On Christmas Day 20 years ago, Nicolae Ceausescu’s despotic rule in Romania ended in summary execution – since when his only surviving son has been left to carry the burden of his family’s past
VALENTIN CEAUSESCU moves softly through Bucharest, capital of Romania, the country his parents once ran like a personal fiefdom.
He has no limousine, no bodyguard and lives well away from the city centre in a quiet suburb. Dressed in jeans and a loose sweater, he cuts an unremarkable figure as he sips coffee, smokes cigarettes, and tells his remarkable story.
It is 20 years since Nicolae Ceausescu was forced from power, summarily tried for a litany of crimes against his people, and executed alongside his wife Elena on Christmas Day.
The shoemaker’s son became the most brutal dictator in the old communist bloc, making the Ceausescu family name a byword for repression, cruelty and megalomania.
Ceausescu’s misrule was both thuggish and cunning, wily and idiotic. His Securitate secret police recruited hundreds of thousands of informers, bugged millions of homes and spied on Romanians who had contact with foreigners. So powerful was its grip that no coherent dissident movement – and certainly no Vaclav Havel or Lech Walesa – ever emerged in Ceausescu’s Romania.
Ceausescu strengthened the Securitate as he destroyed Romania. He bankrupted the nation by repaying foreign loans early in a bid for political independence, and then exported almost everything Romania produced to raise money. The result was a crippling lack of basic goods, food rationing, and power cuts that made shortages of heat, light and hot water the daily norm.
As Romania’s 23 million people sank into poverty, Ceausescu demolished swathes of old Bucharest and threw up bleak tower blocks and monuments to his own ego – most notoriously the Palace of the People, a marble-clad monolith which is the second-largest building in the world.
Across the country Ceausescu planned to flatten rural villages and replace them with jerry-built towns which would cater for a population boom that he sought to create by restricting contraception and abortion. In the event, his social planning bequeathed decrepit orphanages full of unwanted children, and streets full of stray dogs whose owners abandoned them when they were forced from a house into a tiny flat or became too poor to keep a pet. Such are the miseries associated with the name Ceausescu.
But 20 years ago, being a Ceausescu also meant enjoying unlimited power, privilege, and impunity. The ruling couple’s children, Valentin, Nicu and Zoia, were the crown princes and princess of the benighted nation, watched from afar by a resentful but impotent people.
Nicu and Zoia are now dead, leaving Valentin to carry the burden of their past. He rarely gives interviews and stays out of the limelight. He has a small circle of close friends and has worked at the same institute of atomic physics for some 40 years.
Sitting in a favourite cafe in Bucharest, Ceausescu (61) recalls how a flurry of protests around Romania reached the capital on December 21st, 1989, when a speech by his father on the balcony of Communist Party headquarters was greeted with a chorus of dissent from the usually obedient crowd.
“I wanted things to be reformed,” Ceausescu says of his meeting with his father that night in the party building. “I told him that things should change from the next day, if there was a next day.”
Ceausescu thinks his father misjudged the threat to his regime, believing that it was something similar to a Soviet-orchestrated bid in 1968 to make him toe the Kremlin line.
“But it wasn’t only the Russians,” he says. “Things were completely different by then. My father didn’t command the same authority or trust of the people as he did in 1968.”
On December 22nd, clashes between protesters and security services in Bucharest escalated, and Nicolae and Elena realised that their reign was over. They fled by helicopter and later commandeered passing cars on a dash for freedom through the countryside. That afternoon, they were arrested.
Valentin took his then girlfriend, who is now his wife, out of Bucharest and they stayed at a friend’s house as gunfire erupted around Bucharest. He was arrested on December 25th, the same day that his parents were given a brief trial at an army base and then placed before a firing squad.
“That evening I was brought to a military compound and I watched the trial and execution on television. I was there with the commanding officer and maybe another officer. I didn’t look at them,” says Ceausescu. “I was ashamed, ashamed of being Romanian . . . It’s not about how one treats one’s leaders, it’s nothing to do with that. It is hard to describe, but I got this feeling when watching, that it was sort of a dirty thing . . . that it was shameful to watch this.”
Ceausescu was jailed for eight months and then released into a country that was already questioning the real nature of its “revolution”.
Along with many other Romanians, Ceausescu believes that a group of communists who opposed his father or sought personal gain conspired to seize power under the cover of the protests, using army units to sow bloody chaos around the country before presenting themselves as the “National Salvation Front”. Members of the NSF and their allies have repeatedly blocked efforts to discover what really happened in 1989.
“It was not a revolution or a putsch – I would describe it as a mess,” said Ceausescu, who is convinced that Mikhail Gorbachev’s reformist Kremlin and other east and west European governments supported plans to oust his father.
“It was orchestrated by the people who then took charge,” he says. “I found out later that the Russians had a large number of people in the country who had no need to take action . . . They couldn’t believe that everything crumbled in a few seconds – that disorganised everything, and the people in charge had to come up with a plan. There were no loyalists, no forces to fight and had to take someone on. They gave arms to everybody in the streets, people were trigger-happy. That’s what happened.”
Some of the men who came to power by ousting and executing Ceausescu were known to Valentin from his years helping to run Steaua Bucharest football club during its mid-1980s heyday.
“I didn’t have a very personal relationship with them,” he says. “I don’t feel betrayed by people I don’t really know. None of my friends have betrayed me. They stood by me.”
It is largely because of those friends, he says, that he never considered leaving Romania for good, despite studying for a time in London and learning fluent English. Unlike his brother Nicu, who had a playboy reputation and was seen as his father’s likely successor, Valentin always steered clear of politics and says he never feared for his own safety during the chaos of the revolution or its aftermath.
Living in a country still haunted by his father’s regime, by the secrets of the revolution and the ghosts of its 1,500 or so victims, Ceausescu thinks peaceful change was possible in Romania, and would have created a nation less riven by corruption, suspicion and recrimination.
“This is my belief,” he says. “But everybody else thought otherwise. And that’s why we got here.”
