Eastern Europe: The Third Communism

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heavy industrial nuggets for Russia, East Germany and Czechoslovakia, and asked Rumania to be what Dej called "a mere market garden." Simultaneously, Rumanian publications were rewritten, stressing the role of Rumanian (as opposed to Red Army) heroes in the liberation war against the Nazis. Compulsory Russian-language study was dropped from schools in 1963, the Maxim Gorki Institute was closed, and Bucharest's only Russian bookstore went out of business. Rumanian officials who had always chatted in Russian suddenly insisted on speaking with their Soviet counterparts through an interpreter.

Khrushchev struck back in 1963: Soviet agents approached Dej's Moscow-trained Deputy Premier, Emil Bodnăras, with plans to dump Dej in an intraparty coup. Bodnăras, who had been cooperative with Moscow in the Pauker period, promptly blew the whistle and the coup never came off. Instead, Dej grew more recalcitrant than ever. In April 1964 he declared Rumanian independence from Moscow in a 12,000-word treatise whose pivotal phrase was: "There does not and cannot exist a 'father' party and a 'son' party." Dej added insult to filial impiety by sending Ion Gheorghe Maurer, his Premier, to Peking with assurances of Rumanian neutrality in the Sino-Soviet dispute.

On his way home, Maurer audaciously popped into Moscow and offered to "mediate" the quarrel—which left Nikita apoplectic. And when Khrushchev dispatched Troubleshooter Nikolai Podgorny (now Russia's President) to the Dej villa at Mamaia, the Rumanian greeted him cordially with white wine and soda, but refused to be budged by anti-Chinese arguments. Other Red leaders, such as Italy's Palmiro Togliatti and France's Waldeck Rochet, joined the Dej neutralists, and finally Khrushchev had to postpone the summit meeting at which he had hoped to read Red China out of the Communist movement. Khrushchev's fall from power in October 1964 and Dej's death the following spring did nothing to change the balance of belligerence between the countries; Ceausescu had been an ardent apprentice.

Child of Scornicesti. Nicolae Ceausescu's career has been carved in protest. The son of a shoemaker, he was born in Scornicesti (pop. 2,000), a farm village in the foothills northwest of Bucharest where even today oxcarts and shanks' mare are the standard means of propulsion and peasants wear their pungent sheepskin cloaks winter and summer alike. Ceausescu's formal education was scanty; his real learning began in 1934 when, at the age of 16, he joined the Communist Party as a youth organizer. Drumming the countryside for Dej's resistance movement, he soon ran afoul of the Iron Guard, by 1938 found himself in Doftana Prison where he shared an 8-ft. by 6-ft. cell with Dej himself. A former inmate who now serves as a guide at Doftana (since converted to a "museum of the revolution") remembers Ceausescu from cellblock days: "A skinny kid who rarely said a word. He didn't whine when they kicked him. He didn't smile when they fed him." Fascist jack boots and stints in H cell, a solitary-confinement cubicle where a prisoner was physically unable to lie down, left Ceausescu with a stutter which still crops up now and then in his speech. The jailbirds' best friend was Maurer, who serves Ceausescu as Premier just as he did Dej.