Word: ceausescu
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Ironically, the country that probably has the least interest in cutting the economic ties that Moscow imposed in the late 1940s is Rumania, which under Nicolae Ceausescu was more hostile to the Kremlin than any other East bloc country. He so ruined the national economy that for years to come it may have little to export beyond small agricultural surpluses, and serious market reforms may take just as long. Now that the insane policy of exporting everything but the barest necessities has ended, however, the country will probably avoid the kind of collapse that threatens Poland, because Rumania's farm...
...combined with a hastily arranged visit to Bucharest on Saturday by Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze. Moscow's solicitousness may be attributed to a desire to quell the discontent of ethnic Rumanians in the Soviet republic of Moldavia, a region Stalin annexed from Rumania in 1940. Now that Ceausescu is gone, the Kremlin has every reason to expect that secessionist fervor will be rekindled. Evidently Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev hopes Bucharest can be bribed not to fan the flames -- proof, if any were needed, that the road to reconstruction may take some highly unpredictable turns...
...They are like cockroaches -- ugly, numerous, been around a long time and hard to kill," said a U.S. analyst in Washington last week. "They" are the Securitate, the Ceausescu dictatorship's ever present and dreaded security apparatus, whose members fought savagely for several days to keep the tyrant in power. Among the most vicious of such outfits in the history of the communist world, the Securitate was established in 1945, partly as a counterbalance to the regular military, and later, under Ceausescu, competing with it for funds. Its estimated 180,000 troops regarded themselves as being part of an elite...
According to Ion Pacepa, a Rumanian lieutenant general who defected to the U.S. in 1978, the Securitate under Ceausescu had various functions. One was to serve as a kind of Praetorian Guard for members of the Communist Party's Central Committee and specifically the Ceausescu family. Many of the 75,000 or so troops were recruited from orphanages and raised to regard their job with a loyalty bordering on fanaticism. Other uniformed crack troops, equipped with armored vehicles and helicopter gunships, were assigned to supervise the country's border patrol and guard the political prisons. A particularly brutish department known...
...Securitate's more unusual duties was to provide down-to-the-skin security for Ceausescu. According to Pacepa, after hearing Cuba's Fidel Castro claim that the CIA had once tried to poison him by treating his shoes with a toxic substance, Ceausescu developed a phobia about becoming the victim of such a scheme and began wearing brand-new garments every day. At one time, says Pacepa, the Securitate kept a year's worth of suits, socks and shoes stored in a special warehouse; one of each, presumably after careful inspection, was delivered daily to Ceausescu's private quarters. Once...