Nicolae Ceaușescu was a Romanian communist politician and statesman. He was the general secretary of the Romanian Communist Party from 1965 to 1989, and the second and last communist leader of Romania. He was also the country's head of state from 1967 to 1989, and widely classified as a dictator, serving as President of the State Council and from 1974 concurrently as President of the Republic, until his overthrow and execution in the Romanian Revolution in December 1989, part of a series of anti-communist uprisings in Eastern Europe that year.
Official portrait, 1965
Arrested in 1936 when he was 18 years old, Ceaușescu was imprisoned for two years at Doftana Prison for Communist activities.
Ceaușescu giving a speech in 1954
Ceaușescu with Deng Xiaoping and Leonid Brezhnev in 1965
The Romanian Communist Party was a communist party in Romania. The successor to the pro-Bolshevik wing of the Socialist Party of Romania, it gave an ideological endorsement to a communist revolution that would replace the social system of the Kingdom of Romania. After being outlawed in 1924, the PCR remained a minor and illegal grouping for much of the interwar period and submitted to direct Comintern control. During the 1920s and the 1930s, most of its activists were imprisoned or took refuge in the Soviet Union, which led to the creation of competing factions that sometimes came into open conflict. That did not prevent the party from participating in the political life of the country through various front organizations, most notably the Peasant Workers' Bloc. During the mid-1930s, due to the purges against the Iron Guard, the party was on the road to achieving power, but the dictatorship of king Carol II crushed this. In 1934–1936, PCR reformed itself in the mainland of Romania properly, with foreign observers predicting a possible communist takeover in Romania. The party emerged as a powerful actor on the Romanian political scene in August 1944, when it became involved in the royal coup that toppled the pro-Nazi government of Ion Antonescu. With support from Soviet occupational forces, the PCR pressured King Michael I into abdicating, and it established the Romanian People's Republic in December 1947.
Political prisoners of the Ion Antonescu regime, photographed in Târgu Jiu camp in 1943 (Nicolae Ceaușescu, future leader of Communist Romania, is second from left)
People in Bucharest greet Romania's new ally, the Red Army, on 31 August 1944
October 1944 rally in support of the National Democratic Front, held at Bucharest's ANEF Stadium
The Communist Party's National Conference of October 1945. Pictured, left to right: Vasile Luca, Constantin Pîrvulescu, Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu, Ana Pauker, Teohari Georgescu, Florica Bagdasar and Gheorghe Vasilichi