On Christmas Day 1989, Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena were executed after a sudden pro-democracy movement, assisted by the army, ousted their two-decade dictatorship. The aging couple had long been scorned for leading 23 million Romanians into a ruinous, repressive era marked by dire poverty for the majority and a pervasive fear of the government and its secret police. It was widely considered the most iron-fisted dictatorship in modern history.

Ceausescu was born in 1918 into a large peasant family in Scornicesti, Romania. As a youth, he became active in revolutionary leftist movements, and was jailed on several occasions. By the 1940s he was the protégé of Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, who led Romania into a new era as a socialist republic in the postwar period. Ceausescu succeeded Gheorgiu-Dej at the latter's death in 1965. But Ceausescu quickly implemented a policy of rapid industrialization that impoverished the country...