Modern Tyrants by Daniel Chirot

Author:Daniel Chirot
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Free Press
Published: 1994-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

This hardly fit the voluntarism and dynamism that Ceausescu needed, and he surely must have admired Kim and the Koreans for showing no such weakness. He therefore set out to reform thought as well as structure in his Romania. This was the final step toward making him a thorough tyrant.

In July of 1971, when he launched his post-Asian reforms with his “July theses,” Ceausescu reversed the cultural opening that had occurred in the late 1960s and reestablished an Index of prohibited books and authors. Tightening continued for the rest of his rule. Sociology was removed from the university, and what remained was placed within the Communist Party’s special academy of political studies; the number of those allowed to study nontechnical subjects at the university was sharply cut; fewer books were published; and the privileges formerly accorded to intellectuals were scaled back. In 1974, Elena Ceausescu was imposed on the Academy of Sciences as a member (she had training as a low-level chemical engineer), and then as head of this institution. She so politicized it that its prestige and much of its serious research were destroyed. 41

A perusal of the Romanian press in the 1980s shows that along with daily mention of the leader’s brilliance and devotion to the nation, there was also very frequent mention of Elena Ceausescu’s scientific accomplishments, of the many “famous” scientists coming to Romania to ask her advice and pay her homage, and of the honors supposedly bestowed upon her abroad. By the late 1980s, Elena Ceausescu was officially “comrade, academician doctor engineer, beloved mother of the Romanian people.” 42

In North Korea, where there never seems to have been a period of cultural liberalization, such reassertion of control was unnecessary. The worship of the leader began almost from the start, but became overwhelming in the 1950s after the Korean War. That was when Kim was able to remove any trace of internal opposition. The surviving leadership of what had once been a major local communist movement in the South and had fled to the North was executed. Only those who had been with Kim from the beginning, and had been associated with him and the Chinese in Manchuria, remained in the top ranks of the leadership. One of Kim’s followers had already written, in 1946, that Kim was “at our center the Great Sun … great leader, sagacious teacher, and intimate friend.” 43

Romania actually once had a fairly lively tradition of open intellectual discourse. The 1920s and 1930s saw a wealth of competing schools of thought and great progress in higher education; Romania produced a number of distinguished artists, writers, and scientists who gained world fame. There were liberals and socialists, communists and fascists, and most varieties of political thought in between. But Romanian intellectuals gradually became overwhelmingly fascist in the late 1930s. This corresponded to similar trends elsewhere in Europe that have already been discussed above. 44 That left them vulnerable to Ceausescu’s nationalist appeals which seemed to promise a return to their favored status of the pre-communist period.

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