On Christmas Day, 1989, Romania and the Romanians received the greatest gift in their history – the dreaded dictator, Nicolai Ceausescu, was executed, along with his especially hated wife, Elena. Ceausescu had been known as the “Conducator” – the “Leader.” Not an original title for a dictator, for sure, but another Romanian dictator, Ion Antonescu, who had allied himself with Hitler, also used the name – Antonescu was shot by the Soviets in 1946. No politician in Romania today on a local, provincial, or national level calls themselves that and likely never will. Ceausescu had other titles that he preferred, but his wife loved them. She was the “Best Mother Romania Could Have” and the “Mother of the Nation.” She also liked to pose as a world-renowned scientist, and though virtually all of her credentials were fake, she was still known as the “Great Scientist of International Renown.” The news – and the truth, were tightly controlled in Ceausescu’s Romania. Outside of the country, at least outside the Communist Bloc, she was known as a real power in the country, but not a scientist or intellectual of any kind.
Three days before Christmas, Ceausescu walked onto a large balcony in the building of the Central Committee of the Communist Party to make a speech. Over the past year, communism in Eastern Europe had begun to crumble. By the time Ceausescu walked onto the balcony, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria had overthrown their communist systems. East Germany had essentially ceased to exist when the Berlin Wall crumbled in November. Having been in power since 1965 and having ruled the country with possibly the most pervasive secret police force in history, Ceausescu was determined to keep power at any cost.
He walked out onto that balcony and began to speak in the same threatening and paranoid language communists had been using since the Soviet Union became the first communist nation in 1917-18. Romania’s problems were the result of “foreign interference” and “hooliganism.” These “fascist provocations” by “reactionary circles” and “foreign agents” were aimed at destroying the perfect state that could be part of a “bright future” if only they would listen to him. Well, they had listened to or been forced to listen to him for 24 years and wouldn’t listen to him any longer. Many of the 100,000 or so people in the plaza below him had been bussed in from other parts of the country to hear him and cheer him. Before the anti-communist revolutions of 1989 had brought down all but two communist nations, Yugoslavia and Albania, no one would have dared to do anything BUT cheer, but not today.
After about nine minutes of the same old thing, and having seen or heard through word of mouth and an underground press that the other people of the Soviet Bloc had overthrown their own leaders – and for the most part peacefully – the people below the Conducator began to chant, move menacingly closer to the building and then began to call for the end of the regime and Ceausescu’s blood. Elena’s too. They ran with their personal security and escaped the capital by helicopter, landing in the small town of Snagov and then on to Targoviste, a small city about 50 miles from Bucharest, the capital.
All through his panicked flight, Ceausescu attempted to contact and organize a military response to the uprising, but having seen the writing on the wall in the rest of Eastern Europe and hearing about what had happened in the capital, officers and men throughout Romania were either walking away or joining the opposition. By the time the couple had arrived in Targoviste, the local garrison, who were commanded by Ceausescu’s former defense minister, who had wisely switched sides – were waiting for the Conducator and the Scientist of Great Renown and took them to the local military base.
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