ABSTRACT
After proposing to relax Romania’s Communist regime, Nicolae Ceaușescu (1918–1989) walked in the footsteps of his predecessor Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej and re-imposed Stalinism. Initially, the regime mobilized and exploited legitimate national grievances. Posturing as the guarantor of national sovereignty, Ceaușescu and his circle managed to construct a legitimizing narrative rooted in a romanticized past and promising the advent of an ethnically pure, classless society. Instead, Ceaușescu’s Romania became a classic case of neo-Stalinist repression cloaked in the language of extreme nationalism.
