He was the most adored of all the European communist leaders. He wanted to stand up to the Soviet Union. He called himself the giant of the Carpathians. He instituted in his country the darkest of terrors. He made a clean sweep of the past, of his capital, of his very people. He thought the story began with him. His madness cost him his life without his having understood anything of the revolt of his people. On Romanian central television, there is panic. No one knows what to do. Will Ceausescu be able to recover? This meeting was fatal to him. The discontent that had accumulated for years turned into a hurricane that swept away everything, including Ceausescu. It's a human flow that pours into the streets. Everything now seems possible to the inhabitants of Bucharest. The massacres of the night cannot stop them. In the early morning, a crowd from the factories on the outskirts marched on the central committee. But on the square, the army is already rallying to the revolution. And when a helicopter appears, the demonstrators launch an assault on the building of power. It is with extreme accuracy that the Ceausescu manage to flee. Account of one of their last followers. The helicopter commander started ringing at Bucharest airport. I will, I will land. It's forbidden. Reported another helicopter I will land with the President. They left him in a helicopter, Two old people with no strength, with no power. This act was the act that signed Ceausescu's sentence. From the end of the 1960s, the sycophancy of Romanian journalists and writers knew no bounds. But Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu are also welcomed abroad with the most flattering honors. They are intoxicated with the splendor of old monarchies. The attentions displayed by Western leaders lead them to believe that everything is permitted. This almost illiterate couple collects university distinctions in the countries they visit. Nikolai and Elena are among the greatest. In 1951, I made an extraordinary discovery. First, he could not write correctly in the Romanian language. He was very weak in Marxist theory and did not read Marx's capital. He has not read Engels. he has not read Lenin. But the problems of Leninism written by Stalin he knows by heart. He could recite entire pages from Stalin. He had difficulty speaking, he stammered. And it gave him an inferiority complex. Which he eventually managed to beat and he became an extraordinary mass speaker. That tells you something about his will to do. Nicolae Ceausescu was born in 1918 into a family of modest peasants. He was an activist in the clandestine PC, which earned him several prison sentences. He becomes in detention during the war. The most loyal watchdog of Gheorghiu-Dej, future leader of communist Romania. After the entry of Soviet troops in Bucharest, he marries Elena Dej is all-powerful. He entrusts the young Ceausescu with the task of purifying the army with the rank of general. Nicolai fulfills his task with fierce zeal. It was a regime of physical and moral destruction. Until 1964, the Securitate murdered around 300,000 people. People were terrorized by the Securitate. Physical labor was a slow death sentence. By weakening to exhaustion. I worked , I dug the channel from the Danube to the Black Sea. For days, months and years, with my pickaxe in winter, in the frozen ground. It was a job beyond all human strength, and yet, I did. This was the fate of those who had to pay for their beliefs. We were undesirable for this regime for them, we were not to exist. All these measures were taken at the central committee where Ceausescu was the political director. He was the mastermind that commanded all the ministries. Each ministry was the facade of the regime, but the important decisions were taken at the Central Committee where Ceausescu, who had been made general, was the right hand Gheorghiu-Dej. At the time there was no area where he did not command and decide. He was a fanatic, not in the simplistic sense of the word, it wasn't in the sense of mere human weakness. He had extraordinary ambition. Gheorghiu-Dej died of cancer. In 1958 he secured the departure of Soviet troops from Romania. Before dying he accuses, in front of his relatives, the Russians of having caused his death by subjecting him to irradiation. By acceding to the post of secretary general, the young Nicolaï Ceausescu made many enemies. Dej's accusations against Moscow ring in his ears. He increases the number of Securitate agents tasked with spying on officials. Did you vote for Nicolae Ceausescu in 1965? Of course, believing that it will change, but I was wrong. You see I knew him. He remained in his very rigid interior a fanatic. He was an extremely interesting personality from this point of view, when political reasons dictated, flexibility, he calculated his movements very well. He was a great political calculator. From Gheorghiu-Dej. He retained that nationalism was a key asset in Romania. He frees intellectuals who, suddenly, incense him. The adulation of which he is the object appears to him simply as a justified recognition of his merits. Me personally expelled from the university in 59 for anti-Soviet attitude, I was rehabilitated. In September 65, I had every reason to believe that this guy is a good person and he was a guy who will lead the socialist formula of the country in a national direction. However, one thought obsesses him. He would like to know everything about what is going on in the mind of every Romanian and especially of his collaborators. The homes of the latter are bugged and Elena delights in hearing the recordings made in the bedrooms. Under Ceausescu there were far fewer assassinations, but the Securitate maintained its legend, its mystery. It felt like she was everywhere. The Romanian Securitate did not have thousands of officers, as in Germany. No, no, but it was more efficient and cultivated the myth of its omnipotence and ubiquity. That was the Ceausescu method. That we always feel followed, that we pay attention to who we talk to and what we talk about, because everything was monitored, everything was recorded. Already, Nicolae Ceausescu accumulates titles. He has just been elected President of the Republic. He brandishes the scepter of the ancient sovereigns. He is the first secretary of the party, but he will also be commander-in-chief of the armies, president of the Higher Council for Economic and Social Development, president of the Workers' Council , president of the Front for Democracy and Socialist Unity. All this deserves some congratulations. In internal politics he was a tyrant dictator, but in foreign politics. He had genius. As soon as the Sino-Soviet split, Nicolae Ceausescu let it be known that he would not align himself with Moscow's positions. On the contrary, he concludes a trade agreement with Beijing. Better, he is the first among the communist leaders to establish diplomatic relations with West Germany. And even stronger, on August 16, 68, he signed a friendship treaty with Alexandre Dubcek, the main actor in the Prague Spring. When, on August 21, Warsaw Pact tanks invaded Czechoslovakia, its response was immediate. We can say that at that time, 68, it was the maximum fist of his popularity, all the people had supported him and he had a large number of intellectuals who entered the party to demonstrate this political support to the party and personally at Ceausescu. And it was a generally positive period for the country. From then on, Nicolae Ceausescu is no longer just a national hero, he has become one of the stars of the world stage. He travels everywhere. The great flock to Bucharest, where Richard Nixon made a historic visit in 1969. In the early afternoon, part of the crowd ransacked the central committee building, while the other shouted Do not destroy the evidence. At this moment, the power is to be taken. It will go to those who are best prepared for it. Inside the central committee, there are young people and workers who have just stormed this symbol of power. Formerly discarded communists, who are the only ones with the necessary experience. Regime loyalists who were unable to flee. The crowd and the stupefied soldiers discover a network of underground passages which should have facilitated the flight of the Ceausescu couple. These tunnels imagined by a mind obsessed with conspiracies run under the whole city and up to the presidential palace. They will have been useless on board the helicopter Ceausescu hears the revolutionaries shouting their joy on the radio. the Air Force has gone over to the camp of its enemies. The end was lamentable leaving with a helicopter 30 kilometers from Bucharest. What for ? He can take any plane to go. I don't know where in Libya or elsewhere. But with the chopper, he didn't stand a chance. The presidential couple is abandoned by the pilot of the helicopter at the edge of a road. Their bodyguards are reduced to seizing a car. It was the moment when the couple who dominated Romania, the couple who thought they were immortal, became aware of their loneliness. 1971 will be the year of the decisive turning point for Ceausescu. The last psychological dams that still bind him to common sense are falling. He is enthusiastic about the gigantic spectacles offered to him by Mao Tse-Tung and the North Korean Kim Il-Sung. Romania must take this path. He was
fascinated by the model of Kim Il-Sung, He saw in this Korean model a total control on the part of the dictator. I expressed my surprise at his enthusiasm. regarding the Korean model and I was telling him how you can think that is the applicable model for a European country. When I got back, he accused me of intellectualism. I asked him what that means, what to understand about that? He promised to explain it to me in a more concrete way. But this dialogue, I did not have one. So he even argued in the executive committee that I have to accumulate experience. That was the Chinese way for rehabilitation. When he returned to Romania, he gave a great speech in which he announced this new policy of cultural revolution and at the same time of a more repressive and policed regime. It was time for a radical change in his strategy. Ceausescu, we want to do as well and better than the Chinese and North Koreans. It is not enough for him to stage his armed forces or huge crowds. It is still necessary that these events exalt the history of Romania, of which he wants to be the ultimate incarnation. At all times, schoolchildren, high school students, peasants, workers rehearse, with empty stomachs after their working hours, a choreography which must be perfect no misstep can be admitted by the one who is now called the Conductor, the Supreme Guide, and who says of himself individuals like me we meet only once every 500 years. And if I tell you that you are a man, a very young man, you are 20 years old and all the people tell you you are very young, you are 20 years old 10 years old we always say Yes, I am very young. If everyone says you are the most illustrious character in Romania, you are the first hunter, you are the oldest politician, you are the first doctor in Romania. You are Romania's leading economist. If everyone tells him he's the best. Me, I know that not only him, it's the others who care about this thing. His relatives contributed, helped him to accentuate his pathology. He was sort of a counter therapist. Of course, there were no real therapists around him. No one dared to talk about Ceausescu's illnesses. In my opinion, these people contributed to the evolution of his paranoia. Paranoid, such is the diagnosis. The paranoid is a patient who builds a megalomaniac universe intended to mask his fragility. At first, psychiatrists tell us, the paranoid is fairly well tolerated by society. Then it's something else entirely. We started talking only about him. We began to omit even the leaders of the Communist Party, that is to say the history of Romanian communism itself. We started to eclipse everything that happened before. Princes, Voivodes they were not mentioned at all and it began to be considered the marvelous result of a history that began with the Dacians and the Romans. Elena accompanies her husband everywhere, the fellow academician doctor engineer, as it should be called, enters the Politburo. In 1973 and became Deputy Prime Minister in 1980. And step by step at each congress, he forced the installation of a two-headed personal dictatorship, because even at that time, he was also someone two-headed and that the influence of his wife was very badly dry, without any grace. She does not tolerate a prettier woman appearing next to her. In a photo, she does not even hide a little contempt for her husband on occasion and reigns terror in the entourage of the party and the government. It was a permanent obsession of the Ceausescu couple that the nomenklatura and their relatives could foment a coup. The microphone there was everywhere, in all the offices where I worked in the house too. The security system was very strong. That's why he succeeded. Many gave in to this tremendous, terrible pressure exerted by the officers of the Securitate. There are very few who resisted, who refused At every movement, to make a little criticism. He dismisses anybody, he sent his ambassadors somewhere in South America or Africa. Take a good look at this document. This beating is, it seems, a Germanic custom. In Romania, we beat and we are beaten. This is one of the rare times we will see Ceausescu laugh. Did Elena Ceausescu have the same character traits as him? Elena Ceausescu also suffered from this personality disorder. She was completely paranoid. Ceausescu's paranoia was more positive. He even joked. He was always in action, while Elena had a dark, depressed temper. She was very suspicious of things that she gradually passed on to her husband. In the 1950s, Elena tries to enter the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as a secretary, but she is quickly fired for incompetence. She takes it into her head to become a chemist, takes evening classes, only passes her exams on political intervention on the third attempt. Quickly, she was then appointed director of the Institute of Chemistry in Bucharest. From then on, she published books after books. No, she didn't write or direct. She couldn't write a book or an article. They say you helped graduate Elena. I didn't know anything. I was not at all involved in all these affairs. Everything was done by central committee propaganda. During trips abroad, the obsession of Romanian diplomats is to find a university to award a degree to Elena. Always hungry for honors. Even US President Carter is involved, but Elena still wants more power. She becomes Minister of Science and Culture. His first act was to cut the National Theater subsidy in half. The director of this institution manages to meet Nikolai. He persuaded him to restore funding in the name of the ideological role played by the theater. Elena's revenge will be spectacular. Elena Ceausescu was informed of this reversal dictated by Ceausescu, and she decided that each evening the list of visits to Ceausescu at the estate would be approved by her. This gives you an idea of the growth of his authority over Ceausescu. I had some personal discussions with Ceausescu and I tell him comrade we have the example of Mao Zedong and his wife. What happened in China? His wife, when she wanted to get something, threatened to tell the Soviets about his real position towards the Soviet Union. You see I'm telling you something that I've never spoken about. Ceausescu was the official face, he commanded everything, but Elena had formed her own networks of influence. Together, they achieved their goal, acting in parallel, each holding his own instruments of power. Nothing could be too big for Romania and its leader. Ceausescu only dreams of giant economic complexes. It builds industry around two poles, petrochemicals and steel. But Romania's oil reserves are running out and steel, in overproduction, is being sold off to the Third World. A Romanian factory requires four times more energy than its Western equivalent for the same production. A single combine consumes as much as Bucharest. It is true that the inhabitants of the capital are only entitled to one 40-watt light bulb per room, that the use of refrigerators is prohibited and that the maximum temperature tolerated in winter in an apartment is fourteen degrees. Everything he wanted, he managed to achieve. It was his Stalinism that inspired this counter-economic, counter-productive decision , without any regard for the market. And this is one of the causes of our difficulties now. Romania has rich agricultural land, but collectivization, there as elsewhere, has reduced yields. For the first time in 1981, bread was rationed. The presidential couple decrees that Romanians eat too much. Ceausescu establishes an ideal menu He preferred to export everything we could, leaving the Romanian people all starving. To repay the external debt, we supply more The stores. In Brasov Every inhabitant is entitled to seven grams of flour, 29 grams of sugar, 23 grams of pork per day when found in shops. Romanians are hungry. Last delirious discovery the construction of six giant collective canteens capable of each serving 80,000 meals a day. They will never come into operation. These unfed recruits serve as free labor. High school and university students must devote a large part of their holidays to work of collective interest. They often fall from exhaustion. He never understood what was happening to others. Besides, he never visited a hospital. In 25 years in power, he has never visited any dispensary. He made an attempt during the earthquake of 1977. But he quickly left the places he was visiting. It is his obsessive fear of being contaminated by a disease that may explain this behavior. But in fact, he remained insensitive to any form of human suffering. He couldn't believe that people could have feelings of their own. In the afternoon, while the fighting continued in Bucharest, Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu arrived in Târgoviste. They rely on the loyalty of the sécuritate and the militia. But there too, the city caught fire and they were handed over to the army, which concealed them for three days in a barracks. It was a moment when we realized that he was abandoned, he, I have the impression that he did not believe yet. He was so drunk with his power. He was convinced that he has the people close to him. He was condemned anyway by history. This was the moment that saved, let's say, the revolution. In 1977, the terrible earthquake in Bucharest, is for Ceausescu a magnificent opportunity. He will raze what remains of the center and recreate a new city. Its capital. There have been quite a few other cities that have been, that have been abused. But Bucharest, Bucharest, is the only city in the world which was attacked during a time of peace. The Bucharest of the monasteries and religious fervor of the 15th century, that of opulent houses and bourgeois prosperity between the two wars, is not its own. He must disappear. There have been terrible tragedies. People who had to leave their homes in a few hours, men who committed suicide, even. These are tragedies the West has never experienced. It must be said, there were very few architects who had the courage to say no and protest. In an attempt to build the largest conference center in the world, he had a 2,000-hectare district razed to the outskirts of the capital and, of course, the most beautiful monastery in the Balkans demolished. The world begins to be moved by this destructive madness, Unesco intellectuals are alarmed. It's too late. However, the Palais des Congrès will never be built. Its foundations have sunk into the marshes. It seems that he stopped the demolition work which was resumed a few days later on the order of Elena Ceausescu Here, I have proof that it was she who had an absolutely harmful role. And then things got worse. We wanted to destroy more than a dozen churches in this region. Monument. One day the desperate patriarch let me know that he had received a note from Nicolae Ceausescu saying that he was ordering the demolition of churches of extraordinary value. I managed to get in touch with Ceausescu's sister-in-law, Adela Petrescu. She stepped in forcefully saying that it was a shame for Romania to do things like that and that we would be judged by posterity. We were five or six Romanian intellectuals who protested and who got her to be moved more than 200 meters. The church was indeed moved, not destroyed, but Ceausescu, takes his revenge. He hid it from everyone's eyes, or almost. High-rise buildings hide it from distracted visitors. Ceausescu had received some religious education. His mother was very observant, one could even say bigoted. But on the other hand, it was not the case of Elena Ceausescu who, she, did everything to keep her husband away from the church. From their attitude towards religion, I believe they wanted to remove all memory. Nothing holds him back anymore. He razed villages around Bucharest, built buildings without heating, without toilets, sometimes without running water. A gesture and a neighborhood disappears. one gesture and another is born. Does he even know that men suffer and die like in the time of the pyramids? Probably not. He is all in his disordered dream and without renewed faith. We must abolish the differences between workers and peasants, build a new world like no one anywhere has been able to do. Ceausescu does not know the plans. He can't comment on a plan, so we tell him with our hands, we offer him and we have to make models, models. But even the models are not enough, We drew curves according to his gestures. These were stories that can happen, maybe in the Persian world, in the Turkish world. Previously, the chariot or the sultan who comes makes signs and is respected by others. At least in the last fifteen years of his reign, he believed he was shaping a world according to his plans, according to his will. But it was such a cold, unfair, primitive world , in which nothing existed, which excluded all forms of joy and pleasure. You don't see He has visited the palaces of other communist leaders, he is impressed with the palace of Kim Il-Sung of Korea. When he came from this visit, he told us that he wants to make a new palace that represents the supremacy of communism over western democracy. We are having an architectural competition with a very narrow theme, 10,000 square meters. Two architects made a typical project, ten times larger than the initial project. They won because Ceausescu can't say I want a big palace. They are the architects. and the other leaders who said for you who is the first character in Romania, you need a bigger palace. Then stands the largest palace in the world, like the Tower of Babel. Nicolae Ceausescu adds floors that mix styles. Stone quarries don't produce fast enough. Never mind. Walls are finished with cinder blocks, marbles are exhausted, entire forests are devastated. We work day and night. The marble staircases rival those of the Vatican. The reception rooms are as tall as three-storey buildings. The chandeliers are heavier than those of Versailles, and the Grand Balcon overlooks the Boulevard de la Victoire du socialisme wider and longer than the Champs Elysées. How long did it take to build this set? This set I believe is five years old. Almost all the center is done in five years. And how many people worked? For all this set it is 100,000 people. How much did it cost? There is no price. If we have to work, we will. We do not count, unlimited budget. But in recent years, the rumor has been spreading abroad. The Lord of these palaces is the vampire of the ending century. To satisfy his whims, he literally drinks the blood of his people. Only the sinister reputation of the Securitate prevents food riots from starting. His country is too small for him, he forces his subjects to have children who are often abandoned in orphanages which are places of death. He forbade contraception and the 25 provincial palaces built for him remained empty. For example, the presidential palace of Cotroceni, it is there twice, there remained 1h palace of Sinaia. No one may have spent two or three minutes there, only. he always stayed in Bucharest. In his house, where in Snagov, he had another, smaller house. It is a house which resembles his birthplace, a peasant's house. He was always a peasant. He lived like a peasant and died like a peasant. Only two cows were selected to provide milk to the presidential couple. Ceausescu eats little. He is obsessed with the fear of germs. He is essentially a vegetarian. Everything he eats is tasted first. Then a small piece is sent to the central laboratory for analysis. Abroad, he brings his food, but also his own bedding, in case a powder has been spread in his sheets. Basically, he has only one distraction: hunting. He is the best and biggest hunter in Romania. Who could doubt it? The bears are fed the fresh meat that is so sorely lacking in the human diet. Just like boars, they are knocked out with sleeping pills. Shortly before the arrival of the great man. The hunting pictures are brilliant but only deceive their author. It is always the same cameramen who accompany the presidential couple seven days a week. We play the comedy of harmony and family happiness. But Zoïa, their daughter, hates her father and her mother. Everything rings false in this life where every detail is controlled to the point of ridicule. Once Ceausescu attacked my fellow cameraman. Why did you cut me in the knee? You can't see my legs anymore. Comrade President, I made what is technically called an American plan. Oh no, no, no! Me, I only want Romanian plans. Because we are fed up with Americans. So one day I am at his palace in Snagov He questioned me at the garden with plum trees. And the plums fell. Why did the plums fall? But I'm insulted, what should I do? Yes, let's see, In the whole country there is no fruit because these are those. In recent years Ceausescu and more and more alone. He even refuses to be treated. The most serious of Ceausescu's illnesses was his diabetes. Any doctor will tell you that if this disease is not treated, it can lead to a sharp decline in mental faculties and this affects the capacity for judgment and decision-making. He also had an early onset of psychological old age. I realized Ceausescu didn't even know 1% of what was going on in the country. When he learned something, he was intrigued and couldn't believe it. In fact, he was completely isolated. There was this wall erected by his entourage who lied to him about everything and who basically wished a bad destiny for Romania. He himself generated this. I think that in the last years even the special organizations created to inform him made a certain selection of the information which is acceptable or not by him even. This is the tragedy of all dictators who want to know what suits them. This emaciated, weakened man. Can it still be scary? Yes, because he has not given up. On August 23, 89, the troops passed before him in review on the occasion of the national holiday. This is the 25ᵉ time since he came to power. But for him, this is the first opportunity to do so from the balcony of the museum, Ceausescu, who believes he will later be his mausoleum. It's late, comrade. This is what remains of your building today. At the 14th congress of the Romanian Communist Party, when the Berlin wall had already fallen, he challenged Gorbachev and the West one last time. The delegates applaud like automatons. They are already dead. History will do without them After this congress, Ceausescu's sister came to see me and said to me: Something is wrong in Romania. I think it's over. I will never forget her words and she concluded: Now I just have to pray for my brother because everything is over for him. After hearing this speech, I was very worried. It made me think and I think that deep inside him, he was afraid of being let down by those close to him, of not being so loved or believed by his people. The court arrived from Bucharest. The defense lawyer was in the same helicopter as the judges and the prosecutor. The audience is made up of some of the country's new masters. We must never forget that this trial, today we accuse and we rightly accuse, for the very summary way in which it happened, was welcomed by all Romanian public opinion. This is the fate of all great paranoids. They die without understanding what is happening to them, how they were wrong. There is a sort of fatality in persevering in one's errors, in one's faults until the last moment. Ceausescu died ten years ago, but he marked his country as no other leader did elsewhere at that time. The Securitate is the unfinished problem of the Romanian revolution? We never did an investigation for their monstrous, repressive, criminal activity. We never did a legal case on the Securitate. Never. Don't you think we can talk about it now? Now is not the time to talk about that. Do you think Ceausescu should be forgiven for what he did? History will judge. Personally, I cannot answer you now. The diagnosis is simple Ceausescu was a paranoid whose illness was aggravated by contact with his wife Elena. But a question still remains today, why did this couple succeed so easily in dragging all of Romania into their nightmare without almost anyone resisting them? Romanians are probably not done wondering about themselves.
