Nicolae Andruta Ceausescu (26 January 1918 - 25 December 1989) was a Romanian politicial who was the Secretary General of The Romanian Communist Party from 1965 to 1989,President of the Council of State from 1967, and President of Romania from 1974 to 22 of December 1989.

Early Life And Career
Born in the village of Scornice?ti, Olt County, Ceausescu moved to Bucharest at the age of 11 to work in the factories. He was the son of a peasant.

He joined the then-illegal Communist Party of Romania in early 1932 and was first arrested, in 1933, for agitating during a strike. He was arrested again, in 1934, first for collecting signatures on a petition protesting the trial of railway workers and twice more for other similar activities. These arrests earned him the description "dangerous communist agitator" and "active distributor of communist and anti-fascist propaganda" on his police record. He then went underground, but was captured and imprisoned in 1936 for two years at Doftana Prison for anti-fascist activities.

While out of jail in 1939, he met Elena Petrescu (they married in 1946) — she would play an increasing role in his political life over the decades. He was arrested and imprisoned again in 1940. In 1943, he was transferred to Târgu Jiu internment camp where he shared a cell with Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, becoming his protégé. After World War II, when Romania was beginning to fall under Soviet influence, he served as secretary of the Union of Communist Youth (1944–1945).

After the Communists seized power in Romania in 1947, he headed the Ministry of Agriculture, and then served as Deputy Minister of the Armed Forces under Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej. In 1952, Gheorghiu-Dej brought him onto the Central Committee months after the party's "Muscovite faction" led by Ana Pauker had been purged. In 1954, he became a full member of the Politburo and eventually rose to occupy the second-highest position in the party hierarchy.

Leadership Of Romania
Three days after the death of Gheorghiu-Dej in March 1965, Ceausescu became first secretary of the Romanian Workers' Party. One of his first acts was to change the name of the party to The Romanian Communist Party, and declare the country the Socialist Republic of Romania rather than a People's Republic. In 1967, he consolidated his power by becoming president of the State Council. Initially, Ceausescu became a popular figure in Romania and also in the Western World, due to his independent foreign policy, challenging the authority of the Soviet Union. In the 1960s, he ended Romania's active participation in the Warsaw Pact (though Romania formally remained a member); he refused to take part in the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact forces, and actively and openly condemned that action. Although the Soviet Union largely tolerated Ceausescu’s recalcitrance, his seeming independence from Moscow earned Romania maverick status within the Eastern Bloc. During the following years Ceausescu pursued an open policy for example Romania is one of the only two communist countries who participated at the Olympic Games organized in America in 1984. Also, the country was the first of the Eastern Bloc to have official relations with the European Community: an agreement including Romania in the Community's Generalized System of Preferences was signed in 1974 and an Agreement on Industrial Products was signed in 1980. However, Ceausescu refused to implement any liberal reforms. The evolution of his regime followed the Stalinist path already traced by Gheorghiu-Dej. Their opposition to Soviet control was mainly determined by the unwillingness to proceed to de-Stalinization. The secret police (Securitate) maintained firm control over speech and the media, and tolerated no internal opposition.

Ceausescu visited the People's Republic of China, North Korea and North Vietnam in 1971 and was inspired by the hardliner model he found there. He took great interest in the idea of total national transformation as embodied in the programs of the Korean Workers' Party and China's Cultural Revolution. Shortly after returning home, he began to emulate North Korea's system, influenced by the Juche philosophy of North Korean President Kim IL Sung. North Korean books on Juche were translated into Romanian and widely distributed in the country.

Beginning in 1972, Ceausescu instituted a program of systematization. Promoted as a way to build a "multilaterally developed socialist society", the program of demolition, resettlement, and construction began in the countryside, but culminated with an attempt to reshape the country's capital completely. Over one fifth of central Bucharest, including churches and historic buildings, was demolished in the 1980s, in order to rebuild the city in his own style. The People's House ("Casa Poporului") in Bucharest, now the Palace of the Parliament, is the world's second largest administrative building, after The Pentagon. Ceausescu also planned to bulldoze many villages in order to move the peasants into blocks of flats in the cities, as part of his "urbanization" and "industrialization" programs. An NGO project called "Sister Villages" that created bonds between European and Romanian communities may have played a role in thwarting these plans.