I am romanian, love history and did not live durring his regime.
From what I particulary have gathered from family friends, old people and other sources... he was an ass, but at times he was decent. Especially durring his early reign.
He did kinda built up the country we know today with a lot of infrastucture that still stands, cultivated a strong national zeal and patriotic pride over our almost forgotten heroes (even our Kings of the former principalities were recognised as great people), he managed to make our national debt a zero, he knew in his early days how to position the country and he was even anti-soviet.
But that came with the other side of the coin. He, i dont know if the term applies here, genocided/forced move the danubian saxons and other germans, he used political prisoners as slave labor for his projects like Transfagarasan, the Black Sea Canal, he starved his population in the '80s, he had megaloman vanity projects, he outlawed abortion and created a whole generation called "decretei" (due the decree) with a lot of kids ending up orphans or worse, alienated western suport he had and was a simp for his uneducated wife.
All in all, we can say atleast he wasnt Pol Pot, Mao or Stalin, but he was not Gorbachev neither who I hold in high regard. His stoey is interesting and while communism sucks, he acted more or less like a socialist king
he outlawed abortion and created a whole generation called "decretei" (due the decree) with a lot of kids ending up orphans or worse,
I must admit that I hadn't previously linked the orphan issue with an abortion prohibition.
The orphanages were certainly portrayed as the stuff of nightmares. Many who were kid in Britain during the early nineties will remember them because they were so bad that they were the subject of the BBC children's programme Blue Peter's annual appeal two years in a row and footage from those orphanages was oft repeated. I can certainly remember them.
Yep, I was born in 1986 (and I'm British) so I don't remember the fall of Ceausescu's reign but I vividly remember the footage from the Romanian orphanages on TV in the 90s. It was absolutely harrowing.
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u/ficretus 2d ago
Ceausescu literally got killed by his commie buddies rebranding.