Revolution 1989

by Victor Sebestyen

  Isolated writers criticising the regime occasionally spoke out bravely. Doina Cornea, a specialist in French literature at the University of Cluj, in north-western Romania, spent years under house arrest. She said the Ceauescu regime was ‘crushing people’s innermost being, humiliating their aspirations and legitimate claims, humbling their consciences and compelling them under pressure of terror to accept the lies as truth and truth as a lie.’ The lies were big and small - even about the weather forecast. In Romania the temperature never officially dropped below 10°C, even when there was ice and snow on the ground, because the law said that heating in public buildings had to be turned on when it did.

  In every office with more than a few hundred employees there was a full- or part-time official liaison person to deal with the Securitate - as well as the unofficial informers willing to spy on their colleagues. Sensitive trades had several intelligence agents. For example, on the state-owned TV station the Securitate had an entire ‘protocol department’ whose task was to ensure that Nicolae Ceauescu always appeared in the best possible light. Film editors were watched carefully by the secret police. ‘All of Ceauescu’s involuntary pauses, hesitations, stutters and grimaces had to be removed before anything could be shown,’ one senior executive on television news said. ‘It was hours of extra work The discarded snippets of film were collected by the Securitate and destroyed lest they fell into the wrong hands.’ TV producer Nick Melinescu once fell foul of the guidelines, with serious consequences. ‘On one occasion there was a picture that was a few seconds too long in which Ceauescu did everything wrong. He scratched, blinked, stuttered and it was all left in. All hell broke loose . . . I was blamed and as a result I was banned . . . my salary was cut for three months. It was bad, one of the worst things that could happen.’ Elena was equally careful about her Mother of the Nation image: ‘There was a huge list of dos and don’ts when recording her images. First and foremost, she was never supposed to be shown in profile because she had a huge nose - and she wasn’t a beautiful woman anyway.’ The propaganda department of the Party had issued instructions that Ceauescu’s small-to-medium size (five feet five inches) should never be emphasised on film. When state guests taller than he were in his company they had to be filmed in such a way that the difference in height was minimised - the French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing towered over the Romanian leader. They were never shown standing together. All newspapers employed one sub-editor who had a vital job: to check that there was never a spelling error in any mention of Nicolae Ceauescu’s name.6

  The future despot of Romania was born in the small village of Scor- niceti in German-occupied Wallachia, southern Romania. His mother, Alexandra, and father, Nicolae Andru, were middling-income peasant farmers, who would have been better-off if he had not drunk away the fortunes of his wife and seven children. He named three of his sons Nicolae, allegedly because he was on such an alcohol-induced bender when he went to the nearest town to register the births that it was the only boy’s name he could remember. The young Ceauescu’s school record was poor, though even his teachers at elementary school realised he had a shrewd intelligence, as well as an almost uncontrollable temper. His formal education ended at fourteen when he went to live with one of his married elder sisters in Bucharest. He became an apprentice shoemaker and was radicalised partly by his socialist brother-in-law and partly by the life offered by the leftist underground. As one contemporary said: ‘He was more attracted by the violence than the ideology . . . he was keen to be where the action on the streets was.’

  Romania in the 1930s limped along from crisis to crisis in the corrupt and decadent reign of King Carol II, who was involved in various dubious financial dealings and had a love life resembling a soap opera. His affair with the divorcee Magda Lupescu filled the gossip pages not only in the Romanian press but also in much of Europe’s. It was his flirtation with fascism that became more serious for his country’s future. Under him the notorious Iron Guard gained enormous influence in public life and the young Ceauescu became a political street brawler against the thugs on the Right. He was first arrested before he was sixteen, in 1933, and was in and out of jail for the next dozen years. Communist Party membership was illegal and Ceauescu received an education from the Marxist intellectuals who were in prison with him. Among other things he was taught to control his stammer, though when he was nervous, tired or stressed that returned in later years. While he learned at their feet, he proved highly useful to them running errands, scrounging extra food and finding ways to communicate with the outside world.

  Out of jail in 1938, at a Communist Youth League meeting, he met and fell in love at first sight with a very attractive, dark-haired girl whom her friends called ‘Pasarica’ (meaning little bird). She was Elena Petrescu, a year older than he and with a similar peasant background. A prudish man, Ceauescu never looked at another woman in a sexual way in his entire life. She was more experienced and confident in the ways of love and before they were married she had a number of affairs. He was back in jail before they could pursue their relationship further, but soon after he was released from the harsh Târgu Jiu prison at the end of the war they met again and soon married.

  The Soviets installed a puppet government in their Romanian domain and Stalin placed a cold, clever and calculating political tactician, the highly experienced Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, in charge of the new Communist regime. Ceauescu had been in prison with Gheorghiu-Dej and admired his brains and ruthlessness. The older man began to use Ceauescu as a fixer who, in those days, had some natural political and diplomatic skills as well as an ability to apply bully tactics to get his way. He was put in charge of creating a Communist army and later rose through the ranks of the Party. He would often do the leader’s dirty work for him, such as conducting the various purges and witch hunts characteristic of Soviet-style communism. He navigated the often precarious world of Balkan politics with greater dexterity than the cleverer, wittier and more sophisticated intellectuals around him. After Gheorghiu-Dej died - in severe pain from cancer in 1965 - Ceauescu was not the obvious choice to succeed him. While older rivals intrigued and destroyed each other, he emerged as a compromise candidate.

  Initially he presented a liberal image. He lifted censorship slightly, encouraged a measure of private enterprise and seemed in his first few years a breath of fresh air. Often he sounded more like a nationalist leader than a hardline Communist. But a radical change came over him after he went on a long state visit to North Korea and China at the end of 1971. He was massively impressed by Kim Il-Sung and Mao Zedong’s personal style of rule, the cult status they enjoyed, the vast rallies in Peking and Pyongyang with hundreds of thousands of people waving pictures of the leader and treating him like a living god. He felt he deserved similar adoration in Bucharest, where he was convinced people loved him, but ought to show it more than they did. He returned tougher and pursued relentlessly Stalinist ways. He turned the screw against the traditional Romanian enemy, the large Hungarian minority living in Transylvania. New laws were introduced barring them from teaching Hungarian in schools and maintaining cultural centres. He spent massively increased sums on the Securitate. Selectively, he had opponents murdered or jailed and he turned Romania into the most desperately miserable and destitute part of Eastern Europe.7

  While Ceauescu grew increasingly hated at home, he was fêted abroad. He was the West’s favourite Communist, even as he brutalised his own people. The reason was simple. He steered as independent a path as he could from the Soviet Union and in the Cold War that was all that mattered. His predecessor Gheorghiu-Dej had played the nationalist card and it had worked for him. He had negotiated a deal that removed Soviet troops from Romanian soil, and though Romania remained a loyal member of the Warsaw Pact, it occasionally spoke with a voice of its own. Ceauescu followed in these footsteps. Just before Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968 he turned up in Prague offering support to Alexander Dubek. He refused to let Romanian troops take part in the in
vasion and spoke regularly against the Soviet Union interfering in the affairs of other socialist countries. He wanted Romania’s economy to be less dependent on Russia’s and made overtures to the West for improved relations.

  The leaders of the free world formed a queue to ingratiate themselves with this Communist who dared to challenge Moscow. They did not imagine they could detach Romania far from Moscow’s embrace, but they believed that if they encouraged Ceauescu to show yet further independence, they could cause the Soviets considerable embarrassment. So he was awarded medals and honours and invited on lavish state visits to Western capitals. He went to Paris and stayed at the Elysée. The French President, Giscard d’Estaing, warned his next hosts, in London, about the tendency of the Romanian entourage to pilfer lighters, ashtrays and ornaments of all kinds and he suggested that anything the British wanted to preserve should either be hidden or bolted to the floor.

  When the Ceauescus stayed at Buckingham Palace in June 1978 Queen Elizabeth II was amused when she was told that early in the morning the Romanian President and his aides held a meeting out in the garden because they assumed all the bedrooms in the Palace were bugged. At a formal reception she said: ‘We in Great Britain are impressed with the resolute stand you have taken for . . . independence. Consequently, Romania holds a distinct position and plays a significant part in world affairs. Your personality, Mr President, as a statesman of world-wide repute, experience and influence is widely acknowledged.’ Margaret Thatcher was not to be outdone. She said she was ‘impressed by the personality of President Ceauescu . . . and was left with par- ticular impressions of him as leader of . . . a country willing to develop her co-operation with other nations’.8 He was given an honorary knighthood and several other medals.

  Elena’s craving for honours was even more desperate than his. Though her education was patchy - she had been thrown out of school aged fourteen - eventually she took a chemistry degree. She wanted to be taken seriously as a scientist. Her husband had made her head of the ICEHCM, Romania’s most distinguished chemical research laboratory, even though she was not qualified even to work there as a junior, let alone be in charge of it. When the London visit was planned, her aides sent feelers out to obtain an honorary FRS, the highest award in British science. She was rejected. Oxford and Cambridge were approached for honorary degrees but turned her down. She did receive a fellowship from the Royal Institute of Chemistry and an honorary degree from the Polytechnic of Central London. At the award ceremony Sir Richard Norman, President of the Institute, praised her contribution ‘to macromolecular experimental chemistry, especially in the field of the stereospecific polymerisation of ijisoprene on the stabilisation of synthetic rubbers and on copolymerisation’. Mircea Corciovei, the leading Romanian chemist who had actually done most of the research for the work under her name, was philosophical. ‘We were told: no paper can be written or published, no conference lecture delivered without Elena Ceauescu’s name appearing in first place. We never saw her, we never heard from her, at any time during our research or afterwards. She never even acknowledged our existence. We were producing papers with words which we knew she could not pronounce let alone understand.’9

  Ceauescu was the subject of fawning biographies, not only in Romania but in Western Europe. A hagiography published in Britain in 1983 was prefaced with a no-holds-barred ‘interview’ by publisher, former MP - and subsequently disgraced newspaper tycoon - Robert Maxwell in which one of his first questions was: ‘Dear Mr President, you have been holding the highest political and state offices in Romania for almost eighteen years, a fact for which we warmly congratulate you. What has - in your opinion - made you so popular with Romanians?’10

  In the US he was equally showered with honours and praise. President Gerald Ford said: ‘President Ceauescu’s influence in the inter- national arena . . . is outstanding.’ Jimmy Carter asserted: ‘His prestige has gone beyond the boundaries of Romania and Europe . . . The whole world appreciates him and regards him with admiration.’ Even his eccentric behaviour did not make the Americans stop to think. On a three-day visit to the US in 1979 he walked out of a dinner given in his honour in New Orleans because he took umbrage when a cardinal on the same table said grace before the meal. On his last afternoon in America he had a meeting with the Mayor of New York, Edward Koch. Outside the Manhattan hotel where the Ceauescu entourage were staying there was a small demonstration by a group of Hungarian exiles. Halfway through the meeting, Koch said: ‘Mr President, down there some friends of mine were demonstrating against you, and they tell me you don’t give freedom of religion and cultural freedom to your Hungarians living in Transylvania. Is that right?’ Ceauescu was incandescent with rage. He turned to the US diplomatic official accompanying him on the visit and demanded: ‘What does the State Department have to say about this? How dare he talk to me like that?’ He was told that whatever policies the Federal government may have, the Mayor of New York was allowed his say. The Conductor became further incensed. He gave orders that the party should immediately head back to Bucharest. There was a slight hiccough in that plan, though. Elena was in Cartier’s, where she was being given a personalised tour, and insisted on staying for a further three and a half hours. They flew home at the time their itinerary said they would. Four years later George Bush, then Vice President, went to Bucharest and announced at the end of several hours of talks with Ceauescu that ‘he was one of the good Communists’.11

  Romanians, with typical gallows wit, called it socialism in one family. Ceauescu filled the top posts in the country and the ruling Party with his siblings, nephews, nieces and in-laws. An elder brother, Nicolae Andruta, was a Lieutenant-General and key link-man in the Interior Ministry and security service. Another brother, Ilie, was Deputy Defence Minister, who along with yet another brother, Marian, ran a highly secret arms business: they sold Soviet-made rocket and electronic communications systems to the Americans, who in return provided Romania with Western weaponry, which it then passed on to the Soviets. Another brother, Florea, was the leader’s eyes and ears in the Party newspaper, as an editor on Scînteia. His favourite brother-in law, Gheorghe Petrescu, was a Deputy Prime Minister. Brothers-in-law Ilie Verde and Manea Manescu had top Party posts. His favourite niece, Maria, was made head of Romania’s Red Cross organisation. But his closest adviser was always Elena, who was given increasing power. By the early 1980s she was placed in charge of the country when he was away on tours abroad. Romania never was a shared dictatorship - Elena was number two - but she became more shrewish, adopted grander airs and he grew ever more reliant on her. She frequently said in other people’s hearing: ‘I am the only person you can truly trust.’ There were signs that he could be scared of her rages. ‘He was afraid of her, I am sure of that,’ said the Party historian Ion Ardeleanu, who knew them both well. ‘If he was late for a meal, or a meeting with her he would look at his watch and start sweating and stammering.’12

  They were unfortunate with their children. The eldest, Valentin, was adopted as a baby in 1948 and tried from an early age to keep a calculated distance from his parents. He was a physicist, fairly distinguished, who obtained a good degree from Imperial College in London. His parents disapproved of his marriage to Iordana Boril, partly because she was Jewish but, worse, because she was the daughter of one of Ceauescu’s rivals during the power struggle inside the Party in the 1960s. Petre Boril had a romantic past as a fighter in the Spanish Civil War, while Ceauescu was languishing in a series of jails. Valentin and his wife lived in a modest two-room apartment in an unfashionable part of Bucharest, like average Romanians, and had all their nomenklatura privileges withdrawn. He worked quietly in the Institute of Physics. The marriage did not last, but Valentin was never forgiven. He kept out of politics, though he did once say of his compatriots, ‘Absolute power corrupts absolutely, but submission corrupts too’.