Enfant Terrible

Each morning at 7:45, a black Mercedes limousine with a police escort arrives at the Bucharest mansion of Rumanian President Nicolae Ceausescu and whisks him to his office in the columned Central Committee Building. "At 8:01 the President's advisers and ministers must be ready to receive a call from him," says an aide. The call could be about almost anything, since Ceausescu (pronounced Chow-shess-cue) insists on passing judgment on all manner of problems, from the working conditions in a coal mine to the decor inside the capital's new National Theater.

In his very personal role as Rumania's top man, Ceausescu feels he has a predecessor. His office is dominated by a painting of Michael the Brave, a Walachian prince who briefly united what is present-day Rumania for the first time in 1600. At private gatherings it is not uncommon for the defiantly nationalistic Ceausescu to break into a folk ballad about Michael's exploits.

Ceausescu's nationalism, in fact, has made him the enfant terrible of the Warsaw Pact countries ever since he came to power in 1965. Harshly orthodox in domestic policy but highly independent abroad, he is the one Soviet bloc leader who has been able to go his own way without provoking a Czechoslovakia-style crackdown. He even goes so far as to say that military blocs have become an anachronism (see box).

Rumania was the first Warsaw Pact country to recognize West Germany, the first to join the International Monetary Fund, and the first to receive an American President, Richard Nixon. Ceausescu's role in thawing relations between Peking and Washington has earned him the gratitude of both China and the U.S. Nixon has promised to obtain most favored nation status for Rumanian trade, and Ceausescu recently became the first East European leader to buy U.S. airliners--three Boeing 707s for more than $40 million, including one outfitted for Ceausescu like Richard Nixon's Air Force One.

In an effort to broaden diplomatic ties and make Rumania economically more self-reliant, Ceausescu has also been courting the Third World to line up cheap raw materials and a ready market. This year he has already visited Pakistan and Iran, and he plans a nine-nation tour of Latin America. The Soviet Union remains Rumania's largest single trading partner, but 47% of Rumania's trade today is with non-Communist countries.

Such a policy is not without its perils. Ceausescu's emphasis on industrialization has produced a phenomenal annual growth rate of nearly 12%, but Bucharest cupboards are bare. Peasants are so wretchedly poor that some villages have no shops and people live by primitive forms of barter. In recent months, there have been increasing reports of unrest and even strikes.

The answer from Ceausescu has been an increasingly autocratic rule and the nourishing of a personality cult. For two weeks before Ceausescu's 55th birthday in January, the entire government press became a giant birthday card with Comrade pictures and Ceausescu." greetings to "beloved Congratulatory messages were actively solicited, and in they poured, including salutations from Richard Nixon, Willy Brandt and Mao Tse-tung. The personality cult has extended to Ceausescu's wife Elena, director of a chemical research institute. At her husband's instigation, she was elected to the Communist Party's 185-member Central Committee. "You might say the personality cult is a sort of antidote to factionalism," explains one Western diplomat. "Ceausescu has a strong determination to demonstrate that there will not be any divisions in Rumania that the Soviets could exploit."

Ceausescu warily refuses to allow Soviet troops into Rumania to hold maneuvers. Rumania's own 200,000-man armed forces are supplemented by a crack division of mountain troops and a defensive network of "patriotic guards"--a civilian militia system that could muster as many as 1,000,000 soldiers in the event of an attack. But Ceausescu's real hope for survival is that no attack ever comes.

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