According to respondents to an INSCOP research survey, most Romanians believe Ceausescu’s so-called “Golden Age” saw the country take better care of its citizens, and more cooperation between Romanians.
Of those polled, 66.2% believed 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 telephone interviews method on a sample of 1,505 people aged 18 years and over.
Ceaușescu’s repressive and iron fist communism was the only regime in Central Europe that ended in bloodshed 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, revived recently by Russian propaganda, are to blame
Decline and fall
Nicolae 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, East Germany.
On December 21st, following days of deadly repression in the western city of Timisoara, the dictator was supposed to address 100 thousand supporters that 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 kilometers 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 the 22 December, the day after beginning of the unrest in Bucharest and Ceasescu’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’s 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 Ceaușescu’s personality cult symbols.
The army and the feared political police Securitate fired into the demonstrators on December 17 causing dozens of fatalities, while the whole city rose up against the communist regime. On December 20th, after 3 days of violent repression, the army withdrew and the city became free of communism.
The echoes of Timișoara’s uprising spread to the entire country and to Bucharest paving the way to the epilogue of the regime.
The root causes of economic turmoil
The causes that led to the fall of Ceasescu’s regime were determined by both external and internal factors, such as the sunset 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 called Ceaușescu the “Genius of the Carpathians” or simply the “Conducator”, the leader the same title used by Ion Antonescu the head of the Romanian fascist regime during WW2
Nicolae Ceasescu took advantage of the 1977 destructive 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. It was the so-called Systematisation.
This was a rather dystopic infrastructural urban and farm planning that was meant to pave the way to the full collectivisation of the Romanian society.
Old towns and villages were demolished (Bucharest, the Banat and the and Transylvania regions’ urbanism were put upside down) 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.
Consequence: popular 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 a strict control of the society through the Department of the State Security (the Securitate, a Stalinist political police structure) that had a vast and extensive network of informants.
Any communication was intercepted and controlled, while all the typewriter machines of the country were registered by the security services.
The Securitate had complete freedom to torture and eliminate opponents, even abroad.
Artists and intellectuals were systematically persecuted as well as the ethnic minorities.
The regime banned contraception (even condoms) and abortion, not with religious or moral motivations, just to increase demography and the future workforce. Pregnant women were strictly controlled by the authorities.
Multifaced dictator
Nevertheless, Nicolae Ceaușescu enjoyed political respect on the international scene until the start of the 1980s. The West saw him as an autonomous voice (vis-à-vis Moscow) within the Warsaw Pact. Ceasescu’s Romania was the only country in the socialist military 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 detached from the broad lines dictated by the Soviet Union to the socialist countries. This allowed Nicolae Ceaușescu to establish political relations both with the West and with Mao’s China, a communist country but 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 Zou En Lai and the USA 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 early 1970s.
Romania in 1974 was the only socialist country to sign a preferential tariff treaty with the European Community, what later became the EU.
The 1972 oil shock gave Romania relative power on 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.
Because in the 1970s it allowed the regime to conduct expansive policies with relative benefits for the population that had access for the first time in its history to mass consumption and a fairly generous welfare state.
From the early 1980s, falling oil prices and misguided economic measures forced the country into severe austerity measures with the ambition of wiping out 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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