Romanian President Nicolae Ceausescu, who was toppled on Friday after 24 years in power, was a one-time darling of the West who used old-style Marxist brutality in a desperate attempt to remain the Eastern bloc's last dictator.
In the early days of Ceausescu's reign, he was embraced by the United States. The United States wanted to encourage his relatively independent foreign policy, which often put him at odds with the Soviet Union. Two American presidents, Richard M. Nixon in 1969 and Gerald F. Ford in 1975, visited him in Bucharest, and he was once received at Buckingham Palace.The West liked him because he was a maverick who refused to toe the Kremlin line.
While other East bloc countries broke relations with Israel in the aftermath of the 1967 Arab-Israel war, he maintained them. He openly opposed the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, refusing to allow Romanian troops to participate. When all other East bloc countries joined the Soviet-led boycott of the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, he sent Romanian athletes.
Earlier this year, when Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev encouraged economic and political reforms throughout Eastern Europe, the 71-year-old Ceausescu held firm and insisted his country remain a bastion of Communist orthodoxy.
He built up a personality cult around himself and his family unparalleled since the late hard-line Kremlin leader Josef Stalin.
Photographs of Ceausescu adorn roadways and are plastered to the sides of buildings. Similarly, there are almost equal numbers of photographs of his wife Elena, the country's second most powerful figure.
It is estimated that at least 40 members of his family held top jobs in the Romanian Communist Party and government hierarchy.
His regime was so repressive that merely applying for a passport to travel outside the country was enough to prompt a government inquisition. Romanians were urged to give police an account of any conversation they have with foreigners.
State Department experts estimate that one in every four Romanian citizens was paid by the government to inform on their fellow citizens.
Typewriters are registered with local police, along with copies of the type face,. so that confiscated letters or underground newsletters can be traced to their authors.
Ceausescu's reputation as a maverick extended to his economic policies. In recent years he undertook a massive effort to pay off his country's entire foreign debt. Instead, the country was plunged into poverty.