Tout un weekend culturel à Bucarest, Roumanie

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In the 1960s, under the leadership of Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej and his successor, Nicolae Ceausescu, the Communist Party of Romania began to implement a foreign policy independent of Soviet goals. Socialist state ownership and central planning fostered the rapid growth of heavy industry and forcibly turned Romania from an agrarian into an urban sociey. During the 1970s, Ceausescu attempted to modernise the Romanian economy further, by investing huge amounts of money borrowed from Western credit institutions. Due to his grandiose development projects, the Romanian people were submitted to a rigorous austerity programme in the 1980s since Ceausescu wanted to pay off the country's accumulated foreign debt within a short period. The standards of living plunged considerably as Romania exported much of its food and fuel production. The populace was controlled by the secret police (Securitate) and the government, dominated by Ceausescu's family, squandered much of the nation's remaining wealth on megalomaniac constructions and feasts. For nearly 25 years, Ceausescu's regime slowly dragged the Romanians into an economic, social and moral deadlock. All these years were dominated by lies, corruption, terror, violation of human rights, and isolation from the Western world. When communist regimes across Eastern Europe fell in 1989, Ceausescu resisted the trend and reassessed his unpopular policies. All these things and many more heightened popular discontent and triggered the forced overthrow of the dictatorial regime in December 1989. In mid-December of that year, however, antigovernment demonstrations erupted in the country's cities, and, when the Romanian army joined the uprising against him, Ceausescu fled. He was arrested by the new provisional government, tried and executed (December 25, 1989).

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