A Christmas Tale

With a moral for the tyrants of today

It was a bitterly cold Christmas Day in 1989. Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu, long the all-powerful rulers of Romania, were hustled into a military compound wearing long flannel coats — poor armor against their inevitable fate. Four armed soldiers flanked them, tying their hands behind their backs as the couple made feeble attempts to resist.

In the video above you see Nicolae, defiant to the end, shouting, "I will present myself as I want to!" The “president” and communist party chief seemed to understand what was coming. Elena, her voice dripping with indignation, called out, "I raised you like a mother!" and "You’re not allowed to tie my hands!" A famously arrogant and extraordinarily despised co-despot, she seemed less to understand. The scene was pathetic, somehow evoking sympathy for the two elderly and helpless Romanians — a testament to the strange quirks of human nature. Make the monstrous pitiful, and we will pity.

Their execution was swift – so much so that the film crew failed to capture the final moments. This violent conclusion followed a farcical show trial (below) held on the same day, in which a prosecutor shouted accusations of genocide supported by the “defense counsel” but not by any evidence. The Ceaușescus were accused of having $1 billion in foreign bank accounts, but no such accounts were ever found. Nicolae (at 24:30 in the below video) protests that he does not recognize “those who organized a coup d’etat.”

The judges' verdict allowed for appealing to a higher court, but the Ceausescu (pronounced chow-SHES-coo) couple were executed a few minutes after the verdict, rendering that provision moot. They were lined up against a wall and shot by a firing squad. Such is the place in history of the small town of Targoviste (pronounced tur-GOH-veesh-teh).

The whole thing raised more questions than it answered. Was this an act of justice or revenge? Could a fair trial have better served Romania’s transition?

The new authorities argued the execution of the Ceaușescus was necessary to stop terrorists from attacking the new political order, yet no terrorists or terrorist cells were found. Nonetheless, perhaps 1,000 people died in street shootings concurrent to the ouster of Ceausescu, which were never explained. Conspiracy theories abound. Revolutions are never clean, but rarely quite this grimy.

Romania is currently in the throes of a messy political situation, after Vladimir Putin interfered via TikTok to elevate an anti-Western ultranationalist kook to the second round of the presidential election, causing the whole thing to be cancelled earlier this month. But it is heaven on earth compared to the communist era.

For decades, communist Romania under Ceaușescu’s rule was a dystopian nightmare. His megalomania was at an elite level in the world, culminating in the construction of the colossal Palace of the People (not renamed “of the parliament), a project that displaced 40,000 people and drained the country’s resources. The infamous austerity policies of the 1980s reduced Romania to misery as Ceaușescu sought to pay off foreign debts by exporting most of the country’s food and energy resources. Starvation and cold became the norm. The Securitate, Ceaușescu’s secret police, sowed fear through pervasive surveillance, arbitrary arrests, and torture. The regime reached its zenith of cruelty during the demolition of entire villages under the guise of "urbanization." This was not governance; it was tyranny dressed as progress.

And yet, the revolution that toppled him was no pristine expression of popular will. As some historians have noted, it bore the hallmarks of a palace coup orchestrated by the moderate wing of the Communist Party. Ion Iliescu, a former Ceaușescu ally turned reformist, emerged as the leader of post-revolution Romania, raising suspicions that the revolution’s narrative was largely stage-managed. Despite these murky origins, most Romanians breathed a sigh of relief at the Ceaușescus’ fall. When I met their son Valentin a few years later, even he seemed to think the outcome was for the best. The execution, though brutal, marked the end of an era of unparalleled repression and the beginning of Romania’s long, difficult road to healing.

It is a Christmas tale that offers lessons—and warnings—for the despots and aspiring authoritarians of today.

Putin’s tightening and increasingly murderous grip on Russia, Xi Jinping’s cult of personality in China, Kim Jong Un’s dynastic tyranny in North Korea, and Ilham Aliyev’s stranglehold on Azerbaijan all mirror various hallmarks of Ceaușescu’s rule: paranoia, self-aggrandizement, and the ruthless suppression of dissent. Such “leaders” would do well to study the pitiful end of Romania’s "Genius of the Carpathians."

The cautionary tale extends beyond the archetypal strongman to the so-called democratically elected authoritarians — like Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, who manipulates democratic institutions to consolidate power, and Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, who clings to the pretense of legitimacy while falsifying elections and ruling with an iron fist. Also to regimes like the cruel theocracy in Iran under Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, which hijacked what could have been a great country 45 years ago and made it synonymous with menace and mania.

Even in free countries, elected miscreants are undermining trust in true democracy and edging toward authoritarianism, agitating against their critics while pretending to champion their nations. You know who they are. Many readers of this publication live in two countries grappling with this today.

The Ceaușescus’ story, with its sad conclusion on Christmas Day, serves as a reminder of the fleeting nature of power. Once omnipotent, their fall was swift, their end wretched and abject. The image of the couple tied up, then crumpled on the snowy ground, should be taken as a warning.

One month before, Nicolae Ceausescu was reaffirmed by the communist party as the all-powerful head of Romania. Dictatorships – let’s say, like Putin’s – can seem eternal. But nothing is eternal. The ends creeps up on them slowly, then happens very quickly.

The latest to fall is Bashar al-Assad, whose recent flight from Syria — his country reduced to rubble — offers a grim foretaste of the fate that may await some of the others. Holed up in Moscow, where Putin refuses to meet him and his fancy wife reportedly seeks divorce, Assad’s existence is one of humiliation and isolation. Like the Ceaușescus, his descent into irrelevance is as striking as his years of cruelty were horrifying.

All these criminals – from Putin, Xi, and Kim to Aliyev, Erdoğan, Maduro and the treasonous others who cling to power with ever-tightening fists – should take the time to learn a very potent Latin phrase: Sic transit gloria mundi.