Nope. The thing is he wasn't. He said all the right things , he publicly condemned the USSR sending tanks to Czechoslovakia and he maintained a good relationship with the USA, Nixon being the first american president ever the visit Romania.

That said he's the closest thing you could get to Kim Jong Il outside of the DPRK. His execution was a crime though and what followed was the standard transition disaster that left the country in the hands of a few oligarchs.

I'm not saying he's a great guy, just that it's interesting how things develop. I kinda have a bit of an obsession with these things because I grew up seeing his pictures on the first page in all the school text books but he was long since dead and everyone complained about how shitty it it was back when he was in power, I just felt like I was missing something, then gradually people started saying the opposite. There's always a lot of debate about the degree to which he was aware of how bad living conditions had deteriorated during the 80s, and how much of his entourage (now in power) just let him think the country was a paradise and everyone loved him and weather he was dumb enough to believe it.

Not a great guy at all. To me it's interesting to hear the rhetoric; it's only gotten more sophisticated since Ceausescu. What I immediately drew from this is that his speaking is more honest than what we usually hear today, not only that there's not as much doublespeak - which I think has become reflexive in politics.