Nicolae Ceaușescu
After the start of the
Cold War, both the
US and the
USSR sought to expand and control their
spheres of influence as a method of preventing the
other side from gaining too much
power. This meant that both sides ended up
throwing in with some unpleasant
dictators in the name of
containment or
expansion. On the US side, we had
Somoza,
Pinochet,
Batista and
Shah Pahlavi. The
Communists got
Tito,
Castro,
Assad, and probably the most
evil and
demented of the whole bunch, Nicolae Ceaușescu.
Ceausescu was chosen to lead Romania in 1965, and promptly purged his rivals and bestowed positions of power upon his family members. His wife Elena was made second in command of the country, and he granted her (a grade school drop-out) a Doctorate in Chemistry and made her head of the Council for Science and Technology.
Ceausescu had grandiose visions of leading Romania into a new age, and undertook massive, expensive, and somewhat pointless public works projects to achieve this end. Unfortunately, these projects ran up massive foreign debts as well, which he was unable to pay. The Romanian economy suffered, and soon collapsed for everyone except Ceausescu and his cronies.
Additionally, Nicolae had it in for the ethnic Hungarians in his country, and did his best to drive as many as he could out of Romania. Romanian citizenry was appalled at these policies, but were kept in check by the Securitate, his secret police, who kept almost 15%(!) of the population as paid informants.
Of course, all of what I've just said is just standard dictator stuff, and could have easily applied to any of the men I mentioned in the first paragraph. What really set Ceausescu apart was his total, abject lunacy. I shall, of course, elaborate:
Nicolae viewed the problems in his country as ones that stemmed from a shortage of labor. His solution was, of course, to embark on a program of population control, except that his idea was a little different from that of the Chinese. In 1966 Ceausescu banned abortion, birth control and divorce, and decreed that all Romanian women must bear 5 children apiece. Never mind that most Romanian families could barely support two. To enforce this decree, he had specially trained birth squads set up to visit women at home and at work once a month, and administer pregnancy tests. Those women who weren't pregnant were interrogated in regards to their sex lives. As a result of this decree, state-run orphanages were soon filled to overflowing with about 150,000 orphans in a country with a population of about 5 million.
Oh, but that's not all. Ceausescu's excesses are legendary...
- In addition to tapping phones and opening mail, the Securitate also required all typewriters to be registered. The penalty for owning an unregistered typewriter was death.
- After receiving a death threat from an anonymous sender, Ceausescu ordered the Securitate to secure handwriting samples from the entire population.
- Nicolae was intensely paranoid, and was terrified that foreigners might try to poison his clothes or give him a fatal disease from shaking hands. So he only wore clothes that had been under surveillance in a special warehouse.
- Ceausescu's government was Communist, but it was also anti-Soviet. This won him favor in the West, and the Queen of England invited him to Buckingham Palace to receive an honorary knighthood. However, Nicolae's paranoia caused him to bring his own bedsheets to the palace, and after shaking the Queen's hand, he quickly washed his own with alcohol to get rid of any germs.
- Despite his paranoia and fear of illness, Ceausescu was steadfast in his denial that AIDS was a real disease. He believed that it was mainly a syndrome of the bourgeoise West, and that Romanians would not suffer. So, of course, Romanians suffered. Thousands of the abovementioned orphans died of AIDS contracted from blood transfusions and shared needles in vaccinations.
- Ceausescu was given a black Laborador Retriever puppy by a British Labour Party leader, and developed an unusually strong fondness for it. So strong, in fact, that he gave it its own house, telephone, and motorcade, and promoted it to the rank of Colonel in the Romanian army.
Unlike other dictators of his time, Ceausescu met a fitting end. In December of 1989, the Securitate arrested
Lazlo Tokes, a Hungarian clergyman who had spoken out against the regime. Tokes' supporters rioted, and when the army refused to shoot the protesters, the Securitate
executed the army officers and then opened fire on the crowd itself. When word broke out, the Romanian populace revolted. As the revolt spread, a
disgusted Romanian army deserted the regime, leaving the Ceausescus powerless. The family attempted to flee the country by
helicopter, but they were caught, put on trial, and sentenced to death.
Hundreds of men volunteered to be on the firing squad. When the three who were chosen showed up on December 25th, they didn't wait for an order; they just started firing as soon as they saw Nicolae and Elena. As a Christmas present to Romania, the former state-run Television Station aired footage of the Ceausescus' bullet-ridden corpses all night long.
Thanks to historyhouse.com and the Big Book of Bad for most of the resources (except for the handwriting sample bit)