Nicolae Ceauşescu
Nicolae Ceaușescu ruled Romania for twenty-four years and was shot with his wife on Christmas Day 1989. Born in 1918 in a village in Oltenia, the third of ten children of a peasant family, he was apprenticed as a shoemaker at eleven, joined the illegal communist youth movement, and spent much of the 1930s and 1940s in prison, where he met Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej. He succeeded Gheorghiu-Dej as party leader in 1965. His early years were genuinely popular and produced real international standing. He reduced the secret police's public role, permitted more cultural latitude, kept relations with Israel after 1967 when the bloc broke them, and publicly condemned the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 — which made him a favourite of Western governments seeking to divide the Soviet bloc, and which brought state visits and loans. A trip to China and North Korea in 1971 changed him. The July Theses that followed imposed ideological control on culture, and a personality cult grew that eventually exceeded anything in Europe. He banned contraception and abortion in 1966 to raise the birth rate, with compulsory gynaecological examinations; the policy filled state orphanages with abandoned children. From 1982 he repaid the entire foreign debt of some ten billion dollars by exporting food and fuel, and the population endured rationing, unheated flats and hours of electricity a day. He demolished a fifth of central Bucharest for a palace. The rising began at Timișoara in December 1989. He was booed at a rally, fled by helicopter, and was tried in two hours.
- Lived: 1918 CE – 1989 CE
- Nationality: Romanian
- Roles: dictator, head_of_state, communist_leader
