Word: escu
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
What was happening? Many foreign experts believe that Rumanian President and Party Leader Nicolae Ceauşescu was punishing a group of opponents who last summer had participated in an unsuccessful plot to oust him. After Ceauşescu returned from an extended tour of China and the Far East last June, there were rumors about coup attempts in Bucharest. At an all-day meeting of regional party leaders, Ceauşescu was criticized -and reportedly even booed-for having made passionately pro-Chinese statements during his trip that unnecessarily annoyed the Russians. For the moment, Ceauşescu remains...
Ceauşescu's Law. In view of such criticisms, how has Rumania's leader managed to survive? For one thing, he has remained markedly conservative in domestic affairs. That has made it impossible for the Soviets to accuse him of unorthodoxy. According to what Western observers call Ceauşescu's Law, the more daring the foreign policy, the more rigidly conservative the domestic climate. Accordingly, Ceauşescu followed up his Peking trip with a tough crackdown on those "invidious Western influences" that the Soviets regularly criticize as bourgeois and decadent...
Rumanians dubbed the new policy, which was announced only two weeks after Ceauşescu's return from China, the mini-culturala, after Peking's Cultural Revolution. Among the casualties so far have been acid-rock music on state radio and in youth clubs (too Western), the movie Midnight Cowboy (perverted) and the American TV series...
...Untouchables (too violent). Ceauşescu evidently believes that the mini-culturalā begins at home; his teen-age son Valentin appeared last week with his formerly long locks closely shorn. He explained to friends that his father had ordered the haircut...
Will Nicolae Ceauşescu's cultural purity save him from Russia's wrath? In all likelihood, the Russian-Rumanian crisis will prove to be nothing more than a Soviet campaign of intimidation. The situation is significantly different from Czechoslovakia in 1968; the Russians know that the Rumanians, like the Yugoslavs, would fight if they were attacked. Even so, the current war of nerves is an uncomfortable reminder to many East Europeans of that terrible August three years...