The Tragicomedy of Romanian Communism
The Tragicomedy of Romanian Communism

Summary/Abstract: Stalinism is alive and well in Romania. At the time when Gorbachev's politics of glasnost threatens to contaminate and/or destabilize the long slumbering East European elites, the Ceausescu regime has strengthened its despotic features and is determined, it seems, to abide by a vision of communism that synthesizes an updated version of Stalinism and xenophobic populism. Increasingly exclusive and programmatically suspicious of domestic liberalization, Ceausescu's system has exhibited an unprecedented contempt for its own subjects. The system appears to be a sui generis form of Asiatic despotism where the political state, in the words of Marx, is truly " nothing but the personal caprice of a single individual." [...]

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