Nicolae Ceausescu Archives

How Banning Abortion Will Transform America

The Texas ruling takes us one step closer to the state surveillance of Ceaușescu’s Romania

September 7, 2021 • by Maria Bucur and Kristen R. Ghodsee

_____ Across the United States, Republican-controlled legislatures are outlawing abortion, with the hope of bringing the issue before a sympathetic Supreme Court. If they succeed in revoking women's reproductive rights, the U.S. will quickly become a different society—one resembling Communist-era Romania. “It was a horrible time,” recounts one Romanian gynecologist, referring to the period ...

How Banning Abortion Will Transform America

Democracy

The Powerlessness of the Powerful

Living in post – truth, seeking alternatives, examining Nicolae Ceausescu and Donald Trump

September 14, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

This was most dramatically revealed in the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu on December 21, 1989. As this video documents. A mass rally in support of the leader morphed into a demonstration against the regime, apparently in a flash, though this was not as spontaneous as it appeared at first. In private, ...

Feature

Remembering Romanian Fascism; Worrying About America

Losing Our Moral Compass between Past and Future

September 3, 2017 • by Maria Bucur

Living under Ceausescu was in some ways like living with Donald Trump as president. There was a lot of nationalist swagger, posturing, and boasting about independence from the Soviets. When Ceausescu refused to send troops into Czechoslovakia in 1968 as part of the Warsaw Pact crackdown on student protests, people ...

Feature

Once Upon a Time in 1989

How the West is now learning the hard lessons of the East

August 30, 2017 • by Slavenka Drakulić

In the first of a series of articles from the landmark 50th edition of Transit (to be published in September), author Slavenka Drakulić casts a rueful glance over the expectations -- some fulfilled, many frustrated -- of the generations that have lived through the changes since 1989. I imagine a cosy ...