Communist "Perks" at the Top

The communists at the top lived lavishly under Ceausescu’s regime of terror and oppression. But none lived as extravagantly as the dear leader himself, his wife, and their progeny whose excesses were legendary.

Starting with their clothes, the Ceausescus wore different outfits for her and suits for him every day and burned everything, including shoes, at the end of the day in case the clothing and shoes may have been poisoned.

The lavish parties were obscene and always ended with the out-of-control bad son Nicu attacking an unsuspecting waitress or young woman who happened to be in the vicinity where the party was held.

Their food and drink were expensive, brought daily by planes from abroad, including Elena’s favorite flower, the orchid.

According to Gen. Pacepa, when a fake diamond plant started industrial production in January 1978, Elena, after seeing the first samples of clear diamonds, asked for a huge jar (20 pounds) filled with synthetic diamonds for the dear leaders’ sixtieth birthday party on January 26, 1978. The jar stayed only a few days on his desk. He tired easily of his unearned and excessive abundance.

And this was nothing when compared to the demands Elena made of all Romanian institutions, including co-operative farms, to send valuable and expensive gifts to her dictator husband. She encouraged her minions to influence Western powers to send him expensive gifts as well. Ceausescu’s presents were then placed in a hurriedly opened museum in which the most valuable items were displayed in photographs.

Among the excessive gifts, Gen. Pacepa recounted, was a massive 24-karat ingot with the words, “Ceausescu and the People,” the letters carved in bas-relief. It came from the Ministry of Mines.

Solid gold ears of hybrid corn came from the Ministry of Agriculture. The people were struggling to find corn to grind it into cornmeal for their daily “mamaliga,” a corn mash substitute for bread.

A television set with a hi-fi stereo with a platinum remote control came from the Ministry of Interior.

The intelligence ministry donated a Holland & Holland custom made rifle. Ceausescu loved to “hunt” brown bears that his minions had herded close to where he was waiting to mow them down with his many guns.

While we could not find food on grocery store shelves and had to stand in interminable lines every day to survive, Ceausescu “has never received a penny of wages during his entire adult life.”

According to Gen. Pacepa, “before World War II he was an apprentice to a shoemaker, who paid him with room and board and Marxist indoctrination.”  He was proud that, as an activist, in and out of jail, he had never been paid for what he had done. “My whole life has been devoted to the World Revolution of the Proletariat,” he said. It was the same proletariat he condemned to a life of misery, suffering, and hunger every day of his existence as a dictator.

Ceausescu, upon the urging of his wife, finally set foot in a department store in October 1970 for the first time in his life. It was Macy’s in New York, on an official visit there. He never believed that the merchandise was available to all. He called American stores “window dressing” because Americans cannot buy anything without borrowing money and they slept in the streets. He genuinely believed that Macy’s was specially stocked for his visit.

To save his ill-gotten money “for a rainy day,” Ceausescu set up a secret account which Gen. Pacepa said, was code-named “TA” with cash obtained from “Operatiuni Valutare” or OV (foreign currency operations). This account, Gen. Pacepa alleged, held upwards of $400 million. Not a bad sum of “rainy day” cash for a man who was never paid a salary in his life. He allegedly spent $4 million from this account to buy his wife jewelry for her collection during trips abroad.

Ceausecu also kept secret bank accounts and safe deposit boxes in Switzerland. He used the cash generated from his secret deals to buy his children expensive automobiles and other luxuries from abroad and a custom-built, armored Mercedes for himself. He thought he needed it because most of the population hated his guts. Not that they had guns to threaten him in any way, they had been confiscated at the beginning of the Bolshevik takeover of the country. And he was constantly surrounded by entire armies.

All these obscene expenditures and theft happened while the proletariat starved and lived an extremely hard life because of his communist economic policies, lack of basic freedoms, and political oppression.