My brush with Romania's notorious Ceausescus

"My father is fine. Thank you for asking."

He would not be so fine some 12 years later: both father and mother were shot by firing squad after the “Exceptional Military Court” convicted them of crimes against the Romanian people.

The palace of the parliament in Bucharest, Romania. Credit: iStock

Yet in 1977 all seemed right in the world of Nicu Ceausescu, the then Romanian student leader had come to meet Australian student leaders, of which I was allegedly one, at a barbecue in South Melbourne.

Some 40 years on, it was slightly eerie to stand in what was Nicu’s bedroom in what we were told was the Ceausescu’s favourite family home, now a museum in a suburban neighbourhood in downtown Bucharest. It probably befitted a Communist dictator of the period. His father Nicolae had a gold-plated bathroom, an extraordinary indoor swimming pool and a house full of 1970s, Baroque-style teak furniture upholstered in the awful creams and browns of the era.

“He had 89 houses so you will find nothing in the one you have visited,” said one driver. “That's rubbish,” said another. “He only had 50 and that was in the whole of Romania.” He needed them for security, I was told, in case some ungrateful citizen or two decided his type of leadership wasn't theirs so moving house each night was reminiscent of the kind of home hopping done by other tyrants of the era such as Gaddafi and Arafat.

Nicu Ceausescu in 1991.

With the Winter Palace in mind, Ceausescu started construction on one of the largest buildings in the world. The parliament in Bucharest is an extraordinary construction by any measure. After a one-hour visit, the tour guide told us we had only covered 4 per cent of the building. Ceausescu died before it was completed. After years of discussion by the Romanian government as to whether it should be demolished or completed, it was finished at enormous expense with over 1000 rooms and 30 large reception halls. It was an extraordinary act of excess.

In the west of Romania, near the border with Serbia, lies the small city of Timisoara. In 1989 as revolutions were sweeping Eastern Europe, a demonstration broke out on December 14 in that city in support of a Hungarian pastor who was being punished for being a vocal critic of the Ceausescu government. Riots then spread across Romania to the capital.

On December 21, in order to regain control, Ceausescu spoke from the balcony of the Communist Party headquarters on the Calea Victoriei attacking the demonstrators in Timisoara. But on this occasion the crowd would not be mollified. Two decades of brutal repression of the Romanian people was two decades too many. Starvation abounded. Ivan Denisovich ate better.

The people were now in open revolt and on December 22 many elements of the military defected forcing Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, to flee Communist Party headquarters by helicopter.

The narrow road to Târgoviște, 80km north west of Bucharest, is lined with farmhouses, abandoned industrial buildings, a few gypsy compounds and roadside food markets of all description. Halfway down a nondescript street in Târgoviște is a small building formerly the local military headquarters known as “The Military Unit UM 01417”, also now a museum.

After three days of confusion and indecision, Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu were brought to this building and put on trial by the “National Salvation Front” for crimes against the Romanian people, including genocide.

The small courtroom and the trial itself have been viewed online millions of times. Today, the room is as it was on Christmas Day 1989, when the military court convicted the Ceausescus and sentenced them to death. The Ceausescus were handcuffed and led out the building through a small corridor to the back garden where they were put up against the wall and shot. The bullet holes in the wall and painted outlay of where their bodies fell are still evident today, some 30 years on.

With the death of Ceausescu, Romania joined so many other Eastern bloc countries in overthrowing communism; East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia Yugoslavia, Albania and ultimately the entire Soviet bloc but not before millions had been slaughtered, tortured, imprisoned or starved across Europe.

Like all communist leaders of the time, Ceausescu ruled by unprecedented brutality. Ultimately communism stultifies the human spirit; crushes liberty; suppresses free speech, expression, thought, religion and just about every other form of personal liberty and reduces human beings to ghoul-like automatons who have no escape from the tyranny of the state. And that’s for those who are lucky enough to live.

Not many in Romania were nostalgic on the 30th anniversary of Ceausescu’s passing. Nor should they have been.

Michael Kroger was the Liberal state president in Victoria until November 30, 2018.