ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to highlight the sinuous dynamics of the Romanian communist elite and to explore its bewildering ideologic metamorphoses. The plight of the Romanians under Ceausescu’s dictatorship is acknowledged and deplored both in the East and the West. There is nowadays a growing tendency to dismiss the Romanian experiment in autocracy as historical anomaly, irrelevant for the general development of Soviet-type regimes. The “Romanian ideology,” the doctrinary amalgam bound to project Ceausescu’s image as a symbol of valor and dignity, will not outlive its main driving force. It took the pathologic outgrowths of Stalinism, the vaudeville of clientelism and nepotism, the cynical cronyism of the past twenty years to turn the above-mentioned pun into an unbearable national tragicomedy. Ceausescu’s personalist leadership has carried to an extreme the feudal-aristocratic features of Stalinism: all power is concentrated in the hands of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu, who seem to have established absolute control over all the party and state agencies.
