Nicolae Ceauşescu

Nicolae Ceaușescu (26 January 1918 – 25 December 1989) was a Romanian Communist politician. He was the general secretary of the Romanian Communist Party from 1965 to 1989, and hence the second and last Communist leader of Romania. He was also the country's head of state from 1967, serving as President of the State Council, from 1974 concurrently as President of the Republic, until his overthrow in the Romanian Revolution in December 1989, part of a series of anti-Communist and anti-Soviet Union uprisings in Eastern Europe that year.

Born in 1918 in Scornicești, Olt County, Ceaușescu was a member of the Romanian Communist youth movement. Ceaușescu rose up through the ranks of Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej's Socialist government and, upon Gheorghiu-Dej's death in 1965, he succeeded to the leadership of Romania’s Communist Party as General Secretary.

Upon his rise to power, he eased press censorship and openly condemned the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in his speech on 21 August 1968, which resulted in a surge in popularity. The resulting period of stability was very brief, however; his government very soon became severely totalitarian, and was considered the most repressive in Eastern Europe of the time. His secret police, the Securitate, was responsible for mass surveillance as well as severe repression and human rights abuses within the country, and he suppressed and controlled the media and press, implementing methods that were among the harshest, most restrictive and brutal in the world. Economic mismanagement due to failed oil ventures during the 1970s led to skyrocketing foreign debts for Romania; in 1982, he exported much of the country's agricultural and industrial production in an effort to repay them. The shortages that followed drastically lowered living standards, leading to heavy rationing of food, water, oil, heat, electricity, medicine, and other necessities. His cult of personality experienced unprecedented elevation, followed by extensive nepotism and the intense deterioration of foreign relations, even with the Soviet Union.

As anti-government protesters demonstrated in Timișoara in December 1989, he perceived the demonstrations as a political threat and ordered military forces to open fire on 17 December, causing many deaths and injuries. The revelation that Ceaușescu was responsible resulted in a massive spread of rioting and civil unrest across the country. The demonstrations, which reached Bucharest, became known as the Romanian Revolution—the only violent overthrow of a communist government in the turn of the Revolutions of 1989. Ceaușescu and his wife, Elena, fled the capital in a helicopter, but were captured by the armed forces after the armed forces changed sides. On 25 December, after being tried and convicted of economic sabotage and genocide, they were immediately executed by firing squad, and Ceaușescu was succeeded as President by Ion Iliescu, who had played a major part in the revolution. Capital punishment was abolished shortly thereafter.

Leadership of Romania
When Gheorghiu-Dej died on 19 March 1965, Ceaușescu was not the obvious successor despite his closeness to the longtime leader. However, widespread infighting by older and more connected officials made the Politburo turn to Ceaușescu as a compromise candidate. He was elected general secretary on 22 March 1965, three days after Gheorghiu-Dej's death.

One of his first acts was to change the name of the party from the Romanian Workers' Party back to the Communist Party of Romania and to declare the country a socialist republic, rather than a people's republic. In 1967, he consolidated his power by becoming president of the State Council, making him de jure head of state. His political apparatus sent many thousands of political opponents to prison or psychiatric hospitals. Initially, Ceaușescu became a popular figure, both in Romania and in the West, because of his independent foreign policy, which challenged the authority of the Soviet Union. In the 1960s, he eased press censorship and ended Romania's active participation in the Warsaw Pact, but Romania formally remained a member. He refused to take part in the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact forces and even actively and openly condemned that action in his 21 August 1968 speech. He travelled to Prague a week before the invasion to offer moral support to his Czechoslovak counterpart, Alexander Dubček. Although the Soviet Union largely tolerated Ceaușescu's recalcitrance, his seeming independence from Moscow earned Romania a maverick status within the Eastern Bloc.

Ceaușescu's main aim as leader was to make Romania a world power, and all of his economic, foreign and demographic policies were meant to achieve Ceaușescu's ultimate goal: turning Romania into one of the world's great powers. For the Conducător (the "Leader"), as Ceaușescu liked to call himself, "demography was destiny" and countries with rising populations were rising powers. In October 1966, Ceaușescu banned abortion and contraception and brought in one of the world's harshest anti-abortion laws, leading to a large spike in the number of Romanian infants abandoned to deplorable conditions in the country's orphanages.