Nicolae Ceau?escu
(born January 26, 1918, Scornice?ti, Romania?died December 25, 1989, Targovi?te) was a
Communist
official who was the leader of
Romania
from 1965 until he was overthrown and killed in a revolution in 1989.
A member of the Romanian Communist
youth
movement during the early 1930s, Ceau?escu was imprisoned in 1936 and again in 1940 for his Communist Party activities. In 1939 he married
Elena Petrescu, a Communist activist. While in prison, Ceau?escu became a protege of his cell mate, the Communist leader
Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej
, who would become the undisputed Communist leader of Romania beginning in 1952. Escaping prison in August 1944 shortly before the Soviet occupation of Romania, Ceau?escu subsequently served as secretary of the Union of Communist Youth (1944?45). After the Communists’ full accession to power in Romania in 1947, he first headed the ministry of agriculture (1948?50), and from 1950 to 1954 he served as deputy minister of the armed forces with the rank of major general. Under Gheorghiu-Dej, Ceau?escu eventually came to occupy the second highest position in the party
hierarchy
, holding important posts in the Politburo and Secretariat.
With the death of Gheorghiu-Dej in March 1965, Ceau?escu succeeded to the leadership of Romania’s Communist Party as first secretary (general secretary from July 1965); and with his assumption of the presidency of the State Council (December 1967), he became head of state as well. He soon won popular support for his independent, nationalistic political course, which openly challenged the dominance of the
Soviet Union
over Romania. In the 1960s Ceau?escu virtually ended Romania’s active participation in the
Warsaw Pact
military alliance, and he condemned the invasion of
Czechoslovakia
by Warsaw Pact forces (1968) and the
invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union
(1979). Ceau?escu was elected to the newly created post of
president
of Romania in 1974.
While following an independent policy in
foreign relations
, Ceau?escu
adhered
ever more closely to the communist orthodoxy of centralized administration at home. His
secret police
maintained rigid controls over free speech and the media and tolerated no internal dissent or opposition. Hoping to boost Romania’s population, in 1966 Ceau?escu issued Decree 770, a measure that effectively outlawed
contraception
and
abortion
. Doctors monitored women of childbearing age to ensure that they were not taking steps to curtail their fertility, but
maternal mortality
rates skyrocketed as women sought unsafe and outlawed means to terminate their pregnancies. In an effort to pay off the large foreign debt that his government had accumulated through its mismanaged industrial ventures in the 1970s, Ceau?escu in 1982 ordered the export of much of the
country’s
agricultural and industrial production. The resulting extreme shortages of food, fuel, energy, medicines, and other basic necessities drastically lowered
living standards
and intensified unrest. Ceau?escu also instituted an
extensive
personality cult
and appointed his wife, Elena, and many members of his
extended family
to high posts in the government and party. Among his grandiose and impractical schemes was a plan to bulldoze thousands of Romania’s villages and move their residents into so-called agrotechnical centres.
Ceau?escu’s regime collapsed after he ordered his security forces to fire on antigovernment demonstrators in the city of
Timi?oara
on December 17, 1989. The demonstrations spread to
Bucharest
, and on December 22 the Romanian army defected to the demonstrators. That same day Ceau?escu and his wife fled the capital in a
helicopter
but were captured and taken into custody by the armed forces. On December 25 the couple were hurriedly tried and convicted by a special military tribunal at
Targovi?te
on charges of
mass murder
and other crimes. Ceau?escu and his wife were immediately afterward shot by a firing
squad
. They were later buried in Bucharest.