Copyright:© Louis Glanzman, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Time magazine 1966, www.si.edu.
The history of the Cold War is often seen as a conflict between two worlds. On the one hand the capitalist West, on the other the communist East. And yet, especially in Eastern Europe, there are some examples somewhere in the gray area in between. Josip Broz Tito's Yugoslavia and his role in the Non-Aligned Movement are probably the first to come to mind. The example of Yugoslavia proved that the West was willing to send large sums of investment to a formally communist country if, in return, it distanced itself somewhat from the Soviet Union. True, this distance existed only partially in Yugoslavia, and the break with Moscow was followed by a rapprochement in the late 1950s. However, at least one other ruler was inspired by it:Nicolae Ceaușescu in Romania. Today is about this man and his extraordinary rise.
Nicolae Ceaușescu:Master of Pragmatism
Since his rise to power in Romania in 1965, Nicolae Ceaușescu had a different plan in mind. On the one hand, as a new strong man, he committed himself to being a liberal reformer – at least to the outside world. On the other hand, he protected himself at every step in Moscow, so as not to cross any borders. When it comes to stone-cold pragmatism, you can't fool this man. Immediately after taking power, Ceaușescu's Romania took the first steps that should enable a rapprochement with Western Europe and the USA. These included the establishment of diplomatic relations with the Federal Republic of Germany (which was scandalous in the East), the maintenance of these same relations with Israel after the Six Day War, the neutral stance in the Soviet-Chinese dispute of the 1960s and Romanian neutrality during the suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968.
The West applauded and the associated financial injections, loans and investments were not long in coming, as planned and learned from Tito. Hardly anyone was interested in the fact that Ceauşescu had not warned his colleagues in Prague in any way about the invasion when he had just arrived there on a state visit. In the West, people were only too happy to believe in the liberal breakaway in the Eastern Bloc. On the basis of these first diplomatic successes, the economy in Romania soon went uphill or at least there was a noticeable improvement among the people in the country. In his early reign, Nicolae Ceauşescu even implemented some genuine reforms. The country was slowly opened up to tourism, freedom of travel for Romanian citizens was extended and even private business activities were now possible to a certain extent. With Leonid Brezhnev, the strongman in the still all-dominant Moscow, there seemed to be at least a tacit understanding of all this. He was prepared to accept the anti-Soviet outliers in Bucharest as long as the situation in Romania remained stable and turning away from communism was not an option. She never did. As I said before:Nicolae Ceaușescu was a pragmatist.
Citizens for Sale
In the future, this pragmatism was particularly evident in economic issues. One thing in particular stands out that should fill Ceaușescu's coffers well over the years. His Romanian state was, as he saw it, struggling with entire sections of the population who were hostile to the state. In addition to the old classic, the Jews, and Romania's hereditary enemies, the Hungarians, for Ceaușescu these were above all the Romanian Germans in Transylvania and the western Romanian Banat. The good Nicolae now found a brilliant and profitable solution for these population groups. He just ran her free! Only a few years after taking power, Ceaușescu reached a compromise on the matter with the West German government. In Germany, this action ran under the alias "Geheimsache Kanal", which sounds much better in Romanian than "Action to recover". For the Federal Republic of Germany, the Germans of Romania were not considered foreigners due to the Federal Expellees Act, so admission to Germany was not only possible but even explicitly desired. The question of how sensible it really was to buy the citizens of Romania at a high price did not arise.
Over the next few years, more than 200,000 German-speaking Romanians received an exit permit for Germany. Overall, the Federal Republic may have paid over a billion marks for these emigrants. Or have you never wondered why it feels like every place in Germany has a Transylvanian dance group? For Nicolae Ceauşescu, it all came at just the right time. Bucharest received much-needed foreign exchange and was able to get rid of some critics within the German community. At the same time, there was a similar agreement with the state of Israel, which Ceaușescu got rid of several thousand Jews. He is even said to have said that oil, Germans and Jews were Romania's three most valuable exports. Well then:Everything done right, comrade!
Ceauşescu happily maintained the game between East and West throughout the 1970s. He reveled in the role of mediator, and is said to have, on more than one occasion, considered himself ripe for the Nobel Peace Prize (a disturbing parallel to Donald Trump). He was also a welcome guest in the West in the early 1970s, and many high-ranking politicians from France, the United States, Germany and elsewhere traveled to Romania. The many benefits of this collaboration could have lasted longer, but at some point Ceaușescu decided to pursue his long-held internal policy of control more vigorously. It probably didn't go together anymore. The story of the reformer, which he loved to play in the West, absolutely didn't match the demeanor at home, which no longer even resembled a dictator but increasingly resembled a monarch who had come too late.
Romania's Cruel Horseman
Then, towards the end of the decade, as enthusiasm in the West also waned, he officially changed tack. In addition to the control of the population by the Securitate secret police, Ceauşescu now increasingly emphasized the importance of economic self-sufficiency for Romania. From an economic point of view, this may have been a total grab for the toilet, but it clearly shows that Ceaușescu achieved what every dictator wishes for at the time:his power was no longer dependent on an advantageous economic situation. He was free to do whatever he wanted, even leaving pragmatism behind when he did. In the last decade of his rule, Nicolae Ceauşescu became increasingly uninhibited, also when it came to his economic policies. He drove radical industrialization, which soon swallowed up to a third of the national budget and caused the first food shortages as early as the mid-1970s. The situation became increasingly difficult in the early 1980s as a result of the increasing lack of Western money, the global oil crisis and the increasing debt of Romania, to which Ceaușescu responded with gigantic public works projects.
The construction of an outrageously expensive (and economically dubious) Danube-Black Sea Canal fell at this time, as did the oversized nuclear power plant in Cernavodă and the start of construction of the Palace of Parliament in Bucharest. At the same time, in 1982, Doctor Ceaușescu also prescribed the repayment of all foreign debts to the state in order to do justice to its new course of self-sufficiency. By early 1989 he actually managed to pay off all the debt. In the meantime, the Romanian people were starving. Food shortages were a daily routine for people in the country. Ration cards were introduced for more and more goods, and even that was saved for meat, because there were not even enough of them to set rations. The answer from the palace:The people simply ate too much! Ceaușescu couldn't help it! As early as 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev compared Romania's economy to a "harried horse driven by a cruel rider". A few years later the rider fell. The trial and execution of Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife Elena (whom you can learn more about in this podcast episode) was broadcast on Romanian television on December 25, 1989. And so the brutal story of how Ceaușescu built his new Romania on credit came to an end. It was not a happy ending - neither for the cruel horseman nor for his people.
If you want to learn more about Ceaușescu and the other cruel dictators of the 20th century and especially what today's so-called populists learned from them... Check out my book Populism Made Easy!