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Romania The Ceausescu Succession
In March 1965 Gheorghiu-Dej died. A triumvirate
succeeded him:
Ceausescu, the party's first secretary; Chivu Stoica, the
state
council president; and Ion Gheorghe Maurer, premier.
Ceausescu
wasted little time consolidating power and eliminating
rivals.
Alexandru Draghici, his main rival, lost his interior
ministry post
in 1965 and PMR membership in 1968. After Draghici's
removal,
Ceausescu began accumulating various party and government
positions, including state council president and supreme
military
commander, so that by the Tenth Party Congress in 1969,
Ceausescu
controlled the Central Committee and had surrounded
himself with
loyal subordinates.
Ceausescu, like Gheorghiu-Dej, preached national
communism, and
he redoubled the Romanianization effort. In 1965 the PMR
was
renamed the Romanian Communist Party (Partidul Comunist
Român--PCR)
in conjunction with the leadership's elevation of Romania
from the
status of a people's democracy to a socialist republic, a
distinction ostensibly marking a leap forward along the
path toward
true communism. The leadership also added a strong
statement of
national sovereignty to the preamble of the new
Constitution. By
1966 Ceausescu had ceased extolling the Soviet Union's
"liberation"
of Romania and recharacterized the Red Army's wartime
action there
as "weakening fascism" and "animating" the Romanians to
liberate
the country from fascist dominance. Romanians heeded the
nationalist appeal, but Ceausescu so exaggerated the
effort that a
cult of personality developed. Propagandists, striving to
cast
Ceausescu as the embodiment of all ancestral courage and
wisdom,
even staged meetings between Ceausescu and actors
portraying
Michael the Brave, Stephen the Great, and other national
heroes.
Romania's divergence from Soviet policies widened under
Ceausescu. In 1967 Romania recognized the Federal Republic
of
Germany (West Germany) and maintained diplomatic relations
with
Israel after the June 1967 War. In August 1968, Ceausescu
visited
Prague to lend support to Alexander Dubcek's government.
Romania
denounced the Soviet Union for ordering the Warsaw Pact
invasion of
Czechoslovakia, and Ceausescu met Tito twice after the
invasion to
discuss a common defense against a possible
Bulgarian-Soviet
military action and reassert their insistence on full
autonomy,
equal national rights, and noninterference. Popular
acceptance of
Ceausescu's regime peaked during his defiance of the
Soviet Union
following the invasion of Czechoslovakia; most Romanians
believed
his actions had averted Soviet re-occupation of their
country.
In the 1960s and early 1970s, thanks mostly to ample
domestic
energy and raw-material production, easily tapped labor
reserves,
forced savings, Western trade concessions, and large
foreign
credits, Romania enjoyed perhaps its most prosperous
economic years
since World War II. Although industrial production had
tripled in
the decade up to 1965, the inefficiencies of central
planning and
inadequate worker incentives signalled future problems. In
1969 the
regime launched an ephemeral economic reform that promised
to
increase efficiency and boost incentives by decentralizing
economic
control, allowing private enterprise greater freedom, and
increasing supplies of consumer goods. Ceausescu soon
halted
decentralization, however, and renewed the effort to
develop heavy
industry.
During his early years in power, Ceausescu sought to
present
himself as a reformer and populist champion of the common
man.
Purge victims began returning home; contacts with the West
multiplied; and artists, writers, and scholars found new
freedoms.
In 1968 Ceausescu openly denounced Gheorghiu-Dej for
deviating from
party ideals during Stalin's lifetime. After consolidating
power,
however, Ceausescu regressed. The government again
disciplined
journalists and demanded the allegiance of writers and
artists to
socialist realism. As a result of his China visit in 1971,
Ceausescu launched his own version of the Cultural
Revolution,
spawning volumes of sycophantic, pseudohistorical
literature and
suppressing dissidents.
In the early 1970s, Ceausescu painstakingly
concentrated power
at the apex of the political pyramid. The arrest, and
probable
execution, of the Bucharest garrison's commanding officer
in 1971,
possibly for planning to oust Ceausescu, prompted an
overhaul of
the military and security forces. After his China trip,
Ceausescu
removed Premier Maurer and thousands of managers and
officials who
advocated or implemented the earlier economic reform, and
he
replaced them with his protégés. In 1972 the government
adopted the
principle of cadre rotation, making the creation of power
bases
opposed to Ceausescu impossible. In accordance with the
PCR's claim
that it had ceased being an organization of a few
committed
operatives and become a mass party "organically implanted
in all
cells of life," Ceausescu began blending party and state
structures
and named individuals to hold dual party and state posts.
In 1973
Ceausescu's wife, Elena, became a member of the Politburo,
and in
1974 voters "elected" Ceausescu president of the republic.
Data as of July 1989
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