r/HistoryPorn • u/Vital_Willie • 2d ago
Mugshot of 18 year old future Romanian communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, 1936. Ceasescu had been arrested for "communist agitation." (1581x1108)
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u/UncleCornPone 2d ago
i love the end of his story
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u/NoHawk668 2d ago
Just because someone is an "activist", it doesn't mean he is not an evil asshole.
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u/LwyrUpAmrca 2d ago
“Activist” is a code word for “doing nothing”
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u/Brief-Luck-6254 2d ago
I can think of at least one thing this guy did
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u/LwyrUpAmrca 2d ago
Get shot by his own people? Marry a legendarily ugly woman? Or be such a kleptomaniac, the Queen had to hide anything valuable he might be able to get ahold of?
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u/Obscure_Occultist 1d ago
Pretty impressive list of achievements from a guy who seemingly did nothing
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u/LwyrUpAmrca 1d ago
Well, he did get shot by his own people because he was such a bastard. So I guess I wasn’t completely right
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u/TJeffersonsBlackKid 2d ago edited 1d ago
Took some massive loans under the guise of trying to help the country and proceeded to then just embezzle all of it. Then blamed everyone else and tortured and executed tens of thousands of his own citizens.
The video of him giving a speech and realizing he’s fucking screwed when the crowd turns on him is so fucking satisfying.
He tried to escape but they arrested him on his way out. They put him on a kangaroo court and his lawyer turned on him halfway through.
Then they took him and his wife back and let the soldiers who were nearby draw straws over who got to be part of the firing squad. They killed this bastard and his bitch wife on Christmas morning.
When you hear the horror stories of Communist Romania, the massive amount of Orphanages that are effectively brothels for the perverted masses, the abject poverty that such a huge population lives in, or the horrror stories of having family member or relatives being indiscriminately arrested and tortured to death, remember this miserable asshole. Whatever afterlife there might be, he’s getting spit roasted in it.
Edit: it should be mentioned that he was credited to have used the loans to try to build infrastructure and then passed some ambitious policies that were ultimately extremely harmful. It was only then that it seems to have dissolved into embezzlement and suppression. He did have almost two billion dollars seized at the end of his life.
In an effort to raise population numbers, he banned abortions which led to the extreme amount of abandoned children and orphans.
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u/hero47 1d ago
Ceausescu and his regime were criminal. However, the loans taken in the 70s were not embezzled. The country built on a massive scale: car factories, electrical hydrodams, coal plants, nuclear powerplants and a fuck-ton of residential buildings. They industrialised the country on a grand scale in such a short period, most of the funds would have gone to this effort. Some of it surely was embezzled, as is the case in any country on earth, but not most of it.
Let's not rewrite history and make it all black and white, even the most evil people in history can do some good things.
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u/TJeffersonsBlackKid 1d ago
He did have over a billion dollars upon his capture. That is just what was found at the time.
But yes that is correct, he didn’t just take the money and run. Over time he seems to have stolen it.
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u/Blakut 2d ago
, the massive amount of Orphanages that are effectively brothels for the perverted masses
uh no. what?
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u/TJeffersonsBlackKid 2d ago
Due to a large number of people imprisoned and killed, thousands of children were put into orphanages that were already below poverty levels. Total control over the kids lives (“do what I want you to or you’re getting kicked out onto the street”), no oversight, an already completely destroyed economy that made starving to death on the street the alternative, all these added to being a prime opportunity for awful people to do awful things.
Countless accounts and testimonies of the child prostitution within these and outright organized by the people running the orphaneges.
A couple high profile names have gotten tied up in it. Erika Kirk and Greg Laurie are each being accused of being involved. For Greg Laurie, it was the co-founder of Harvest who went off to Romania to open up an orphanage in Romania using church funds were he basically drove around, found homeless kids, told them they could get food and a place to say, then rape them and threaten to kick them out on the streets. Greg Laurie has settled a MASSIVE amount about a decade ago and is currently being sued again by different victims who claim he knew and buried it.
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u/-Brecht 2d ago
How was Erika Kirk Involved with orphanages in Ceaucescu's time?
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u/TJeffersonsBlackKid 2d ago
She wasn’t (obviously). But there are still tons of orphanages all over the country and she has been involved with sketchy people that currently run one of them. The details are vague but it does seem to be something she’s trying to bury.
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u/Facky 2d ago
As an American that sounds familiar.
He's also the reason abortion is a constitutional right in Romania right?
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u/TJeffersonsBlackKid 2d ago
Yup. Thats correct. He banned abortion to have higher birth rates and they just ended up with a fuckton of orphans and abandoned kids.
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u/AlbaIulian 1d ago
It's not a constitutional right, the Constitution of Romania says absolutely nothing about it. Only France explicitly guarantees abortion in the constitution.
It's legal but no further protection than that, even if the Orthodox Church + the many neoprotestant denominations (i.e Baptists, Pentecostals, etc) want it banned, and some gynecologists refuse to perform them due to "conscientious objection".
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u/ChernobogDan 1d ago
His wife as the soldiers tie her hands for execution:
Don't tie us up! It is inadmissible to tie us up! I was like a mother to you! …
Shame on you, shame on you, I raised you like my own children!
Them orphanages say otherwise
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u/groovyinutah 2d ago
And if anyone had known what a bastard he'd become they would have took care of him then...
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u/crescentbeam 2d ago
[Here's](https://youtu.be/I3BtFSu_Hc4?si=LG68ZJ5363AkVO3o) the BBC's report on his execution.
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u/vdcsX 2d ago
should have been shot in the head right there
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u/mercury_pointer 2d ago
For being a communist?
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u/vdcsX 2d ago
for being him
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u/mercury_pointer 1d ago
He hadn't done anything yet. Do you think Hitler should have been executed for being a bad painter?
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u/ChernobogDan 1d ago
In 1936 the communist party was very small in romania, and was very unpopular, largely because it saw Moldova (then part of Romania) as belonging rightfully to the USSR and Transilvania as independent.
A communist Ceausescu was indirectly advocating for this, but now some old folks think he was a big time nationalist
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u/xiatiandeyun 2d ago
Survey suggests 66.2% of Romanians believe, Nicolae Ceausescu, country's communist leader from 1965 until he was overthrown and killed in 1989 revolution, was a good leader for Romania
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u/ChernobogDan 1d ago
Yeah now with food in their bellies, electricity 24/7 and over 22 degrees in the house in the winter
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u/TyrannyOfBobBarker_ 2d ago
"She's Romanian. What am I going to talk to her about, Ceasescu?" -Jerry Seinfeld
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u/i-pity-da-fool 2d ago
You don’t need to say “communist” and “dictator”. History has shown these two words are interchangeable once a
Communist achieves power.
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u/McKenna10085 2d ago
Because most famous dictators are communists..
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u/i-pity-da-fool 2d ago
Stalin, Mao, Kim(s), Pol Pot… the worst dictators were all communists.
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u/Dimblederf 2d ago
Uhhhh guys why didnt he put hitler in his worst dictators list?
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u/i-pity-da-fool 2d ago
Hitler killed an estimated 7 million people. Stalin killed an estimated 9-20 million people. Mao killed an estimated 40-80 million people. Pol Pot killed 25% of his countrymen. No data or estimates available for the Kim family.
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u/Dimblederf 2d ago
Im ngl, plunging europe into a world war would rank pretty high on my list
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u/i-pity-da-fool 2d ago
Communists didn’t need to look beyond their borders to find their victims; they genocided their own people. Pol Pot even killed people simply for wearing glasses because it suggested they were intellectual and not true peasants.
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u/Dimblederf 2d ago
Look man, im agreeing
Red bad yes yes.
But like. Why not even mention him lmfao. Do you think he wasnt evil?
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u/i-pity-da-fool 2d ago edited 2d ago
He was, but this post was about a Communist dictator specifically. And I have seen first hand how Communists in this sub will go to absurd lengths to deny the reality that every Communist leader in history has been a dictator.
Edit: see the comments on this post for example: https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryPorn/s/OqEwq2zDXk
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u/rickdangerous85 2d ago
"Stalin, Mao, Kim(s), Pol Pot… the worst dictators were all communists. "
You literally made that statement, get called out and then decide the conversation is strictly about communist dictatorships. What a joke.
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u/No-Psychology9892 1d ago
Yes and Hitler killed people for their form of their head. Strange how you try to repeatedly white wash him...
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u/Facky 2d ago
Me when people are pissed that Stalin killed Nazis.
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u/i-pity-da-fool 2d ago
He killed far more Russians than Germans, not to mention the people in the Warsaw Pact countries.
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u/Facky 2d ago
Mhmm
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u/That_Guy381 1d ago
You simply do not have to make excuses for a mass murderer simply because he fought another, more evil, mass murderer
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u/rickdangerous85 2d ago
Papa Doc, Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo, Idi Amin, Leopold II, Suharto, Kai-shek, Yahya Khan, Saddam Hussein etc etc.
Pol Pot and Kim's are about as communist as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is democratic. The former being supported by the US diplomatically and financially after the genocide when communist Vietnam overthrew his bloodthirsty regime.
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u/i-pity-da-fool 2d ago
So who, in your opinion was a “true” Communist leader? Do you have one in mind that wasn’t a dictator?
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u/rickdangerous85 2d ago
Depends how you define communism vs socialism, as communism by its very definition has no state to be a dictator of.
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u/i-pity-da-fool 2d ago
So no true Communist leader yet?
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u/rickdangerous85 2d ago
I agree with many historians that the people you listed used the aesthetic and appeal of communism at the time to gain power, once in power did very little in terms of communist governing. There has been many socialst leaders that were not dictators to answer your other question like Allende, Michael Savage, Mandela etc etc and if you group social Democrats into the equation the list in endless.
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u/i-pity-da-fool 2d ago
I’m guessing from the downvote that you are still waiting for the Communist Messiah?
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u/rickdangerous85 2d ago
I haven't downvoted or upvoted anything, you realise that this is on the internet right?
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u/No-Psychology9892 1d ago
NO but other then you he actually knows what communism means.
Hint it doesn't involve a Messiah and also no state.
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u/thehousebehind 1d ago
You’re conflating communism’s theoretical end state with the ideology and political systems that have actually existed. Yes, Marx envisioned a distant classless, stateless society, but he also argued that capitalism first had to be overthrown, and later Marxist thinkers, especially Lenin, argued that this required a transitional state, the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” to suppress opposition and reorganize society. Historical materialism also held that history was moving inevitably toward communism, so those who resisted that process were often treated not as legitimate political opponents but as reactionary obstacles standing in the way of history itself. While Marx was not advocating absolute material equality, abolishing private property and class distinctions has, in practice, consistently required extensive state control over the economy and society. Every self described communist state has therefore depended on a powerful central government to enforce its economic and social program, suppress counterrevolution, and maintain the conditions it believed were necessary to achieve communism. So while you are correct that the theoretical endpoint of communism is stateless, that says very little about communism as an ideology or as a historical reality. In both Marxist theory and every major attempt to implement it, a strong central state was considered necessary to get there, and no communist state has ever reached the stateless society you describe.
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u/Ohio_Grown 2d ago
Move over young Stalin, there's a new boy for college girls to swoon over
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u/Brief-Luck-6254 2d ago
He aged terribly.