Nicolae Ceaușescu cultivated a cult of personality by linking himself to Vlad Dracula while executing brilliant Cold War diplomacy that secured Romania "most favored nation" status with the U.S. and earned respect for condemning the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. However, his disastrous domestic policies mirrored China's Great Leap Forward, forcing rural populations into inefficient factories that produced fire-prone televisions while foreign debt and oil reserves fueled severe food and heating shortages causing citizens to freeze. His regime's excesses included hunting 400 bears, constructing an 80-room palace and the massive People's Palace by demolishing historic churches and displacing 40,000 people, alongside a $400 million slush fund generated from ransoming Romania's Jewish population for exit visas. Ultimately, these vanity projects, including banning contraception and seizing resources for personal luxury, directly precipitated his violent downfall. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Bone to Pick with Jeff00:02:20
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You can do your job now, Robert.
Oh!
Well, I did my job, Sophie.
I introduced the podcast.
How are we feeling?
Everybody good?
We all have newly hot bevs.
We're doing great.
Yeah, we got a hot bev, and we've got a hot bud, Jeff May.
Jeff, I got a bone to pick with you.
Yeah, what is that bone?
Well, Jeff, at the end of last episode, I said, as I was asking you to introduce your pluggables, where did you come from?
Thawing Cold War Ghosts00:15:47
Where did you go?
Where did you come from?
And then I had to say cotton eyed Jeff, which made me sad because if your name had just been Joe, you see what I'm saying here, Jeff?
Yeah, my pen would have worked alive.
I was original enough to do that.
But they just missed Joseph.
It's like the one white guy name that nobody in my family has.
Let them know they fucked up my joke.
I'm sorry.
Honestly, like, that's on my dad.
Yeah, well, I'm livid now.
Jeff, what I'm not livid at is you for being here to continue talking about Nikolai Ceausescu with me.
How are you feeling?
There's no place I'd rather be than right here talking about tyrannical despots.
Wow.
That's a lie, but it's a nice lie.
A sweet lie, Jeff.
Thank you for that friendly lie.
We used to call those white lies, but now I'm going to call them Jeff May lies.
I mean, the name Jeff May is pretty synonymous with the word white, so I feel like you got that.
It does work either way.
Jeffrey May of the Westchester Maze.
We got to find more uses for you to do your frumpy American Northeast accent, Jeff.
That was perfect.
Maybe we'll do a Vanderbilt.
I got to do a Vanderbilt.
But before we do a Vanderbilt, let's talk about a guy who probably had an accent.
Like the only Romanian accent that I know how to do is a Dracula accent.
And I do feel like that would be offensive.
Although, Jeff, we are about to start by talking about how Ceaușescu used Dracula and other heroes from Romania's past in order to make the case as to why he...
And I'm going to quote here from an article on the cult of Ceaușescu by the New York Times.
In Tirgoviste's history museum, there is a new exhibition of Romanian heroes.
An enormous portrait of Ceaușescu gazes down on the busts of Romanian rulers.
Among the venerated is Vlad Dracula, the 15th century prince whose cruelties gave rise to the Dracula vampire legend.
Flanking the entranceway are huge bronze busts of Decibel, the Dacian king, and Trajan, the Roman emperor who defeated Decibel at a great cost in the second century.
Could it be that Ceaușescu is casting himself not only as a Romanian emperor, but as a Roman one as well?
After all, he carried a jeweled royal mace at his 1974 induction as president.
Roman Emperor, the guide snorted.
It's a little late to do jeweled mace.
You think so?
1974?
You think that's late for a jeweled mace?
Yeah.
Yeah, 1974.
Like, if my dad was alive for it, I feel like you shouldn't have like...
He shouldn't have a jeweled mace.
But I do like the idea of like, ah, I von to rehabilitate your legacy.
Yeah, we're talking about Ceaușescu here as we shit on the idea of having a jeweled mace at your coronation, but the British royal family's over there sweating in a corner being like, don't bring us up.
Don't bring us up.
We got a fucking room full of jeweled maces.
Don't let anybody talk.
They're like, you don't even want to know where we got these jewels.
Yeah.
So yeah, it's very funny.
There's a line in that article where the guide is like, no, he doesn't think he's a Roman emperor.
He thinks he's a god.
And the New York Times reporter is like, what do you mean?
And the guide is like, in the newspapers, they've printed poems about Ceaușescu describing him as a demigod.
Yeah, I mean, not too far off from what Roman emperors thought.
So that works.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's good.
So, I mean, you could say, yeah, he's just, he's honoring his cultural heritage, all of our cultural heritage.
As an Italian, I understand the need to believe that some guy who was born into a job is literally divine.
It's easier than thinking, yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
Thank you.
The God of my people.
So why is Mario Italian?
What is it about Japanese game designers that made them think like, well, you got a plumber?
What's the natural ethnicity for a plumber who fights mushroom people?
Wasn't he Italian?
Wasn't he the superintendent of the Nintendo of America?
Like he was like, his character was created to basically he was like some guy that they knew.
And so they designed him that way.
Oh, okay.
Well, that is less magical than I had hoped it was.
Yeah, but I mean, you know, it's a Japanese and the Italians, deep-rooted history all the way back to roughly 1945.
I try not to go too deep into that history.
Constantly interactions with me.
Think about this new Chris Pratt playing Mario situation.
That's my question.
When I had a real voice, I was like, get the shit out of here.
If you're not being an offensive Italian stereotype, you're not my Mario.
Yeah, that is what I'm saying.
Bob Hoskins played an incredible Mario.
It's like, you know who's a great Mario?
That cockney actor.
Yeah.
So we're back talking about Romania and kind of occasionally Italy.
But yeah, so Ceausescu, when we kind of leave, left off, he's gotten himself into power.
He's establishing his cult of personality.
And he's doing some terrible stuff, like banning abortion.
And he's starting to do some dumb stuff, like trying to turn Romania into the television-making capital of Europe.
But broadly speaking, things are going okay.
And one of the reasons things are going okay is because he does not have enough money yet to realize all of his visions of turning the entire country into a giant factory.
And in order to get that kind of money, Ceausescu knows he's going to need some loans.
Now, the Soviet Union does not, one of the funny things about this is for all of the mismanagement the USSR was guilty of, they're totally right here, where they're like, no, man, just keep growing food.
Making TVs probably isn't going to work out for Romania.
And it doesn't.
So they're not going to give Romania the resources that Ceausescu thinks they need in order to become this manufacturing capital of Europe.
But you know who does have a lot of money and who's really willing to use it on stupid shit?
The United States of America.
Now, that's our thing.
That is our thing.
We will put a lot of money into some very dumb shit because we have infinity dollars.
Now, the problem with this is that the United States is the heart, the beating heart of global capitalism.
And Romania is, in theory, a Stalinist state, right?
A state that's based on at least quasi-Stalinist policies.
So the fact that Ceausescu decides to get in bed with the U.S. seems like a bad idea, like something that couldn't possibly work.
It's actually going to be one of the most successful things that he does.
But the first stage of his plot to get in bed with Lady Liberty comes courtesy of Lady Liberty's pimp at the time, a fellow that you might have heard about, a friend of the pod, Richard Milhouse Nixon.
Now, we love him.
We love old Tricky Dick.
Ceausescu actually is going to get along very well with old Dick Nixon.
Now, 1967, which is when they meet, is kind of an awkward time for Richard Nixon.
He had finished being vice president quite a while ago.
And he's sort of in the term that political writers would use at the time is that he's in like the wilderness right now, right?
Where he's kind of, he doesn't have this, he doesn't have like a super prominent role, but he's trying to get back into politics, right?
He's trying to, you know, he wants to become president.
He's had a couple of scandals.
He's in this kind of very messy place.
And he's trying to, he knows that he wants to like kind of recapture some of his glory days in order to put himself back in the political limelight so that he can run and win the Republican nod for president.
Now, one of the biggest moments from his career previously to this had been this very highly publicized kitchen table debate that he'd had with Nikita Khrushchev.
So Khrushchev comes to power after Stalin.
There's kind of this thawing a little bit in the Cold War.
Nixon has what most people would consider to be pretty unimpeachable anti-communist Cold Warrior credentials.
Referring to Richard Nixon as anything unimpeachable is also very, yeah, perhaps an ironic term to use for him.
But so he meets up with Khrushchev and they have this like very famous debate that is, it's one of these things that kind of turns him, makes him look like a statesman.
And so as he's kind of in this awkward position, he's like, well, what if I do that again?
So he gets in a fucking plane, charters a flight, and he starts traveling through the USSR.
He goes to Moscow and he tries to set up another debate with Khrushchev.
But the Soviets are like, well, that worked out for us, but now the Cold War is like getting gnarlier again.
And we really, it doesn't benefit us at all to help Richard Nixon become the Republican presidential candidate.
So no, we're not going to do this.
And he kind of, Dick kind of awkwardly mopes around Eastern Europe until he finds a communist leader who would be absolutely thrilled to be his buddy.
And that communist leader is Nikki Ceausescu.
Now, the first meeting between the two men is mainly a photo op for Nixon, but it helps to soften his image as this hardline cold warrior, and it makes him look more like a statesman, right?
That's what Dick wants to look like, a serious politician who's yeah.
And the big thing about that is obviously that he has built up a very good photo opportunity life.
Oh, like Nixon, for all of the, all of the bumbling that that man has done throughout his entire career, I'm not giving up checkers and all this stuff.
Like, he went to China.
Yeah, yeah.
And this is kind of the start of that, right?
Because, I mean, you could say Khrushchev was kind of the start of that.
But it's interesting, as much of like this anti-Soviet hardliner as he has a reputation for being, a lot of his career gets made by hanging out with communists.
So that's kind of cool.
At least it's, well, it's actually going to be disastrous for a lot of people.
But it's, we'll call it a mixed bag.
So it works out really well, though, for Nixon.
It makes him look, you know, like a statesman.
And it's going to work out really well for Ceausescu because it's going to give him a connection to the man who's about to be the president of the United States.
And Richard Nixon, you wouldn't call him a great friend, but he does remember when people are useful to him, right?
There's a, I don't know, loyalty is the wrong word, but he is going to have like a soft spot for Ceaușescu after this.
And he's going to help out the dictator of Romania in whatever way that he can.
Now, this does a couple of things for Ceausescu besides just sort of making him look like, oh, maybe this is, maybe this, this guy's actually not as much of a hardline communist as we've been led to believe.
The first thing it does outside of that is it's him throwing a middle finger at Moscow, right?
The Soviets don't want him to do this.
And one of the other things that's happening in this period, this is when you have that big Sino-Soviet split.
So there's literally like soldiers killing each other, Chinese and Soviet soldiers killing each other on like the borders of both countries, right?
This is a really nasty time and this conflict is escalating.
And the Soviet Union basically asks Ceausescu to stand with them against the People's Republic of China.
And he's like, no, I'm not going to do that.
You know, I'm not going to actually take a side in this Sino-Soviet split in the way that you want me to.
So by doing that and by having Nixon over, he's kind of provided a bridge for the Americans where they're like, well, we actually would really like to be able to communicate and talk and settle things directly with China.
And we've had to do that kind of through the Soviet Union prior to this.
And now there's this guy Ceausescu who the Chinese, like Mao likes Ceausescu, because Ceausescu wouldn't throw down against him with the USSR.
And he's already had Nixon over.
So maybe we can work with this guy.
Maybe this guy is going to be our buddy and help us like smooth out some shit.
So this is a, you know, this is a bold move.
It's, it's risky, but you have to say, this is actually, he's going to do a lot of stupid things.
Most of the things Ceausescu does are very dumb.
This is good foreign policy.
He's actually playing very intelligently all these kind of powers off each other for his own benefit.
He's pretty good at intrigue.
Yeah, he's surprisingly adept at intrigue.
Yeah.
And it's one of those things, if he had never been running the country, if he'd just been like Romania's head of foreign policy or something, he might have actually been pretty good at his job.
The problem is that no one actually is ever good at the job that he has, which is like guy in charge of an entire country down to the lives of individual people in it.
But he's pretty good at the foreign policy shit.
And he's going to double down on this foreign policy success in August of 1968 when events in Czechoslovakia provide him with a golden opportunity.
So the Czechs elect a new first secretary.
And Czechoslovakia is a communist state.
They elect a new first secretary of their party, a guy named Alexander Dubček.
And Dubček is a communist, but he is a reformer, right?
And he's very popular in the West because while he's still a commie, he's this kind of communist who's got more democratic attitudes about how things ought to work.
And he starts pushing a raft of reforms that are much more extensive than the ones Ceaușescu had offered his own people.
Most crucially, he's like, maybe we'll have elections again.
And hey, maybe we'll even let parties run that aren't communist parties.
Now, the Soviet Union, who has just sent tanks not all that long ago into Hungary over, you know, an uprising, they're not going to like this.
This is not acceptable to them.
And Moscow responds by invading Czechoslovakia and arresting Dubček.
The force they send is made up of the five Central Warsaw Pact nations.
The two countries that do not participate in this invasion are Romania and Yugoslavia, because they're seen as unreliable.
And they are, in fact, unreliable for the Soviet Union.
I love that we're in like, obviously, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia.
And we're like, oh man, these things don't even exist anymore.
Like, it's so funny.
It's like we're talking about the- Yeah, the Czech Republic.
Yeah.
Yes, but yeah, I mean, we are, you got Romania still, you know, you got a Czech Republic.
But yeah, it is, it is.
We are talking about like these ghostly nations.
It's interesting, too, because like if you go around, if you travel through a lot of Eastern Europe, especially if you travel through like the Balkans, it's obviously it's not uniform, but you will run into a lot of people, particularly older people, who are like, who miss when Tito was around and who miss the days of Yugoslavia, which is not hard to see why when you think about how ugly things got as soon as Yugoslavia broke apart.
And you can find people, particularly in Russia, who miss the USSR.
You do not run into a lot of Romanians who miss Ceaușescu.
No, That's common.
Not as common, not nearly as common.
Not to say that, obviously, I'm not trying to like whitewash either the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia, but you do run into people who are like, ah, you know, for a lot of reasons, there were things that I preferred back then.
That does not tend to happen nearly so often with Ceaușescu in Romania.
Romania's Awkward Geopolitics00:11:33
But what he is pretty good at is this right here.
So the Soviets invade Czechoslovakia.
They arrest this guy, Dubček, and they put an end to this whole, we're going to try opening shit up a little bit here.
And Nikolai is in a dangerous position.
He does not have Soviet soldiers in his country, but obviously Romania is not going to win a war with the Soviet Union, right?
If the USSR wants to come in and force him out, they can do it.
And he's just seen they're willing to do that to the Czechs.
So he's not going to back down over this, though.
He calculates kind of accurately that the USSR, they've just blown a lot of political capital and taken a risk themselves in occupying Czechoslovakia.
They're not going to want to fuck with Romania right now, right?
Because they're kind of dealing with this shitstorm already.
So while they're occupying the country, he delivers a speech on August 21st, 1968, in front of 100,000 people in Republic Square in Bucharest.
And it's called the balcony speech.
He's standing on this balcony of this government building and he addresses this crowd and he tells them that the Romanian Communist Party is expressing full solidarity with the Czech people.
He calls Soviet actions a danger to the peace of Europe and he condemns them for forcing their version of socialism on another socialist state.
One of the things he's like is that, like, as socialist states, we should have the freedom to exist whatever way we want and to like experiment with policies.
And the Soviet Union shouldn't be cracking down on that stuff, which is objectively good, right?
Like, what he's actually taking, this is a principled stance, and it's a risky one for him.
Now, he's not taking it because he's morally opposed to what the USSR is doing so much as he's taking it because this is going to reinforce his popularity with the Americans and the West, right?
And it is outrageous.
It is popular.
You have to say it's very popular in Romania.
This is seen as like the high point of his regime.
And it gives a lot of people reason to be like, oh, you know, this guy actually, you know, maybe we lucked out in terms of, you know, having this dude in charge of the country.
He's willing to stand up to the Soviets.
You know, he's taking this pro stance in favor of liberty from the USSR.
Maybe, maybe we're doing all right.
He's going to put no notes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No notes on it.
The specific thing.
Yeah.
And we can, and with that, we can put a lid on him.
That's it.
Yep, yep, that's the end of it.
Go rides off into the sunset.
Like Kojak.
So he's done this thing and these kind of two moves.
He's made this unique place for himself in the world of diplomacy.
And shortly after this, or right around this time, Nixon wins election.
Yeah, 68, Nixon wins election and he takes office.
And so now his buddy Richard is running the United States and he's just given himself a really good reason to be trusted by the West.
So he starts saying, hey, I would like to have most favored nation trading status, right?
With the U.S., which is a big deal economically.
There's a whole bunch of benefits to that.
And no communist country had ever been offered that.
And the U.S. is like, well, fuck, why shouldn't we do this?
Right.
This guy actually seems like he's, you know, and obviously we don't care that he's, he's, he is a dictator who's purged his enemies.
He's made abortion illegal.
He's doing all of these things that are like fucked up in his own country.
But obviously, we've never given a shit about that.
What we care about is that he's benefiting U.S. foreign policy right now.
So we're going to stand up and start offering him some shit.
And one of the things that means is that like we do, Romania does eventually get most favored nation trading status.
But the other thing it means is that Tricky Dick is going to start talking to American business leaders and American banks and being like, yeah, you can trust Ceausescu, you know, invest in his country, give him some loans.
It's going to work out very well.
He's a trustworthy man.
Yeah.
As he's, as he is pounding his entire body weight in vodka on a daily basis and threatening Henry Kissinger.
He is letting people, yeah, put your money in Romania.
It's going to work out really well.
Long-term, good, goodbye.
Who among us would not threaten Henry Kissinger if given the opportunity?
Yeah.
I mean, we probably shouldn't go much further down that road because I think he still has a secret service detail.
So this is also very popular among the Romanian people.
And Catalin Gruya, who's a Romanian journalist, describes people's feelings this way.
Romanians lived better and they were proud of their president.
Frustrated by history, they saw in Ceaușescu one of their own who was on equal standing with the world's bigger players.
When he condemned the military intervention in Czechoslovakia, Romanian enthusiasm was spontaneous.
This act of defiance against Moscow brought him the respect of the entire world.
And Silvio Brukin, another Romanian writer, adds this: Ceaușescu was a tyrant when it came to politics, an economic disaster.
But in his foreign policy, he had a spark of genius.
Although uneducated, he was smart, a wily peasant sort of smart.
And, you know, it is the kind of one thing that's interesting is Ceaușescu is this little guy.
He doesn't have, he never has anyone backing him up earlier in his career.
He's entirely on his own.
And so he's really good at kind of running in between the feet of these more powerful figures in Romanian politics.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
And that's what he's doing.
Like you can see why his background makes him good at this specific job because Romania is in this really awkward position geographically and it's in this awkward political position between China and the USSR in the U.S.
And he is very good at he's as good at this as he was good at navigating a similar situation in the Communist Party.
What do you do when you're a rock between three hard places?
Like, like, how do you like the tomato between three rocks?
Props to him for doing, I guess, as far as foreign policy is concerned, as good as you can do in this situation.
From a foreign policy standpoint, he's kind of your best case scenario as a leader in Romania at this point.
Now, from an everything else standpoint, that's what we're about to talk about.
Not the optimal case scenario.
Unfortunately, it is not enough to be good at foreign policy.
And for his first half decade and so in power, he seems to be okay at some of the other stuff.
We've just talked, he does some ugly shit, but like the Communist Party under him in the first five or so years in power also does the sort of shit communists are supposed to do.
They put a huge amount of money into this building program to ensure everyone in the country has a private hat residence, which is nice and a good policy for keeping people happy, right?
He also invests funds in education.
And again, it's promoting books that he supports, including these like propaganda books about Dracula and shit.
But it's still like better than, I guess, doing nothing at all.
And then in 1971, Ceaușescu goes on tour.
And as part of his plan to irritate the USSR, he visits China, North Korea, North Vietnam, and Mongolia.
Now, China's going to be the big visit, right?
Because he has just kind of backed or at least refused to like side with the USSR against China.
And Mao is very grateful for this.
So he gets this huge welcoming, these massive crowds and marches.
You know, China's.
And then he played for three hours straight.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He does all of the big hits.
He's doing, I don't know.
I don't know where to take this joke, Jeff.
But Mao shows him a very good time.
And obviously, China, massive, powerful country.
So coming from Romania, Mao is able to show off these huge factories, these massive crowds of soldiers and workers marching in unison.
And he and Elena, Ceaușescu and Elena, look at all this and they start to get really jealous because they're like, well, shit, this is like a first-class world power.
And, you know, we're us.
And I would really like it if we could be a little bit more like Mao.
One of the things that he and Elena do is they go to see this play put on by Mao's fourth wife, Jean Quing, and they see for the first time what this like real cult of personality looks like.
Because Mao's fourth wife and Mao both have very effective cults of personality, massive and expansive, huge numbers of people of all these books about them and paintings and portraits everywhere.
I made the joke the three hours he performed for three hours talking about being on tour.
Yeah, I mean, it's kind of, it's actually kind of the opposite of that because Ceausescu is the and Elena, like Nikolai and Elena are the audience.
And Mao is putting on a show for all of them, right?
He's got these huge crowds of soldiers and of workers like marching in unison.
He's got all of these, like they go see these beautiful, elaborate plays.
He takes them to see these factories.
And Nikolai is just, first off, he's blown away by all of this, but he's also, he's kind of like jealous, right?
Because China is on its way to becoming kind of this first-class world power, and Romania is a pretty small country by comparison.
So he falls in love both with this idea of power that Mao is able to show, but also he becomes aware of this huge cult of personality around Mao and around Mao's fourth wife, where they've got all of these books about them, all of these plays that are both like dedicated to them and dedicated to like kind of referencing them.
And they've got, you know, portraits up everywhere.
And he sees, number one, wow, this is really what you can do when you get off your ass and you put together a first-class cult of personality.
But the other thing he sees is that, like, well, shit, Romania could maybe be the kind of power that China is, if only I exercised power the same way that Mao did, right?
Because Mao is a very centralized ruler.
He's got total, pretty total control.
At least he is.
Yeah, we've heard of Mao, right?
I would like to add: every time you say cult of personality, I immediately want to break into the living color riff.
Oh, see, I was going to, I was.
I was thinking of, isn't that a, what is it, Duranda Rand song?
Living Color.
Wait, the TV show?
That's in David Allen Greer.
Oh, excellent.
I saw David Allen Greer was the band fronted by Corey Glover.
And In Living Color was the comedy show fronted by Keenan Ivory Wayans.
And David Allen Greer.
David Allen Greer was there, yeah.
That was really a Wayans joint.
It was.
And isn't that how Jim Carrey broke out too?
Jim Carrey did that up until the end, really.
I mean, he stuck around.
There you go.
Jim Carrey relevant because he is obviously the chairman Mao of comedy.
You could say that, you know, there's a lot of similarities between the Cultural Revolution and that year that we got Ace Ventura and the Mask.
And there was at least one other Jim Carrey movie that he was at, 95 or something.
Well, Ace Ventura was 1994, I believe.
And then The Mask was 1995.
I think you had Dumb and Dumber around that time.
Jim Carrey and Mao00:04:25
Somewhere in there, too.
Much like Mao declaring war on the Sparrows.
I don't know.
Well, I mean, if you think about it, there's a lot of similarities between them.
When he was showing up, he was saying, Let me show you something.
And that's a very Fire Marshall Bill line right there.
So it all does tie together.
A lot of similarities between the two men.
But you know who won't make inappropriate references to tragedies from Jim Carrey's life?
I'm going to guess that it's these amazing sponsors that we have coming up.
It is these amazing sponsors because they are all big fans of Jim Carrey.
I went and sat on the little Ottoman in front of him.
Hi, Dad.
And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen and she says, I have some cookies and milk.
This is badass convict.
Right.
Just finished fire.
I'm going to have cookies and milk tomorrow.
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If I'm outside with my parents and they see all these people come up to me for pitches, it's like, what?
Today now, obviously, it's like 100%.
They believe everything.
But at first, it was just like, you got to go get a real job.
There's an economic component to communities thriving.
If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail.
And what I mean by fellows, they don't have money to pay for food.
They cannot feed their kids.
They do not have homes.
Communities don't work unless there's money flowing through them.
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When you listen to podcasts about AI and tech and the future of humanity, the hosts always act like they know what they're talking about and they are experts at everything.
Here, the Nick Dick and Pole show, we're not afraid to make mistakes.
What Koogler did that I think was so unique, he's the writer director.
Who do you think he is?
I don't know.
You meet the like the president?
You think it goes the president?
You think Canada has a president?
You think China has a president?
Lozla proves that.
God, I love that thing.
I use it all the time.
I wrap it in a blanket and sing to it.
It's like the old Polish saying, not my monkeys, not my circus.
Yep.
It was a good one.
I like that saying.
It is an actual Polish saying.
It is an actual Polish saying.
It's a better version of play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
Yes.
Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time.
I actually, I thought it was.
I got that wrong.
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Ah, we're back.
I'm feeling good.
I'm feeling like maybe watching The Mask tonight.
That seems like one of the Jim Carrey movies that didn't have anything problematic in it, right?
The mask is pretty good.
He also saved them a lot of money in CGI by being able to do a lot of that stuff.
Interestingly enough, that is one of four movies that were produced by Dark Horse Comics in 1995-ish.
So you had a two-year span where we had four movies.
You had The Mask, you had Tank Girl, you had Time Cop and Barbed Wire.
I didn't realize that was a man, the Tank Girl movie, also pretty good.
It's definitely interesting.
Dictator Hunting Hobbies00:14:32
It gave us Naomi Watch.
Better than, yeah.
I'm going to say it.
Tank Girl, better than the Mask.
And Mao, a better dictator than Ceaușescu.
But now he's jealous, right?
He's jealous at seeing this Jim Carrey-like power that Mao has.
Wow.
Good work, Jeff.
Thank you.
Professional comedians.
So he decides that, like, the only thing holding Romania back from being China is that there's still all this red tape, right?
It takes too long to do things.
There's too many other people who aren't Nikolai Ceaușescu in power.
If I can just.
Yeah.
Because of communism, right?
Because it's red.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, obviously, there's a lot of reasons why Romania was never going to be the kind of power China is, including look at the two of them on a map.
Just look at the size of both countries.
Yeah.
You're going to say, like, I wouldn't show that for all of the tea in Romania.
Yeah, exactly.
The other reason is that Mao, a lot of problems with Chairman Mao, pretty canny fellow.
And Nikolai Ceaușescu has his kinds of canniness, but they are more limited than Mao.
So he is not going to be good at this.
But I'm going to read a quote from Nicholas Holman describing what happens next.
To achieve his aims, the population would have to be subjected to his control, most easily achieved if they were contained in large urban centers.
The economic consequences of such a policy was an all-out drive to create a heavy industrial base in Romania and a determination to make Romania self-sufficient through the elimination of its foreign debt.
A policy of systemization was also proposed in which the rural population was to be moved to larger urban centers, but this was later abandoned.
Initially, the development strategy was very successful as vast pools of underutilized labor and agriculture were mobilized for industry, with the proportion of the non-agricultural labor force increasing from 30.3% in 1956 to 63.5% in 1977.
However, this growth was not sustainable, being based on structural shifts, and soon the labor force was faced with inadequate employment and income opportunities, with a reduced supply of food and other consumer goods.
However, Ceausescu's ideological inflexibility allowed for no changes in his policy, and the regime resorted to coercion to achieve the production targets which enterprise managers were then forced to fabricate.
The effects of this flawed system soon became apparent as the benefits from the labor force shift were reduced.
Economic growth fell from 10% in the early 1970s to 3% in 1980, with food and other consumer goods becoming very short in supply.
The Romania, ladies and gentlemen.
Yeah, he basically is like: everybody get out of the country.
Everyone has to move to the city so that you can work in these factories.
And we're just going to start this slow process of bulldozing every single rural community in Romania.
Yeah, it's like, did he think he could build food?
Yeah, I mean, he doesn't want to make food.
Like, food is not sexy, right?
Food is a very reasonable thing to want to have, and actually not a bad thing to base your economy around making because people are always going to need food.
But you're never going to be a world power, just making a decent amount of food as like a country the size of Romania, right?
You become a world power by industrializing.
So you can have this massive industrial base, so you can have a big military.
So you can have all of these things that he sees the USSR and the Soviets and the Americans having.
And so this is going to be a fucking, this is kind of Romania's version of the Great Leap Forward.
And like the Great Leap Forward, it does not work very well.
And he might have known that if he'd actually gotten an accurate look at what was going on in China, he promised his wife to do that.
And she was like, and she checked in with Mao's wife and said, everything's good.
It's going great.
Things are going.
The backyard furnaces worked wonderfully.
Yeah.
We've been leaping forward greatly.
Yeah.
And this is part of the problem is that like his attitude about what works in Mao's China comes from Mao.
And you may recognize Chairman Mao, not the most reliable source on Chairman Mao.
So Nikki's friendship with Nixon, who is also buddies with Mao, they all get along.
Like legitimately, people will say Nixon and Ceaușescu were friendly with each other.
Like they enjoyed one another's company.
So that's sweet, Jeff.
It's always nice to hear about friends.
You know, it's funny when you see that people are friends with other people that you know and you're like, oh, yeah, I didn't know you guys were friends.
Oh, you like Mao?
I know Mao.
Oh my God.
I was in Glee Club with Mao.
Yeah.
Great guy.
So Nikolai's friendship with Nixon had earned Romania or had earned Romania an invite to the World Bank and the IMF.
And again, the only communist nation at this point, at least, who gets invited to the World Bank and the IMF.
The U.S., considering Nikki a good communist, and this is the term that people in Nixon's White House will say for him.
And eventually, I think in Reagan's White House, too, people are calling him he's the good communist, right?
He's the nice one.
They encourage banks to lend money to Romania.
And so Nikki uses all of this cash he's getting from the West to start building these massive, absolutely titanic factories, much larger than they need to be and much larger than there's any kind of demand for, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, this is the field of dreams of industrializing the Soviet bloc.
If you build it, everyone will want a Romanian television.
But there are problems with this.
One of them is that Romanian steel, because they're also trying to make like cars and shit.
Romanian steel is of terrible quality, right?
This is, I'm not a metallurgist, but certain areas make good steel and certain areas do not make good steel unless you know how to like remove impurities and shit.
The Iberian Peninsula and Pittsburgh.
Yeah.
Generally speaking, those are the two main spots are like Seville and Pittsburgh.
And I'm not, again, not a metallurgist, but perhaps Romania would have done a better job of removing impurities from their steel if they'd had chemists who weren't Elena Ceausescu.
It might have helped.
There's also massive corruption and corner cutting, which means none of their products are actually very safe to use.
Romanian televisions were known to be as likely to burn your house down as let you watch Three's company.
And so once they start producing this stuff, European countries get to look at these things and are like, well, these will kill people.
You can't put these in houses.
It's a very Soviet idea of like, but some houses burn down is fine.
Look at tell you what Dracula would say.
Dracula would say, sometimes you get impaled, sometimes impaled gets you, you know?
Yeah.
So just take it from nationally rehabilitated hero the impaler.
That's a fun time and nickname to have for somebody that you're trying to rehab.
I mean, it's funny.
He is objectively a better person than a lot of the American folk heroes I was raised to hear about, like Kit Carson, where it's like, well, at least Dracula was usually doing it in self-defense.
I don't know.
You know what?
I'll say it right now.
Dracula, better person than Kit Carson.
That's my take on that.
Pathfinder, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And genocide finder.
Oh, okay.
So now we're just going to call every American we see that does a slight genocide a genocide.
Yeah, a light, a light genocide.
Yeah.
So dabbler, if you will.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He was he was a genocide theoretician.
So matters were made worse by the fact that all of this industrial production used up more fuel than even and again, Romania, like the Nazis are very like part of why they wanted Romania on their side is that like Romania has a shitload of oil, right?
That's why the Germans wanted to conquer Romania like during World War One is Romania has a shitload of oil.
One of the things that Romania could be other than a breadbasket is a massive oil producing nation, which again, everything is set up for Romania to have been doing quite well in this period.
They could be the Dubai.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Ceausescu could have made it made very well for himself, but because he wants to industrialize, this takes a shitload of fuel.
And so Romania, one of the most oil-rich nations on earth, becomes a net importer of petroleum.
Like they are having to buy fuel.
Guys, what are you doing?
They are buying oil from Iran because he's using up all of their fuel trying to make fucking televisions.
Yeah, it's like if the Saudi king embarked on a building program that forced them to buy oil from Texas, where it's like, what the fuck are you doing?
In what world?
You shouldn't need to do this.
Yeah.
This should have been a sign that something was awry.
You had no idea.
And as the building program churned ever onwards, Romania's debts stacked up.
Ceausescu cut rations over and over again, and caps were put on how warm buildings could be during the winter.
It was like if it was above 16 degrees Fahrenheit, I think you had to, I think, yeah, that was the equivalent.
You weren't allowed to use heating at all, which is like, that's quite cold.
That's below freezing.
Yeah.
And it becomes increasingly common for the old and sick to freeze to death in winter.
Again, in a country with some of the largest oil reserves in Europe.
Should not have been a problem they were dealing with.
Now, this was, of course, very stressful for Nikki, and he opted to blow off steam in one of the most time-honored traditions of European rulers, shooting hundreds and hundreds of animals.
Now, Romania is a country with a long sporting tradition.
And as a result, brown bears had been prized hunts of the Romanian nobility for, I mean, presumably for thousands of years.
And as a result, the whole country of Romania had less than 900 brown bears when the monarchy fell, right?
By the time Ceausescu took power, socialist policies had rehabilitated the bear count because, again, there's not any nobles hunting bears at this period of time for sport.
Communists are pretty good about shutting.
Yeah, one thing communists are great at, making sure that doesn't happen for a little while.
So the early years of communism are very good for Romania's bear population.
It goes from about 800, 900 prior to communists taking over to about 2,500 by kind of the first 10 years or so of Nikki's regime.
So that's good.
Those bears are fucking.
Those bears are fucking.
Nobody's killing them.
Does a bear fuck in the woods?
In Romania, they did for a while.
And then Ceaușescu found out that it's kind of fun to shoot things.
So one of the things he does when he gets into hunting, if you're a dictator and you take up a hobby, you can get really into that hobby.
So he takes personal possession of all of the best hunting land in Romania.
And so the game wardens who were watching these areas realized that like, if I want to keep my job, anytime the boss comes by, I need to make sure he gets to shoot something, right?
Which you may recognize is not really hunting, but we're about to talk about that.
And I'm going to quote you.
Most hunting isn't.
Yeah.
This is less hunting than most bad hunting.
This is like the guys who pay a half a million dollars to shoot an elephant in the head from a truck would look at what Ceaușescu's about to do and be like, well, that's a little gross.
Yeah.
So I'm going to quote from the Atlantic here.
One district competed against another for his visits, offering big bears and rack-heavy stags as easy targets for his expensive imported rifles.
For a typical hunt, Ceaușescu would fly in by helicopter, landing on a pad cleared within the hunting area.
From there, he'd be taken by rough terrain vehicle.
In earlier years, he favored jeeps, later a Russian maid, the gaz, and later still a rattle-trap Romanian imitation, the Aro, along forest roads to a point very near the spot where hungry bears or running red deer were expected to appear.
He would walk the short distance to a strategically placed high seat, a tight little draw that served as a game corridor, for example, or along a stream where the gurgling water would cover noises made by a hunter.
Usually, he was accompanied by at least one security officer who would carry his weapons and ammunition, and a forestry official from the district office.
Many other forest department employees would have been involved in preparing for his visit, but they were kept at a distance during the actual hunt.
In the high seat, Ceaușescu had little patience for waiting and watching.
His attention span, according to a witness who had worked with him often, was five minutes.
The report of his short attention span comes from Vasile Chrisan, a forestry official who later published a memoir in German, the title of which translates as Ceaușescu, hunter or butcher.
The gist of the book is that Crissin's boss was indeed a butcher and not a true hunter.
For instance, Ceaușescu would continue firing wildly at an animal until it collapsed or ran away.
If he wounded a stag, he'd command Crisan and the other attendants to find it and bring him the trophy.
If he missed altogether, they would tell him the stag was wounded and that they'd find it.
And then that stag or a similar one would be killed and delivered.
Sometimes more stags were found than were shot, Chrisan wrote.
Once after a hunt, a party secretary called him the next day and told him that all six stags were found.
The hell, Ceaușescu said.
How can you find six stags if I only shot four?
I mean, they were like, look, man, you're just good.
Yeah.
I don't know what you want from us.
You're just talented.
You, John wicked it.
Yeah, you, you, you, you folded the bullet through one and into another.
Um, one of the things that's funny about this, so there's a way that you can, like, if you're the kind of people who measure trophies and hunting trophies and stuff, there's like different categories, right?
And it was known for a while, like if you go to museums in Romania of like, that like have animal stuff, like that are like museums of like natural wildlife in Romania that have stuffed animals.
Like most of them even to this day are from Ceaușescu.
And he had this, he was noted during the time when he was hunting for he had like a weird number of incredibly high quality trophies, particularly for bears.
And there were a lot of questions about like, how are there so many bears of that size in Romania?
Like there shouldn't be that many trophies that big.
And it came out after his fall that what his like the people who were responsible for keeping him happy were doing is they were stretching the hides in a bunch of fucked up ways in order to make it look like the bears were much bigger than they were.
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They were like cheating to make him feel like he'd shot a bigger bear than he had.
It's like those dudes that were like filling fish with weights.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's exactly like that.
Filling Bears with Weights00:04:49
But he's not even competing against anybody.
They're just trying to make him feel like a big man.
He is.
And he's trying to make himself feel like a big man.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
So it was not uncommon for him to shoot more game than just four.
I will say that.
On one day in 1974, he shot 22 bears.
And over the course of his reign, he's known to have killed at least 400 of the animals.
He also blew off steam in the gigantic, almost impossibly large mansion he had constructed for himself using some of those same foreign loan dollars that he'd used to make giant factories with.
I know this is the name of the show, but this guy's kind of a dick.
He is a little bit.
We are getting well into the bastardry now.
So when he had taken power, Nikki had actually refused to live in the mansion occupied by his predecessor because he was like, you know, I want to live in a people's house.
I'm going to live in a humble house when I go out and shoot 22 bears in a day.
But then he visits Mao and he comes back and he's like, actually, I think I want a palace.
So he builds one for himself using the people's money that has 80 rooms, a jacuzzi, and a movie theater where he can watch Kojak.
That sounds awesome.
It does sound awesome.
Look, it's objectively sweet to have your own private Kojak theater.
Yeah, like that's not a thing that I would be like, this is a problem.
I'd be like, this guy gets it.
Although perhaps not very communist.
But yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
You know what is communist?
I mean, I'm at a loss because there's so much stuff that we've talked about that is communist.
The products and services that support this podcast, all proud members of the Romanian Communist Party.
I went and sat on the little ottoman in front of him.
Hi, Dad.
And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen and she says, I have some cookies and milk.
This is badass convict.
Right.
Just finished five years.
I'm going to have cookies and milk tomorrow.
On the Ceno Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversations about recovery, resilience, and redemption.
On a recent episode, I sit down with actor, cultural icon Danny Trail to talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances.
The entire season two is now available to binge, featuring powerful conversations with guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more.
I'm an alcoholic.
And without this program, I'm a guy.
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And listen now.
I feel like it was a little bit unbelievable until I really start making money.
It's Financial Literacy Month, and the podcast Eating Wall Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
If I'm outside with my parents and they see all these people come up to me for pitches, it's like, what?
Today now, obviously, it's like 100%.
They believe everything.
But at first, it was just like, you got to go get a real job.
There's an economic component to communities thriving.
If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail.
And what I mean by fail is they don't have money to pay for food.
They cannot feed their kids.
They do not have homes.
Communities don't work unless there's money flowing through them.
Listen to Eating Wall Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia, and I'm kicking off a brand new season of my podcast, Math and Magic, Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing.
Math and Magic takes you behind the scenes of the biggest businesses and industries while sharing insights from the smartest minds in marketing.
I'm talking to leaders from the entertainment industry to finance and everywhere in between.
This season on Math and Magic, I'm talking to CEO of Liquid Death, Mike Cesario, financier and public health advocate, Mike Milken, Take To Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick.
If you're unable to take meaningful creative risk and therefore run the risk of making horrible creative mistakes, then you can't play in this business.
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Ransom Money for Fancy Shopping00:13:41
Ah, we're back.
We're feeling good.
I'm feeling good.
I'm feeling great.
You feeling great?
Yeah.
Excellent.
So I feel like horrible.
Thank you, Sophie.
Have you feel better?
I'm considered hunting 22 bears.
Yeah.
Sophie, why don't you and I go out?
We'll shoot 22 bears.
We'll come back.
We'll have us a good time.
I'll pass.
You don't want to shoot 22 bears?
You don't even want to run Romania.
Wow.
Yeah.
I'm good.
Yeah, you're never going to wind up and share your Romania with that attitude, Sophie.
22 bears?
It's a little bit much for my taste, you know?
Okay.
What about an even Baker's dozen?
No.
Half a Ceaușescu where the bears are half a day.
Yeah.
No.
Still going to be a good one.
Dreamer's Dream.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Dare to dream.
Follow your family.
But if you feel like doing that, I'll lie for you in court.
Thank you, Sophie.
You're welcome.
Help me out in my poaching trial, everybody.
And hey, if you've got any bears that you need shot, I'll helicopter in.
I've got about a five-minute attention span like Nikki, but that ought to be enough.
Allegedly.
Yeah.
You're fine.
You're fine.
It'll be good.
It'll be good.
I'll just keep shooting until I hit something.
Much like Ceaușescu.
Now, so Ceausescu builds himself this mansion, but he realizes he decides pretty quickly, it's nice having a mansion, certainly, but that's also not nearly enough for a guy with my kind of tastes.
And so there's this, in 1977, there's this devastating earthquake in the capital in Bucharest.
And most people would say, devastating earthquake, that's a tragedy.
But Ceaușescu says, devastating earthquake.
Well, shit, that got rid of a lot of buildings that weren't doing anything but taking up space I could have replaced with the palace.
Where some say tragedy, dreamers see opportunity.
That's right.
And, you know, you might say he's a dreamer, Jeff, but he's certainly not the only one because nobody is allowed to disagree with his dreams.
Are you proud of yourself?
Thank you.
I'm always proud of myself.
Cool, as long as you're proud because I'm not content.
I'm proud of him.
Thank you.
Thank you, Jeff.
Not thank you, Sophie.
And thank you, Ceaușescu, because the thing he's about to do next is he's about to start construction of a parliamentary palace for Romania.
I thought you were going to say a death star for some reason.
I don't know why I thought that, but I don't know.
It is a little bit of a death star.
Undergone construction of a new death star.
It is going to be a death star for the Romanian economy because the palace they are building.
Again, Romania, lovely country, a lot of great resources, not a massive country, right?
10 to 20 million people, you know, kind of over the course of his reign.
It gets up to about 20 million people.
So not like tiny, but not a massive country.
And Ceausescu decides we need one of the largest buildings ever constructed by human hands in order to act as the center for our government.
Let's not forget tourism dollars, folks.
Yeah.
Well, that's not legal.
That's the biggest ball of yarn of Romania.
That's what he should have done.
He should have made the world's biggest ball of yarn and then lived inside of it.
He is not going to do that.
Sophie, would you Google Ceausescu's stairs so you can pull up some of these pictures for Jeff while I tell this story?
So today, the parliamentary palace that Ceausescu had built is the third largest building on the planet by volume.
It comes in right after the Aztec pyramid of Teotihuacan and the Cape Canaveral rocket assembly hangar.
It used 3,500 tons of crystal and 1 million cubic meters of marble.
The carpet of the main hall weighed on its own one and a half tons.
When you have a 3,000 pound carpet, that's a big building.
Now, the earthquake had not destroyed enough of the city to make room for this palace.
So Ceaușescu ordered the rest of the city center bulldozed.
He flattened a hill.
Yeah, like you do.
We got to get rid of the rest of this capital city so we can build a capital for our city.
I mean, to be fair, too, that has very, very like the forbidden city energy.
Yeah.
And he sees what happens to the government that makes a forbidden city, and he decides, I want that for myself.
Why not me?
Yeah, why not me too?
He changes the course of a river using dams and he forces, he's going to evict 40,000 people from their homes in order to build this thing.
Every building, and not only does he bulldoze the center of town in order to make this fucking thing.
So, yeah, every surrounding building for four square miles is rebuilt.
So not only does he demolish a bunch of buildings in the center of town in order to make this thing, but he demolishes and rebuilds every building within four miles of it so that it will match the style of the building.
It's pretty, pretty impressive.
Yeah, it is quite a building.
You're looking at those photos now?
Yeah, like, well, I'm seeing them.
You know, Sophie did bring them up.
We're looking at these things and like the man made a pretty impressive building.
Well, the man forced a large number of other people to make an impressive building.
It looks like Scientology, just a little bit.
Scientologesque.
Yeah, so that's pretty cool.
He calls it the People's Palace.
Like the rock.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And in order to make the People's Palace, he has to demolish multiple hospitals and as well as two dozen historic churches and synagogues.
They do that's nothing for him.
No, no, he's he'll demolish a lot more than that before synagogues.
I'm in.
He also, like, while this is going on, there's this kind of like covert plan within Citizens of Bucharest where they figure out how to lift up historic churches and put them on wheels and like drive them away from where Ceausescu wants to destroy them.
And so they wind up like hiding.
There's all these, there's these, there's, I think like three of them, these old Orthodox churches that are like in the middle of these gigantic warrens of massive apartment buildings because they had to hide them from him.
He didn't want to see them.
So they had to like stick them in courtyards and stuff where nobody could see them so that they wouldn't be destroyed by Ceausescu.
Genuinely unhinged.
Yeah.
It's pretty cool stuff.
Yeah.
That's like Yakety Sachs playing while they're moving it.
Now, I want to quote now from an article in CNN Travel that interviewed Irene, a parliamentary aide who works in the building today, or at least did when that article was written, well past Ceaușescu's period.
Quote, construction involved 700 architects and 20,000 building workers doing three shifts a day, plus 5,000 army personnel, 1.5 million factory workers, and an army of so-called volunteers.
You didn't always get to volunteer.
The palace's union hall features two large spiral staircases that descend to the main entrance to allow Ceausescu and his wife Elena to make grand synchronized entrances.
He was short and touchy about his height, says Irene.
So he had the staircases rebuilt twice to match his step.
All right.
I'm going to say that that's not a good investment of money.
No, no, no.
You got to make, you got to, you got to make it sound right, right?
You got to make it look like you're a taller man, so you have to change the staircases repeatedly.
Oh, man, just spend that money on lifts if that's the case.
Or yeah, bigger shoes.
Irene claps her hands.
The sound travels crisply.
Every chamber has a perfect echo because when Ceausescu wanted something, he clapped and he wanted everyone to know he'd clapped.
Oh, yeah, that was very big in Moogle architecture, actually.
They used to do that a lot in palaces.
They would have those reflective, the refractive, whatever the, I forget what the building process is, where you'd clap in one spot and it would travel all the way to a central location.
Yeah, there's actually this.
It's really actually pretty amazing what people can do with stuff.
There's this, like, with the way sound travels around objects.
There's this art project by the wharf in San Francisco where it's these two big metal chairs that are like, I don't know, 30, 40 feet apart.
And you can sit in one and like whisper, and the person in the other chair will hear you clearly just because of like the way the sound waves travel.
It's fucking wild, some of the stuff that you can do with that shit.
But as impressive as aspects of this building are, it is not worth the money.
And in fact, is kind of like a massive disaster from every practical standpoint.
So today in Romania, the people's palace is still 70% empty, right?
They're still using this thing because like, well, it's kind of heavy.
You have to at this point.
But like, they've never, it's never even been close.
They never needed anything nearly this big.
Like a building a third of the size would have been perfectly adequate for their needs well into the future.
But, you know, Ceaușescu wanted to look fancy.
How fancy looking he is.
He is.
And another person who liked looking fancy was Alina Ceausescu.
She had developed very expensive tastes over the period of their time in power for high faction and luxury goods.
And Ceausescu.
It ain't cheap covering that ass.
No, no, no, you need a lot of nice fabric.
And so Ceausescu, obviously, regular Romanians are not allowed to travel unless they're involved in the security services.
And they're certainly not allowed to go buying capitalist goods unless they're paying bribes and shit.
But Ceausescu's family, well, they're able to travel.
They're able to go shopping, you know, wherever they want.
We're going to go to the U.S., we're going to go to Paris.
We're going to buy all the nice luxury goods we can.
Now, the problem with that is that it takes cash to do that.
And getting cash is going to, because again, this is a communist state.
They have to get a little creative about where they find cash for these kind of foreign shopping excursions.
And Ceausescu decides that the best way to kind of wring water from the stone that Romanian had become on Romania had become under him was to ransom off the city, the country's Jewish population for cash.
That's how he's going to pay for these shopping trips.
He's going to ransom off Romania's Jews.
That's somehow somehow worse.
Like, that's pretty bad.
I don't think somehow we need to say, yeah.
Well, I mean, other than like straight out extermination.
Like, yes.
Well, and that's, I mean, strange.
It does involve.
Obviously, he's not killing anybody here, but it is, this is intimately tied to genocide because, you know, World War II ends, and an awful lot of Jews in Romania are like, well, Antonescu killed like half of us.
Maybe this isn't a safe place to stay.
And, you know, it is perhaps time to go.
But obviously, the people who are in charge, the new leadership of Romania, are not going to do that, right?
They don't want anyone leaving.
They certainly don't want a fairly well-educated and economically productive chunk of the population to suddenly leave.
And so at first, under Georgie Day, when Jewish people in Romania would try to leave generally for Israel, they would ransom their Jewish population off to Israel in exchange for money and trade goods.
A lot of it, they would like trade pigs for people because they were trying to start all of these factories.
Many Romanian Jews were ransomed off in exchange for bull semen, which was later used as part of a breeding program.
Getting that husbandry in.
Yeah, it's a whole thing.
And when Ceausescu comes to power and he realizes what George Uday had been doing, he was initially like livid, like, oh my God, that's actually kind of fucked up.
Like, what the hell?
But then he starts to get over it when he understands how much money is at stake.
And I'm going to quote from the book Children of the Night by Paul Kinyon here.
Under Ceausescu's stewardship in the 1970s, the trade in Jews became even more elaborate and far more lucrative.
Financing animal farms was no longer adequate.
Ceausescu was prepared to throw caution to the wind and demand direct cash payments in exchange for Jewish exit visas.
The ransom money was to be calculated according to a sliding scale.
At the lower end were unemployed Jews and children who were considered category D and required a ransom fee of around $2,000.
More well-educated Jews were deemed category A and could only be released from the country for a fee of $6,000.
In exceptional cases, that rose to $250,000.
The secret trade in Jews provided an important source of income for Ceausescu.
He never drew an official salary and, in fact, never actually earned a penny in his life, having worked in exchange for food and lodging when he was an apprentice shoemaker.
The ransom money constituted an emergency slush fund.
He kept it in secret bank accounts alongside the proceeds from other covert operations carried out by his foreign intelligence services.
According to the former chief of his foreign intelligence services, Jan Pasipa, these accounts contained around $400 million by the mid-1970s.
They were used to buy Western motor cars for Ceausescu's children and custom-built armored Mercedes limousines for the leader and his wife.
Along with the new acquisitions for Alina's expanding collection of diamonds, the first lady was notorious for purchasing jewels while on trips abroad.
But on most occasions, her aides persuaded the foreign host to present her with expensive gifts.
This is for a rainy day, Ceaușescu would whisper to Pasipa as they discussed the slush fund while walking along the moonlit pathways around his villa.
Secret Slush Funds Exposed00:03:37
So that's cool.
He's a Jew salesman.
Yes, he's selling them to Israel.
That's such an uncomfortable thing.
Yeah, it is pretty gross.
Pretty gross.
Now, within the broad context of his, at least these people are getting out of Ceaușescu's Romania.
But yeah, we probably don't need to do that.
So, I don't know, Jeff, you don't make your money by ransoming Holocaust survivors off to another country.
How do you make your money?
That is fair.
That's a great question.
Occasionally, I win small fortunes on Netflix game shows.
But when I'm not doing that, I do stand up and I am a podcaster.
I am also a podcaster.
I don't do stand-up.
But you know what I do like is hearing you and Tom watch Batman.
That's right.
Tom and Jeff Watch Batman is a podcast I do with Tom Ryman on Gamefully Unemployed, where we watch, we go through all of the annals of Batman history and we talk about it.
And we are doing 1973's Super Friends, and that is insane.
So you can check that out at Gamefully Unemployed.
You can also hear You Don't Even Like Sports and Unpopular Opinion, both on the UnPops Network with Adam Todd Brown.
And I do my own show called Jeff Has Cool Friends, which is a sort of long-form interview podcast with people I know that have cool jobs.
And we talk about it, and that's really fun.
And that you can get for free if you just look up Jeff Hascool Friends wherever, or you can go to patreon.com/slash JeffMay.
You get early access to uncensored episodes with bonus content, as well as access to shows like Ug Fine with Kim Krall, which is a monthly show.
The monthly show Nerd with Dre Alvarez, which is a deep dive into nerdy histories between me, who is more of like an artsy nerd, and Dre Alvarez is a stats nerd.
So it's an interesting clash of two worlds in that regard.
If you want to see me live, I run a stand-up show in a toy store in Burbank called Mint on Card.
It is the second Friday of every month at Blast from the Past on Magnolia in Burbank, California.
So our next show will be coming up real quick, February 10th.
And if you live in New England, I'm doing a very rare, one-night-only show at Redemption Rock Brewery in Worcester, Massachusetts.
And that is Wednesday, February 22nd.
I'm very excited to be able to get home.
I perform back home once a year.
And it seems like this is going to be it.
I do a lot of local talent.
I manage to make sure that the people that I work with are not scum, which is very hard in comedy.
You know what?
It's almost as hard as finding a good dictator.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, it's very hard.
I get to take the moral high point of saying if I find out a comedian is a rapist, I don't work with them anymore.
And the clubs, very hard to get the clubs to buy into that.
But I love stand-up.
I love doing it.
I love my hometown.
I love performing.
I keep the tickets cheap.
So if you want to check that out, Redemption Rock Brewery, and you can go to my social media at Hey There Jeffro for more information about that.
Hell yeah.
We'll check all of that out.
And I don't know, go to hell.
You know what we should do?
Managing Moral High Ground00:03:05
Huh?
We should do this again in a couple of days.
We should do this again in a couple of days and talk more about Ceaușescu, particularly the end of Ceaușescu.
Actually, there's a lot of other fucked up shit, including the inevitable consequence of banning all contraception in your country.
And yeah, we'll talk Colt's personality.
We'll talk getting shot with your wife.
All the good Ceaușescu shit.
If you're going to get shot with someone, might as well be with your wife, right?
Yeah, man.
Not if it's Elena.
Actually, no, that sounds awful.
Yeah, that sounds actually, well, maybe worse.
I don't know.
That's actually way worse.
Yeah, who knows?
Everybody gets to choose who you want to get shot with.
That's not true.
Anyway, episode's over.
Perfect finish.
Excellent dismount.
Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You know the famous author Roald Dahl.
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But did you know he was a spy?
Neither did I. You can hear all about his wildlife story in the podcast, The Secret World of Roald Dahl.
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Now, everybody over here?
Oh, it's one of my other favorite places.
The Twilight Gazebo.
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Twilight Gazebo.
What's next?
Dead Man's Grove?
Mom, could you please try to be a little bit positive about this?
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This audio comedy series follows a retired couple's reluctant relocation to Sunset Gardens, a flirting senior community that is anything but relaxing.
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On the Ceno Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversations about recovery, resilience, and redemption.
On a recent episode, I sit down with actor cultural icon Danny Trail to talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances.
The entire season two is now available to binge, featuring powerful conversations with guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more.
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Without this probe, I'm going to die.
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