10 – Nicolae Ceausescu
Like many of those on our list, it’s doubtful that Nicolae Ceausescu set out to become an authoritarian dictator. By the time of his death in 1989, however, his name had become synonymous with oppression. Ceausescu’s Romania was the byword for everything that was wrong with Eastern Bloc communist regimes: the secret police controlled everything, abuse of human rights was routine and the economy tanked to a point at which people were starving and almost every commodity was rationed. As this all took place, Ceausescu built a cult of personality around himself. As tin-pot dictators go, he was up there with the very worst examples of the genre.
Nicolae Ceausescu was born into poverty in rural Romania in 1918. His father was a peasant and devoutly religious, as well as violent towards his 9 children, which caused Nicolae to escape to the capital, Bucharest, when he was 11. He became an apprentice shoemaker, but his true calling was in the streets, where he was a vehement communist and an activist for the Communist Party – which was at the time outlawed – from the age of just 14. This brought him into regular contact with the authorities, who recognized his prodigious ability to recruit and spread propaganda.
His political activities saw him in and out of prison during the 1930s and, when Romania became a client state of the Nazis during the Second World War, interned in a camp for political dissents. Locked up with basically every other communist of note in Romania, Ceausescu became known as an enforcer for the then leader, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej. When Romania was liberated, Gheorghiu-Dej seized power and aligned the country with the Soviet Union, and Nicolae was named as the head of the Communist youth movement.
He rose further in the ranks, joining the Politburo in 1952 and then eventually taking over from Gheorghiu-Dej when he died in 1965. He immediately tightened the control of the communist party over Romania: he eschewed the Soviet Union, preferring to try to turn Romania into a global player, and cultivated the idea of himself as the great leader, the hope of all Romanians. Among his policy ventures was the total banning of abortions – he thought that the path to world status was a much larger population, but instead, the outcome was one of the largest orphan communities in the world, as people simply could not afford the children that they were forced to have.
Economically, Ceausescu put all of Romania’s eggs in one basket, hoping to capitalize on high oil prices, only for low productivity and a catastrophic earthquake to nearly bankrupt the country. The reaction to this was to try and generate funds via exports, meaning that all the goods that were produced made their way abroad, leading to energy blackouts and food shortages. Despite these failures, Ceausescu’s huge security apparatus meant that he was rarely challenged. The Securitate, his equivalent to the Stasi or KGB, was both numerically huge and methodically brutal, spying on almost everyone and showing little restraint when doling out beatings.
It was not until 1989, when the Iron Curtain had begun to fall all over Europe, that Ceausescu too would get his comeuppance. The footage is striking to watch. The leader, so immune to criticism and insulated from public opinion, took to a balcony of the palace in Bucharest to denounce demonstrations that had taken place in the Western city of Timisoara. While he was speaking, lone protestors began to heckle him and eventually, he was forced to abandon the speech. The population of the capital were in full rebellion against the leadership and the leader himself tried to flee via helicopter but was tracked down and handed over to the army, which by this point had switched to the side of the people.
A kangaroo court was hastily convened and, in front of national television cameras, Nicolae Ceausescu was charged with genocide of the Romanian people, embezzling from the state, and other crimes against the nation. He, like King Charles and Louis before him, refused the authority of the court to try him, but was convicted anyway and summarily executed by a firing squad.
His rule had terrified the people, bankrupted the country and left Romania as one of the most deprived places in Europe. Ceausescu, as much as almost anyone on this list, got what was coming to him and, moreover, got it in front of all of the people he had once terrorized. It would not be until over a decade later, when our next candidate was deposed, that such a public disassembly of a regime would take place. That would be in Iraq, and the man shivering before the television cameras would be the former dictator, Saddam Hussein.
