Nicolae Ceaușescu's cult of personality

During the Cold War, Romanian President Nicolae Ceaușescu presided over the most pervasive cult of personality within the Eastern Bloc. Inspired by the personality cult surrounding Kim Il-sung in North Korea, it started with the 1971 July Theses which reversed the liberalization of the 1960s and imposed a strict nationalist ideology. Initially, the cult of personality was just focused on Ceaușescu himself. By the early 1980s, however, his wife, Elena—one of the few wives of a Communist leader to become a power in her own right—was also a focus of the cult.

Early seeds of the cult of personality can be found in the acclamation of Ceaușescu following his speech in which he denounced the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. From that date, there was an increasing identification of Romania with Ceaușescu in both the Romanian media and in the statements of other officials. The real beginning of the cult, however, came after Ceaușescu visited China and North Korea in 1971. He was particularly impressed by the highly personal way that China's Mao Zedong and North Korea's Kim Il-sung ruled their countries, as well as the personality cults surrounding them.

Ceaușescu's predecessor, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, had been the subject of a personality cult. However, the cult surrounding Ceaușescu went well beyond anything surrounding Gheorghiu-Dej, with one observer describing it as a "sultanistic regime."

Ceaușescu became president of the State Council in 1967, making him de jure as well as de facto head of state. In 1974, he had the post upgraded to a full-fledged executive post, the President of the Republic. At that time, he was given a king-like "Presidential sceptre". Salvador Dalí congratulated him for his new sceptre in a telegram published by the state-controlled press in Romania, which did not see the sarcasm in the remark.

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Wikipedia