Romania 1944
...unnecessary palaces and other buildings, along with throwing massive feasts habitually. For nearly 25 years, Ceausescu's government dug Romanian society into an economic, and moral standstill. All Nicolae did during these years to cover everything up (even though it was obvious) was lie to the people. He also corrupted the nation with threats of terror to the people so he could control their everyday lives. And to keep Romania from paying back all the Western debt, and to keep the Romanian people under his control Nicolae isolation Romania from the Western world. The early years of Communist rule in Romania were marked by repeated changes of course and by mass arrests and imprisonments. As the people started losing more and more freedom, they started to resist the communist rule. Many people resisted the dominance that they once thought was better than what they had. In 1948 the government reversed the “agrian” reform. Now the country was being forced into collective farming, and destruction of the Uniate church (Greek Orthodox Church). These were two main reasons for tens of thousands of arrests made in a short period of time. The Communist government decided that Romania needed a Danube- Black Sea Canal. In order for this to be built the government designed a number of strained labor and political prisons to put all rebellious, non-compliant, and threats to power prisoners they had arrested. In the end there was an estimated 100,000 forced laborers dying in a failed attempt to construct the Danube-Black Sea Canal. Once collective and state farms controlled 77 percent of the arable land the Communist government declared collectivization complete in 1962. Now Nicolae needed the Romanian population to grow. In 1966, Ceausescu publicized a new regulation that actually restricted abortion and contraception. In the new regulation only women over the age of 40 or who already had at least 4 children were eligible for either. Population wasn’t raising as fast as Nicolae wanted it to so in 1972 he revised the edict to only women over the age of 45 or who already had at least 5 children were eligible for abortion of contraception. Nicolae still hadn’t erased Romanian churches. Nicolae slowly desired more and more control. He knew the only way he could get complete control was to eliminate and persecute the Romanian churches. The largest denomination in Romania was the Orthodox Church with about 87% of the Romanian population. In the early 1950s, approximately 180,000 Orthodox men were sent to prison camps. The Romanian Communists established techniques to brainwash the people. This was pretty close to the people being put under a satanic cast. The typical prisoner was forced to denounce everything that he held most dear: friends and family, his wife or girlfriend, and his God if he was a believer. A Communist jailer described what went on in these “seminars”, which he had construed himself. Eugen Turcanu stated that, “Some had their heads repeatedly plunged into a bucket of urine and fecal matter while the guards intoned a parody of the baptismal rite. One ...