Nicolae Ceaușescu (In power: 1965 – 1989)
One of the Cold War’s most notorious leaders was Nicolae Ceaușescu of Romania. Born in 1918, Ceausescu was well indoctrinated as a Communist as a member of the Romanian Communist youth movement. His devotion was absolute and he was arrested several times for being a “dangerous Communist agitator.” When the Communist party finally took power in 1947, Ceausescu was appointed as the Agriculture Minister before eventually rising to the number two position in the Politburo behind the party leader, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej.
In March 1965, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej died and Ceausescu would eventually be elected as the secretary general of the party. He quickly proved that he was a nationalist as much as a Communist. In the years following his establishment as head of the country, he was the first leader of a Warsaw Pact country to recognize West Germany and joined the International Monetary Fund. He even defied the Soviet Union in refusing to support the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. But he was also responsible for more draconian decrees. One was in 1966 with the enactment of “Decree 770” which banned abortion and made divorce extremely difficult in order to boost population growth.
The end of Ceausescu’s reign began in late 1989 with an anti-government uprising in Timișoara that first began as protests led by ethnic Hungarians against prejudicial mistreatment and eventually became an anti-government rally. Government forces moved in and fired into the crowd. Estimates on the number who were killed vary wildly with reports of a few hundred shot up to 64,000! The protests spread to the capital, Bucharest, and the Romanian army defected to the side of the demonstrators on December 22, 1989. Ceausescu and his wife attempted to flee the country but were captured before leaving. On December 25th, a special military tribunal was formed to try Ceausescu and his wife for crimes of mass murder and corruption. The trial ended quickly with both being found guilty. Ceausescu and his wife were then immediately executed by firing squad.