevards and rows of one-of-a-kind apartment blocks.
Dan Novacovici was tortured and sent to a gulag in Ceaușescu’s communist Romania.
His crime? Not thinking the right way.
Witness his story. pic.twitter.com/7ljKBzL1kQ
— Victims of Communism (@VoCommunism) October 2, 2023
To achieve his goal, Ceausescu ordered the demolition of a large part of the city center. This included the leveling of Vakarest Hill and the relocation of the ancient monastery that had stood on it since the 16th century, as well as the demolition of entire neighborhoods, in particular the historic and beautiful Uran neighborhood in the heart of the city center. Along with ancient ruins, sports stadiums, theaters, military barracks, hospitals, schools and hundreds of homes, some of Bucharest’s most attractive churches and monasteries were destroyed.
In their place, the dictator built depressing rows of concrete apartment buildings, gloomy public buildings that were a shadow of those they replaced, a vast tree-lined boulevard that cut through the heart of the historic city, and a colossal palace at the center of it all. This gigantic building – the heaviest in the world – was to be the beating heart of Ceausescu’s new Bucharest, with 1,100 rooms, many lavishly and expensively decorated with the finest materials, while people outside queued for hours to they buy essential goods.
The unnecessary destruction of Bucharest took place between 1983 and 1988. By the end of the program, the city known as the “Little Paris of the East” has been wiped off the face of the earth. Some of the city’s churches were mercifully saved by digging up their foundations and moving them on rails to new locations, but most of them are now sadly hidden behind gray concrete apartment blocks, removed from their cultural and historical context.
During these destructions, the country’s finances collapsed. Ceausescu had taken out huge loans from foreign banks to finance an oil refinery construction program that was nowhere near completion nor profitable by the time the loans came due.
Instead of declaring bankruptcy on the loans, Ceausescu decided to pay them back as quickly as possible. To achieve this, he instituted a crushing austerity program that included exporting almost everything the country produced, including food and industrial products. This led to hardship across the country as food prices rose. Queues for household goods became a daily occurrence, and discontent in the country grew. The Securitate had the job of suppressing dissent and many people were arrested, tortured and killed in the austerity years of the 1980s.
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As the decade progressed and a harsh austerity regime led to frequent power outages, fuel shortages and escalating poverty, while vast sums were poured into the unnecessary demolition and redevelopment of cities like Bucharest, it was inevitable that something would break.
The spark that ignited the flame appeared in the city of Timisoara. A small protest against the eviction of a dissident Hungarian pastor from his church-owned apartment quickly escalated into a massive anti-government demonstration. Ceausescu allowed the police, armed forces and Securitate to open fire on the crowds and many men, women and children were killed or wounded.
30 years since the beginning of the anti-communist uprising in Timisoara, which led to the fall #Chauseshku and the democratic revolution, which is not over yet. pic.twitter.com/ei5eYZvcaL
— Janez Janša (@JJansaSDS) December 14, 2019
When the country began to disagree about the Timisoara massacre and who was ultimately to blame for it, Ceausescu realized that he had made a mistake. Three days after the massacre, he held an open-air meeting in Bucharest where he blamed anti-Romanian rebels for the uprising. The crowd disagrees, and what was supposed to be a rally in support of Ceausescu soon turns into an anti-Ceausescu demonstration as the crowd begins booing and shouting insults at the stunned dictator. Realizing that he was in real danger of being lynched, Ceausescu holed up in a nearby government building as Bucharest erupted into riots.
The next day, as protests erupt across the country, one of Romania’s top military leaders, Vasile Milea, commits suicide. The rumor that he was actually killed on Ceausescu’s orders spread like wildfire among the military. The previously loyal armed forces of the dictator turned against him and now sided with the protesters. With no hope of regaining control, and as an angry mob surrounds the Romanian parliament, Ceausescu and his wife Elena make a dramatic helicopter escape from the roof. However, after the Romanian army threatens to shoot down the helicopter with a surface-to-air missile, the pair are forced to land and they are quickly apprehended. A show trial was hastily organized for the next day – December 25.
The trial against the Ceausescu family is fast-tracked and the verdict is a foregone conclusion. The Ceaușescus are accused of committing genocide in Timisoara, embezzling millions into secret bank accounts and causing extensive damage to public property during the revolution. During the hour-long trial, Ceausescu refused to recognize the legitimacy of the court. The court sentences the dictator and his wife to death.
The soldiers who were summoned to carry out the death sentence wasted no time. Nicolae and Elsa were led outside immediately after the verdicts. As Ceausescu sang the Internationale and Elsa screamed and swore at the assembled firing squad, the soldiers opened fire and peppered the couple with bullets from their automatic weapons. The couple collapses to the ground. The terror of Nicolae Ceausescu is at an end.
Nicolae and Elsa Ceausescu were the last people to be executed by the Romanian state. The death penalty, along with the regime he ruled for twenty-four years, was abolished during the great wave of revolutions and reforms that swept Central and Eastern Europe in the late 1880s. Today, Romania is a fully functioning democracy, a member of NATO and the European Union. Go to Romania today and you will hardly see any signs that it was once one of the most brutally repressive regimes in the world. But go to the center of Bucharest and the gigantic palace that is now the country’s parliament ensures that the legacy of the man who once ruled the country with an iron fist will be set in stone for many centuries to come.
Source: History
2023-10-05 06:51:33
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