Halfway down the Danube

Elena

"To the first woman of the country, the homage of the entire country,
As star stands beside star in the eternal arch of heaven,
Beside the Great Man she watches over
Romania’s path to glory."

(Poem published in Scientia, the Communist Party newspaper, on the occasion of Elena Ceausescu receiving the Socialist Star of Romania, 1981)

"You shoot them and throw them in the basement. Not a single one should come out alive."

(Elena Ceausescu, giving orders regarding the handling of the Timisoara protestors. From a stenographic record of the meeting of the Political Executive Committee of the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party, 17 December 1989)

No history of the fall of Ceausescu would be complete without an entry for Elena. She was Ceausescu´s wife, but she was also a power in her own right. By the late 1980s, she was Deputy Party Secretary, the de facto second in command of Romania, and may have been in some ways more powerful than Ceasescu himself.

In six months in Romania, I have met a few people who were nostalgic for the good old days of Communism. I have even met a few who have good things to say about Ceausescu. But I haven´t met one person who has anything good to say about Elena; she seems to have been universally viewed with a combination of loathing, derision, and fear.

At first, I took this with a big grain of salt. After all, Elena Ceausescu was a powerful woman, and powerful women often arouse resentment. And she was a power behind the throne, and such grey eminences are not popular either. And she might also have been a convenient scapegoat for people who had been a little too close to her husband to criticize him directly. So I was a bit skeptical.

But after six months of talking to people and reading as much as I can find about her, I'm not skeptical any more. She was a horrible person.

At the macro or public policy level, she was at least partly responsible for some of the most awful and destructive policy decisions of Ceausescu's regime. I'm thinking in particular of the population policy., which outlawed birth control and tried to encourage Romanians (though not, apparently, Hungarians) to have at least three children each. She was also a great supporter of his agricultural "systematizazion" policies, which brought misery to tens of thousands of people.

At the micro or personal level, she seems to have been arrogant, greedy, mean-spirited and paranoid. A couple of years before the end (says one of her surviving bodyguards), she arranged to have Ceausescu's own office bugged. She explained that she was worried about his health; he had diabetes, and he might suddenly have a fainting spell. In fact it let her monitor his conversations, and break into them by 'accident' as she saw fit.

She encouraged the development of a cult of personality second only to her husband's: she was the Mother of the Romanian people, wife, scientist, tireless worker for the greater socialist good. She joined him in official iconography, their double image on stamps, posters, the covers of magazines. Her birthday, like her husband's, was a national holiday.

But it was the fake credentials that really seemed to get to people.

See, Elena was not an educated woman. She dropped out of school at the equivalent to fourth grade, and never attended high school.

But in the early 1960s, when her husband rose high in the Party, suddenly she acquired a Ph.D. from the University of Bucharest. And then, after he became President, her name started appearing on all sorts of advanced scientific papers. She became President of the Romanian Academy of Science.
Romanian government propaganda started presenting her as a brilliant scientist and administrator: "comrade academician doctor engineer Elena Ceausescu, brilliant politician and patriotic scholar of broad international renown."

She greedily, almost compulsively collected honorary degrees from foreign universities. A Doctor of Science here, an honorary professorship there: she just seemed to like the letters after her name.

I don't know why, but this just seemed to drive people mad. It still does. Horrible, oppressive policies and a loathsome personality, well, those were awful enough. But the fact that this uneducated woman was held up as one of Romania's greatest scientists seems to have been, well, adding insult to injury. People still remember it. Even people who have good things to say about Ceausescu curl their lips at "Madame Comrade Academician Doctor" Elena.

"Who wrote the papers for you, Elena?" the prosecutor would shout at the Ceausescus' trial.

"How dare you ask such a question!? I am Chairwoman of the Academy of Science!" came the reply.

Half an hour later both she and her husband would be lying on the snow-covered ground in a little courtyard, bodies riddled with bullets. Elena Ceausescu, Min., D.Sc., Ph.D., would have one more group of letters after her name: (dec.).

Posted by douglas at December 26, 2003 07:12 PM | TrackBack