and
Leonid Brezhnev in 1965 When Gheorghiu-Dej died on 19 March 1965, Ceaușescu was not the obvious successor, despite his closeness to the longtime leader. But widespread infighting by older and more connected officials led the Politburo to choose Ceaușescu as a compromise candidate. Later that year, a new constitution—adopted by the
Great National Assembly in August 1965—renamed the country the
Socialist Republic of Romania, replacing the former designation of "Romanian People’s Republic". His regime maintained strict political control, and thousands of dissenters were imprisoned or, in some cases, confined in psychiatric institutions. 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 it 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 maverick status within the
Eastern Bloc. During the following years, Ceaușescu pursued an open policy towards the
United States and
Western Europe. Romania was the first Warsaw Pact country to recognise
West Germany, the first to join the
International Monetary Fund, and the first to receive a US president,
Richard Nixon. In 1971, Romania became a member of the
General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. Romania and
Yugoslavia were also the only Eastern European countries that entered into trade agreements with the
European Economic Community before the fall of the Eastern Bloc. A series of official visits to Western countries (including the US, France, the
United Kingdom, Spain and Australia) helped Ceaușescu to present himself as a reforming Communist, pursuing an independent foreign policy within the Soviet Bloc. He also became eager to be seen as an enlightened international statesman, able to mediate in international conflicts, and to gain international respect for Romania. Ceaușescu negotiated in international affairs, such as the opening of US relations with China in 1969 and the visit of
Egyptian president
Anwar Sadat to Israel in 1977. In addition, Romania was the only country in the world to maintain normal diplomatic relations with both Israel and the
Palestine Liberation Organisation. In 1980, Romania participated in the
1980 Summer Olympics in
Moscow with its other Soviet bloc allies, but in 1984 was one of the few Communist countries to participate in the
1984 Summer Olympics in
Los Angeles (going on to win 53 medals, trailing only the US and
West Germany in the overall count) while most of the Eastern Bloc's nations boycotted this event. during his visit to India in 1969 Ceaușescu refused to implement measures of
economic liberalism. The evolution of his regime followed the path begun by Gheorghiu-Dej. He continued with the programme of intensive
industrialisation aimed at the
economic self-sufficiency of the country which since 1959 had already doubled industrial production and had reduced the peasant population from 78% at the end of the 1940s to 61% in 1966 and 49% by 1971. However, for Romania, like other Eastern People's Republics, industrialisation did not mean a total social break with the countryside. The peasants returned periodically to the villages or resided in them, commuting daily to the city in a practice called naveta. This allowed Romanians to act as peasants and workers at the same time. Universities were also founded in smaller Romanian towns, which served to train qualified professionals such as engineers, economists, planners or jurists necessary for the development projects of the country. Romanian healthcare also achieved improvements and recognition by the
World Health Organization (WHO), whose director general Marcolino Candau in May 1969 visited Romania and declared that the visits of WHO staff to various Romanian hospital establishments had left an extraordinarily good impression. The government targeted rising
divorce rates and made divorce more difficult – marriages could only be dissolved in exceptional cases. By the late 1960s, the population began to swell. In turn, a new problem was created, child abandonment, which swelled the orphanage population (see
1980s–1990s Romanian orphans phenomenon). Many of the children in these orphanages suffered mental and physical deficiencies (see
Cighid). Measures to encourage reproduction included financial motivations for families who bore children, guaranteed maternity leave, and childcare support for mothers who returned to work, work protection for women, and extensive access to medical control in all stages of pregnancy, as well as after it. Medical control was seen as one of the most productive effects of the law, since all women who became pregnant were under the care of a qualified medical practitioner, even in rural areas. In some cases, if a woman was unable to visit a medical office, a doctor would visit her home. Mothers of at least five children were entitled to receive significant benefits, while mothers of at least ten children were declared "heroine mothers" by the Romanian state.
Speech of 21 August 1968 in 1968
Ceaușescu's speech of 21 August 1968 represented the apogee of Ceaușescu's rule. It marked the highest point in Ceaușescu's popularity, when he openly condemned the
Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia.
July Theses of
North Korea in 1978. In
reforming the state, Ceaușescu sought to emulate
Juche and
Maoist ideas Ceaușescu visited China, North Korea, Mongolia and North Vietnam in 1971. He took great interest in the idea of total national transformation as embodied in the programmes of North Korea's
Juche and China's
Cultural Revolution. He was also inspired by the
personality cults of
North Korea's
Kim Il Sung and
China's
Mao Zedong. Journalist Edward Behr claimed that Ceaușescu admired both Mao and Kim as leaders who not only totally dominated their nations but had also used totalitarian methods coupled with significant ultra-nationalism mixed in with communism in order to transform both China and North Korea into major world powers. Furthermore, that Kim and even more so Mao had broken free of Soviet control were additional sources of admiration for Ceaușescu. According to British journalist Edward Behr, Elena Ceaușescu allegedly bonded with Mao's wife,
Jiang Qing. On 6 July 1971, he delivered a speech before the executive committee of the Romanian Communist Party. This quasi-
Maoist speech, which came to be known as the
July Theses, contained seventeen proposals. Among these were: continuous growth in the "leading role" of the Party; improvement of Party education and of mass political action; youth participation on large construction projects as part of their "patriotic work"; an intensification of political-ideological education in schools and universities, as well as in children's, youth and student associations; and an expansion of political propaganda, orienting radio and television shows to this end, as well as publishing houses, theatres and cinemas, opera, ballet, artists' unions, promoting a "militant, revolutionary" character in artistic productions. Gheorghiu-Dej's process of removing
Stalinist policies and
Stalin's cult of personality between 1956 and 1965 was condemned and an index of banned books and authors was re-established. The Theses heralded the beginning of a "mini cultural revolution" in Romania, launching a
Neo-Stalinist offensive against cultural autonomy, reaffirming an ideological basis for literature that, in theory, the Party had hardly abandoned. Although presented in terms of "Socialist Humanism", the Theses in fact marked a return to the strict guidelines of
Socialist Realism and attacks on non-compliant intellectuals. Strict ideological
conformity in the humanities and social sciences was demanded. In a 1972 speech, Ceaușescu stated he wanted "a certain blending of party and state activities ... in the long run we shall witness an ever closer blending of the activities of the party, state and other social bodies". In practice, a number of joint party-state organisations were founded such as the Council for Socialist Education and Culture, which had no precise counterpart in any of the other communist states of Eastern Europe, and the Romanian Communist Party was embedded into the daily life of the nation in a way that it never had been before. In 1974, the party programme of the Romanian Communist Party announced that structural changes in society were insufficient to create a full socialist consciousness in the people, and that a full socialist consciousness could only come about if the entire population was made aware of socialist values that guided society. The Communist Party was to be the agency that would so "enlighten" the population, and in the words of the British historian Richard Crampton, "the party would merge state and society, the individual and the collective, and would promote 'the ever more organic participation of party members in the entire social life.
President of the Socialist Republic of Romania Ceaușescu had been head of state since 1967, though nominally only as first among equals, deriving his real power from his status as party leader. However, in 1974 Ceaușescu introduced a full-fledged
executive presidency as the nation's top decision-maker. He was first elected to this post
in 1974 and would be reelected every five years until 1989. As President, he was empowered to carry out those functions of the State Council that did not require
plenums. He also appointed and dismissed the president of the Supreme Court and the prosecutor general whenever the legislature was not in session. In practice, from 1974 onwards Ceaușescu frequently ruled by decree. Over time, he usurped many powers and functions that nominally were vested in the State Council as a whole. Effectively, Ceaușescu now held all governing power in the nation; virtually all party and state institutions were subordinated to his will. The principles of democratic centralism, combined with the legislature's infrequent sessions (it sat in full session only twice a year) meant that for all intents and purposes, his decisions had the force of law.
Oil embargo, strike and foreign relations during a 1974 state visit to
Syria, which was ruled by the
Assad family from
1970 to
2024 Starting with the
1973–1974 Arab oil embargo against the West, a period of prolonged high oil prices set in that characterised the rest of the 1970s. Romania as a major oil equipment producer greatly benefited from the high oil prices of the 1970s, which led Ceaușescu to embark on an ambitious plan to invest heavily in oil-refining plants. Ceaușescu's plan was to make Romania into Europe's number one oil refiner not only of its own oil, but also of oil from Middle Eastern states such as Iraq and Iran, and then to sell all of the refined oil at a profit on the Rotterdam spot market. As Romania lacked the money to build the necessary oil refining plants and Ceaușescu chose to spend the windfall from the high oil prices on aid to the
Third World in an attempt to buy Romania international influence, Ceaușescu borrowed heavily from Western banks on the assumption that when the loans came due, the profits from the sales of the refined oil would be more than enough to pay off the loans. This was the first state visit by a Communist head of state to the UK, and Ceaușescu was given an honorary knighthood by the Queen, which was revoked on the day before his death in 1989. Similarly, in 1983,
US vice president George H. W. Bush and in 1985
US Secretary of State George Shultz also praised the Romanian dictator.
Pacepa defection In 1978,
Ion Mihai Pacepa, a senior member of the Romanian political police (
Securitate, State Security),
defected to the US. A two-star general, he was the highest-ranking defector from the
Eastern Bloc during the
Cold War. His defection was a powerful blow against the administration, forcing Ceaușescu to overhaul Romania's state security architecture. Pacepa's 1986 book,
Red Horizons: Chronicles of a Communist Spy Chief (), claimed to expose details of Ceaușescu's government activities, such as massive spying on American industry and elaborate efforts to rally Western political support.
Systematisation: demolition and reconstruction , Bucharest
Systematisation () was the programme of
urban planning carried out under Ceaușescu's regime. After a visit to
North Korea in 1971, Ceaușescu was impressed by the
Juche ideology of that country, and began a major campaign shortly afterwards. Beginning in 1974, the programme consisted largely of the demolition and reconstruction of existing hamlets, villages, towns and cities, in whole or in part, with the stated goal of turning Romania into a "multilaterally developed
socialist society". The policy largely consisted in the mass construction of high-density blocks of flats (). During the 1980s, Ceaușescu became obsessed with building himself
a palace of unprecedented proportions, along with an equally grandiose neighborhood,
Centrul Civic, to accompany it. The mass demolitions that occurred in the 1980s under which an overall area of eight square kilometres of the historic centre of Bucharest were leveled, including monasteries, churches, synagogues, a hospital and a noted
Art Deco sports stadium, in order to make way for the imposing
Centrul Civic and the House of the Republic, now officially renamed the
Palace of Parliament, were the most extreme manifestation of this policy. In 1988, a
massive rural resettlement effort began.
Foreign debt Ceaușescu's political independence from the Soviet Union and his protest against the
invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 drew the interest of Western powers, whose governments briefly believed that he was an anti-Soviet maverick and hoped to create a schism in the Warsaw Pact by funding him. Ceaușescu did not realise that the funding was not always favourable, borrowing heavily (more than $13 billion) from the West to finance economic development, with these loans ultimately devastating the country's finances. He also secured a deal for cheap oil from
Iran, but the deal fell through after the
Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was overthrown in 1979 during the
Iranian Revolution. In an attempt to correct this, Ceaușescu decided to repay Romania's
foreign debts. He organised the
1986 military referendum and managed to change the constitution, adding a clause that barred Romania from taking foreign loans in the future. According to official results, the referendum yielded a nearly unanimous "yes" vote. Romania's record—having all of its debts to commercial banks paid off in full—has not been matched by any other heavily indebted country in the world. The policy to repay—and, in multiple cases, prepay—Romania's external debt became the dominant policy in the late 1980s. The result was economic stagnation throughout the 1980s and, towards the end of the decade, an economic crisis. The country's industrial capacity was eroded as equipment grew obsolete and energy intensity increased, and the standard of living deteriorated significantly. Draconian restrictions were imposed on household energy use to ensure adequate supplies for industry. Convertible currency exports were promoted at all costs and imports severely reduced. In 1988, real GDP contracted by 0.5%, mostly due to a decline in industrial output caused by significantly increased material costs. Despite the 1988 decline, the net foreign balance reached its decade-long peak (9.5% of GDP). In 1989, GDP slumped by a further 5.8% due to growing shortages and the increasingly obsolete capital stock. By March 1989, virtually all external debt had been repaid, including all medium- and long-term external debt. The remaining amount, totalling less than 1 million, consisted of short-term credits (mainly short-term export credits granted by Romania). A 1989 decree legally prohibited Romanian entities from contracting external debt. The
CIA World Factbook edition of 1990 listed Romania's external debt as "none" as of mid-1989.
Yearly evolution (in billions of dollars) • 1995 was the last year in which Romania's economy was dominated by the state. From 1996 onwards, the private sector would account for most of Romania's GDP. • Data for 1975, 1980 and 1982–1988 taken from the
Statistical Abstract of the United States. • Data for 1989–1995 provided by the
OECD. • Data for 1981 and 1985 provided by the
World Book Year Book. • By April 1989, with its debt virtually zero, Romania was a net external creditor. Foreign borrowing was resumed after
December 1989. In order to maintain net creditor status, Romania had to keep its external debt under $2.5 billion, the low estimate of the amount it was owed by oil producers and other
LDCs. This was first achieved in 1988 and continued through the early 1990s.
1984 failed coup d'état attempt A tentative
coup d'état planned in October 1984 failed when the military unit assigned to carry out the plan was sent to harvest maize instead.
1987 Brașov rebellion in 1985 Romanian workers began to mobilise against the economic policies of Ceaușescu. Spontaneous labour conflicts, limited in scale, took place in major industrial strongholds such as
Cluj-Napoca (November 1986) and the Nicolina platform in
Iași (February 1987), culminating in a massive strike in
Brașov. The draconian measures taken by Ceaușescu involved reducing energy and food consumption, as well as lowering workers' incomes, leading to what political scientist
Vladimir Tismăneanu called "generalised dissatisfaction". Over 20,000 workers and a number of townspeople marched against
economic policies in
Socialist Romania and Nicolae Ceaușescu's policies of
rationing of
basic foodstuffs, rationing
electricity and central heating. The first protests began practically on 14 November 1987, at the 440 "Molds" Section of the Red Flag truck company. Initially, the protests were for basic needs: "We want food and heating!", "We want our money!", "We want food for the children!", "We want light and heat!" and "We want bread without a card!" Next to the County Hospital, they sang the anthem of the revolution of 1848, . Upon arriving in the city centre, thousands of workers from the Tractorul Brașov and Hidromecanica factories, pupils, students, and others joined the demonstration. From this moment on, the protest became political. Participants later claimed to have chanted slogans such as "Down with Ceaușescu!", "Down with communism!", "Down with the dictatorship!" or "Down with the tyrant!". During the march, members of the Securitate disguised as workers infiltrated the demonstrators, or remained on the sidelines as spectators, photographing or even filming. By dusk,
Securitate forces and the
military surrounded the city centre and disbanded the revolt by force. Some 300 protesters were arrested, and, in order to hide the political nature of the Brașov uprising, tried for disturbing the peace and "outrage against morals". Those under investigation were beaten and tortured, 61 receiving sentences ranging from 6 months to 3 years in prison, including sentences to be carried out working at various state enterprises across in the country. Although many previous party meetings had called for the death penalty to set an example, the regime was eager to downplay the uprising as "isolated cases of
hooliganism". Protesters were sentenced to deportation, with compulsory residence arranged in other cities, despite such measures having been repealed as far back as the late 1950s. The entire trial lasted only an hour and a half. However, during the late 1970s and early 1980s the regime conducted a
sedentarisation campaign for nomadic and semi-nomadic Romani, providing them with dwellings and guaranteeing them jobs. Although this led to some displacement of Romanis from counties with a large nomadic population, historians consider it a social measure rather that an ethnically-motivated policy. The
systematisation policy provided urban Romanies with better living conditions, as many were moved from insalubrious neighbourhoods at the edges of towns into newly built blocks of flats, however it had negative effects on the cohesion of Romani communities. Dedicated policies for the Romani community began to be implemented in 1977. A government report from 1983 lists some of these policies: the authorities made land available to them and assisted them in the procurement of building materials for houses; many were given jobs; those lacking official identification were registered at the civil status office; measures were taken to legalise marriages, to send children to school, to enlist men for military services and to supervise their hygiene. The report however notes that a significant part of the Romani population resisted these policies, thus the social integration of the community within the Romanian society was still lagging behind. ==Revolution==