Behind the Bastards - Part One: Nicolae Ceaușescu: The Dracula of Being A Dick

Episode Date: January 31, 2023

Robert is joined by Jeff May to discuss Nicolae Ceaușescu.   (Four Part Series)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

My name is M. William Phelps. For the past several years, I've been reinvestigating the cases of two young women abducted from their small towns, their bodies dumped deep in the Ozark woods with a connection to one very familiar name. Find them, torture them, kill them, BTK. Secrets finally revealed, sending authorities rushing to confront a suspect who's been hiding in plain sight for decades. Listen to Paper Ghosts Season 4 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you find your favorite podcasts. Jon Stewart is back in the host chair at The Daily Show, which means he's also back in our ears on The Daily Show Ears Edition Podcast. The Daily Show Podcast has everything you need

to stay on top of today's news and pop culture. You get hilarious satirical takes on entertainment, politics, sports, and more from John and the team of correspondents and contributors. The podcast also has content you can't get anywhere else, like extended interviews and a roundup of the weekly headlines. Listen to The Daily Show Ears Edition on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. more to offer you than you ever thought. You know how long it takes a working man to save $5,000? In this world where there's a lot of hopelessness, people need this movie. George Bailey was never

born. Join the many partaking in this one-of-a-kind podcast experience. Listen to all 10 episodes available now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. or wherever you get your podcasts. SaveGeorgeBailey.com. Subscribe now. Welcome to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the worst people in all of history, and also, at the same time, a podcast where I explore my Boston accent and see how much better I can make it. And to help me today, we have professional Boston coach, Jeff May. Jeff, welcome to the program. Hey there, kid. What's going on?

Wow. Incredible. You see that? Yeah, yeah. I prefer to do my accent a little bit more authentic. Let me run this one by you, Jeff. Oi! Crikey!

I'm from Boston. That's really that's more of a North Shore accent like it's what that's what you're close. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's that's very much if you were to go up to like, you know, like Malden or something like really get up there. That's where you have.

So regional dialect is wild out there. Critical question Brockton part of Boston or not? Yeah, of course. I mean, look, man. Okay, I'll put it. All right. That's great.

So that you're on Jamie. You're on Jamie's side of this. How much is she paying you? But let me. That cackle was so many. That cackle was for in honor of Jamie. But well, here's the thing, though. Thank you, Jeff.

Is that I live 3000 miles away from my hometown, right? so if where I am now when people ask where I'm from I tell them Boston in reality I'm from a small farming hamlet in central Massachusetts called Charlton uh regionally related to Worcester Massachusetts so it's hard for me when people are like Jeff's from Boston and I'm like yeah and then when someone presses me a little bit I'm like okay not really though but I've always counted I mean because Brockton Brockton's like the sort of heart of fighting in Boston which is something

that I did that makes sense that makes sense so I relate that in once and I did want to fight somebody everyone would have fought you there Jeff's Boston accent was so much better than yours robert i'm sorry his was really strong it was strong it wasn't regionalized well but it was strong yeah yours was very marky mark macky mack ah the friggin walbert you should do an episode on him

the only people that like the walbergs are the people that are related to the walbergs have you ever eaten at a walbergers i would rather fucking die it is is that a real place i don't want to be mean but it is the worst burger i've ever had in my entire life well so you know i think a mark walberg getting a burger chain is evidence of of one of the many crimes of capitalism. And you know who hated capitalism? Oh. Donnie Wahlberg. That might be true, but also the subject of today's episode, Nikolai Ceausescu, dictator of Romania.

We just start doing an entire thing about the Wahlberg family and never get to the actual topic. I wouldn't put that. I could do it. I could do an hour. I know you could. Related bastards.

I mean, we are talking about one corrupt family and another corrupt family. So the Ceausescus and the Wahlbergs, who's, who has caused more death and destruction? So Robert, impossible to say.

I need you to say, welcome to, and you're ready for it. Go behind the bastards. Welcome to behind the bastards. No, that's not it. That was, you nailed it. Thank you.

Don't encourage him. Thank you, Jeff. I got to be honest. I thought that you had just replayed what I said back to me. Yeah, yeah. I've been practicing my mimicry like whatever kind of bird mimics things you're like a mockingjay yeah yeah something like that jeff what do you know about nikolai chichescu i try to not know as much as i can about romanian people i know that he wore a

lot a lot of nylon sweatsuits uh he had a lot of cologne on yeah i mean look if you want i mean because romania is kind of like edge of the balkans right sometimes it's considered part of the balkans some people will be like nah it's eastern europe it's not really in the ball whatever i this is not the place to litigate that but what you can say what i can say about romanians which i can also say about serbians and bosnians and um um a number of other people in that area is that their tracksuit game is incredibly strong unbelievable it's like they're like extras in the sopranos yeah it's amazing if you want an if you've gotten a dita a good adidas tracksuit in that part of the world you're basically a king. Just squatting and smoking

cigarettes, it rules. Romania is an interesting country. And Nikolai Ceausescu is interesting because, you know, we've got all these like communist dictators like Stalin, who there are a lot of folks today, particularly on the internet, who will defend these guys. A lot of like weird authoritarian communists who uh who have never met a dictator they don't like and one of the things that's interesting about our subject today chichescu is that he is the one that no one will defend i mean i'm sure you can find a couple of chichescu stands out there but they're almost nobody will back this guy up because he sucked so comprehensively it's funny it's funny when you look at the yeah

when you look at the old soviet bloc and you look at like some of the dictators they had and you look at the old the like the older people that lived through it and like well you know sometimes you have to make hard decisions and it's like hard they got killed like a hundred thousand people and like well you know ruling is difficult uh It is very interesting to see the apologists of like the really terrible people in Russia. They're just like, sometimes you settle for a despot. It happens. I like, what I do like is that he,

his fate was sealed on, I believe, if I recall correctly. Oh yes. Christmas. Yeah, he was, him being murdered was a Christmas present for the whole Romanian nation and really the world, but we're getting ahead of ourselves a little bit. So we're going to talk about Nikolai Ceausescu, but we're also going to have to talk about Romania and give some history

because I don't think most Americans know a lot about Romania. It's a part of the world that, you know, it's interesting because like there was a period of time where Ceausescu was kind of like the good communist. He was very close friends with Richard Nixon. He was spoken of positively by Ronald Reagan. It's amazing. He's like a Stalinist who Nixon loved. And Reagan was like, he's a good guy. It's wild stuff.

Those are two people whose endorsements I could go without. Yeah. Yeah. So, but before we get into how he came to power and what he did, we're going to have to talk a little bit of history because there's some there's some context that is important. If you're going to understand how a guy like what do you know that he was when he was younger, he was extremely hot. That we can discuss sophie um i i definitely don't see that uh because he looks like a muppet as he gets older he ages like a muppet yeah that's romania hot yeah yeah it's the land of the muppets um well it was known as dacia uh d-A-C-I-A back in the day and like the classical period. Um, if you've ever seen, like read a book about the Roman empire and it talks about them fighting

the Dacians and conquering the Dacians, that's Romania prior to Roman contact. Um, Dacia is like one of the last provinces that gets conquered by the Roman empire. And it's one of the first they abandoned. So they're only, only hang around there for a little bit less than 300 years, and then they leave in 275 BC. I do like the fuck this energy that they bring to living in Romania. It's too dark, too many mountains. Yeah, it's like vampires are going to be a thing here. Yeah, they're like we conquered a lemon. We got to get the hell out of here. Yeah. Well, they kind of get out of here. Obviously, like we talk about, oh, the Roman Empire conquers this place or leaves this place. 275 BC, when the Roman Empire leaves, most people living in the region probably would not have

noticed much of a change because for one thing, they're still trading with the Romans. There's still a lot of Roman soldiers in the region. And fact the the reason that we call it romania now is because the like roman soldiers who were stationed there like bred with the local population and this is something they're they're pretty proud of like the romania like the name romania is kind of hearkening back to the fact that there is a lot of roman ancestry in the area now this ties back to yeah for everyone that took like seventh and eighth grade languages remember when you would take like an introduction to like spanish or french or latin or whatever and they would say you know whatever language you're

learning spanish or french they're like they're one of the five romance languages that's my that's where i'm from in massachusetts that's the accent. And it's like, you hear Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, and Romanian. And when they say Romanian, you're like, what? Like, why? Like, why, why them? That doesn't make sense on a map that that would be the language. Yeah. Yeah.

It is weird, especially since, again, if you're in that region and and further into the balkans the the language they're speaking is very different right but but in romania it is this kind of like latinized tongue um so that's cool um roman romance uh there's nothing as sexy as a as a man making a pizza and doing violent hand gestures. I mean, you're not wrong about that. Yeah. The center of Romandacia is a place that is known today as Transylvania. That's actually like the province that the Romans conquered. So again, when I say they left because of Dracula, that is historically true.

Although Dracula didn't exist yet. Yeah, we're going to talk about him for just a little bit here. Did you do, have you done Vlad yet? no no no but we are kind of doing a little bit of Vlad Tepes right now um let me tell you real quick I know you're about to do that but as somebody who taught about the middle ages and I used to do for my literacy classes I would have them write a research paper and I'm like you can pick anybody I'm so, I got so burnt out reading term papers from eighth graders about Vlad Tepes. And it's not that he's not interesting. It's just that it's boring when you read the same paper 30 times a year. Well, Jeff, I'm going to try to give you

a little bit different of a paper because we're going to be focusing on a slightly, an aspect of Vlad's time running Romania that people don't tend to talk about as much. Obviously, the thing everyone knows about Vlad Tepes, Vlad the Impaler, is that he impaled a bunch of people, specifically a bunch of Ottoman soldiers. And if you like hang out and read sort of the weird right wing kind of retellings of medieval history, a lot of them will focus on him as like the shield of the West. And this is something that like within the Romanian right wing, it gets talked about a lot that like Romania was the,

what protected, you know, Christendom from the Ottoman empire. And Vlad Tepe's, you know, was this, was this heroic figure who, who was hard enough to like keep the Muslims out.

This is not actually, yeah, this is not to keep the Muslims out. Charles Martel in France, yeah. Yeah, this is not accurate to the actual history. Pieces of it are accurate, but the broad picture is wrong. So first off, his name was legitimately Vlad Dracula because his dad was Dracule, which was a name he got when he got given an award by the holy roman empire emperor i think it was sigismund um and dracula means son of the dragon because dracule means the dragon um but it also at the same time means son of the devil which is why the guy who wrote the dracula book uh thought he was he was a good pick for a a horrible monster character name i like that you were like the guy like he like his name isn't...

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that dude. What's his name? Bram? The Dracula guy. But not Dracula. Sharon Lois and Bram Stoker. Yeah, Bram Stoker. The guy who... Yeah, yeah, yeah. From Bram Stoker's Dracula. Shitty vampire book. The first Twilight, we could say. Yeah, the prelude to

Twilight. Before we really figured out what we wanted from our vampires. Sparkles and chiseled abs. That's right. That's right. No cum gutters on the original Dracula, probably because he was riddled with various diseases. I want to see Gary Oldman have like a huge six pack in that movie with that stupid little hairdo but he's just like check out my rippling abs this is the thing we should be using that ai shit to do

is go back and go back to like movies that were made decades ago and give the male leads back then who didn't have access to modern fitness technology, just unbelievably shredded cum gutters. Like go back to, to, uh, uh, what is gone with the wind and, and throw some cum gutters in, uh,

in, uh, in, in red and throw some cum, throw some cum gutters on that guy who dies to, you know, the, the,

the Confederate boy soldier. I would like to see gutters, all of them, the rock into kill a mockingbird, like the rock to kill a rocking bird. Yeah. Where he actually just kills everybody in town in order to stop that guy from of them the rock in to kill a mockingbird like the rock to kill a rocking bird yeah where he actually just kills everybody in town in order to stop that guy from getting gives them the rock bottom as they're trying to take out yeah i think that's a good idea also put stone cold steve

austin in uh in that that that uh the the oh shit now i've you've gone off the rails citizen kane we could do that no no no what is it the movie the movie the movie where uh that guy goes to washington dc mr smith goes to washington yeah that man goes to washington yeah throw throw stone cold steve austin and mr smith goes to washington and have him do a stone cold stunner and all those old congress fools stone cold smith goes to uh yeah what does this have him do a stone cold stunner and all those old Congress fools. Stone cold Smith goes to, uh, yeah. What does this have to do with our script? Very, very, very little. So the actual historical Dracula, who is kind of your first, like he's often seen as like

one of kind of the founding figures of Romania in like Romanian nationalist discourse, because he's kind of this, this first figure on the scene. And this is back when Romania is called Wallachia, who becomes super famous. And he becomes famous, yeah, for the impaling people. Vlad Tepes is the ruler of Wallachia on three non-consecutive occasions, which happens a lot, actually,

in their history at this point. They've got this weird system by which they pick who their ruler is going to be, where you have basically this group of nobles who gets to vote on who's going to run things, and it leads to a shitload of turnover. From 1418 to 1476, Wallachia has 11 princes

who are in power for about five years each. So he gets into power, gets thrown out of power, comes back into power several times. Common in Europe? Yeah, common in Europe. But in Romania, it is a particularly violent system. And this makes sense when you look at just kind of where Romania is located, right?

Not only are they right next to the Ottoman Empire, but they're right next to Hungary and the Holy Roman Empire. And they are just constantly dealing with different groups coming in and trying to basically run things. So it's not only the Ottomans that they're fighting. And repeatedly, Romanian leaders will side with the Ottomans in order to protect themselves against the Hungarians or whatever. Like this is a common thing. So Dracula, like actual Vlad Dracula, spends a decent chunk of his career fighting alongside the Ottomans. He also, for a point of it when he's technically a vassal to the Ottomans, is leading like an illegal underground war against them. All this stuff is going on. But I think what's more to the point is that rather than kind of being a shield against like the Muslim world who is defending Christendom, Vlad is more concerned with maintaining his

relative independence from an ocean of surrounding threats who covet Transylvania and the rest of Romania. Transylvania is specifically the area that the Romanians fight with the Hungarians over a lot, and it changes hands all the fucking time. And he is a pretty brutal, Vlad Dracula is a pretty brutal ruler to his own people. And this is the thing that gets discussed less. We talk about the impaling of all of these Ottoman soldiers as he's trying to throw back this invasion from the Sultan. And I want to quote now from the wonderful book Children of the Night by Paul Kenyon, because this was a little piece of Dracula history that

I hadn't heard. It was around this time during the first couple of years of Dracula's rule that he organized a notorious feast for all the beggars of Targoviste. The event appeared to be a great humanitarian gesture. The hall was hired and tables were filled with food and wine. Invitations were put out around the city to the cripples, the blind, the diseased, and the destitute. They all congregated in a large wooden hall, toasting Dracula's generosity. But towards the end of the meal, someone noticed smoke coming from the walls.

They ran to the door, only to find Dracula's troops had locked it from the outside and set the place ablaze. Many hundreds were trapped, and a bonfire of souls was left burning into the dark Wallachian sky. The bonfire of the beggars, as it became known, was a warning. Begging would not be tolerated. It was a drain on the finances of the most decent and generous in society, said Dracula, a crime as evil as theft. Wallachians

were uneasy. It was one thing killing the rich, but to massacre the poor in such violent circumstances? On the other hand, Dracula's tactics did seem to be working, and crime fell. It was said that Dracula's guards would test the townsfolk by leaving a purse full of gold coins in a busy marketplace when the guards came to collect it in the evening the purse was always left untouched the admiration for authoritarian solutions would also resonate down the centuries so that is this is kind of like yeah that's going to be effective because you know of the murder yeah yeah when you murder enough people um you you can decrease the crime rate um that that is that is and this is a lesson that no romanian leader is ever going to forget and it kind of like he vlad is sort of setting the tone here for an awful lot of their

history right down to the fact that you've got this kind of peasant population that is getting mistreated by its leaders enough that many people are starving in the streets and so the solution of the ruler is well what if we just light those people on fire this would be this is like a facebook comments section gone to life like this is this is what a lot of people from my hometown would like to do oh matt walsh is totally down for this yeah 100 yeah yeah yeah the daily wire is already writing a think piece on how vlad dracula had the right how literal dracula had the right idea on improving our civic spaces yeah the new york times is going to post an editorial that says are there too many poor people yeah question what if we just light them on fire

you know um and i think i you know this is one of those areas where my my moral sort of uh compass is at odds with the intellectual side of me because on a moral level i think it's always okay to set fires but clearly sometimes fires can be bad and this is something i'm still grappling with jeff yeah i mean well fires can have disastrous results but fire itself is awesome like i keep i keep fire with me when i'm recording at all times i have to have an open flame near me or else what's the point what if wolves came in while i was recording right you're not gonna keep the wolves away if you don't have a fire like i'm in san francisco right now as we record this and i have a fire on me at all times because famously san francisco is a city with a wonderful history of fires that i want to celebrate

you know all of the good fires san francisco it's called knowing your history that's right that's right um so romania in the years after dracula uh who gets who gets murdered uh before he's very old again none of these romanian princes last all that long so romania spends a lot of most of the medieval period as a vassal of the ottoman empire um and this actually this state of affairs lasts until pretty recently. The country does not get its independence until the Russo-Turkish War of 1877 to 1878. It becomes an independent kingdom with a Hohenzollern regent. So, you know, whenever they have these, because this happens a lot where you're having these chunks of Europe become independent from either their former masters or from the Ottomans or whatever.

And they all need kings, right? Because it's still the attitude in the 1800s that every new country ought to have some sort of king. So there's this kind of like constant, it causes a lot of conflict. This is a lot of what sets up World War I. But Romania, because of how close it is to Germany, winds up with a Hohenzoll which, which like theoretically should mean that they're going to side with the Germans on everything. That's actually not what happens in practice, but that's certainly what the Germans think when, when they make sure Romania gets this, this guy who's related to the Kaiser.

Now you're totally our friends. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's also the mess that by the time world war one rules around like the country has this hohenzollern king but it also has a queen who's one of queen victoria's grandchildren which is also super common right everybody's got one of victoria's

kids or grandkids somewhere in their fucking royal family yeah they're collecting them like pokemon yeah exactly um and the hohenzollerns have caught at least one and she's actually she's actually kind of rad um they have this horrible war um in like 1912 1913 where romania tries because when romania becomes independent they don't have transylvania right uh transylvania is still property of the Hungarians. So at one point, they invade Hungary right before World War I, and it goes just absolutely terribly. But Queen Mary, who's this victorious grandkid, winds up working as a combat nurse in this frontline position, and she becomes very beloved by the Romanian people. And she seems to be legitimately the only royal in Europe during this period of time who doesn't completely suck because while the rest of them are starting a

series of of wars that will kill tens of millions she's just sort of like working as a trauma nurse the entire time just like trying to do good yeah she she seems dope actually the uh the Hungarians I don't know if you've ever covered this on the thing but what do you know about like their nomenclature right like the history of that name that they were just the so they're the magyars right yeah so they're magyars and then when people saw them they were like ah they fight like the huns it's sort of like how we called native americans oh my god you're indian it's just that whole like ah you guys are hungarians you're like the huns and like no we are our own people that's that reminds me of like where the word barbarian came from which is that the greeks just thought everyone who wasn't greek sounded like they were going all the time yeah it's very like oh yeah racism before racism it's it. It's that deep racism.

It's true, pure racism. Yeah, it's absolutely uncut by the later, you know, the corruption that went into racism later. Yeah, before racism got so commercial, you know. Yeah, just a bunch of guys looking at people who live over the hill near them and saying, sounds, they all talk weird. Yeah, yeah yeah they did it for the love of the game yeah yeah it's the the honus wagner of racism that's the that's the

europeans in this well at least in in ancient history yeah so um yeah uh so you got romania they have this disastrous war where they they try to take and the reason why they lose the war because it goes well for like a day and then everybody gets sick from mosquitoes and starts dying which is not an uncommon story in the history of war really yeah yeah um but outside of that when kind of world war one starts to break out, Romania is kind of in a decent position because they've got this king, their first king, Carol I, who's in charge right up until 1914. And he drops kind of right before the war drums start sounding. And the king who follows Ferdinand is a pretty smart guy and is like, I don't think World War I is going to go well for anybody. I don't want to get involved in this shit.

I just would like to – I can sell food and fuel because Romania's got a hell of a lot of oil. I'll just sell that shit to the Germans and we won't send all of our guys off to die, which is a good strategy and would have been a winner if they had stuck with it. But they are not going to

stick with it. Now, part of the reason why the new king is kind of hesitant to get involved in World War I and doesn't want to like is because he doesn't want to risk upsetting the peasants. the struggle between these urbanized populations, which are still a very small chunk of the country in the late 1800s, and the majority of the country, which is the peasantry. And the peasants, especially in the early 1900s, late 1800s, they're not quite serfs, but they also are basically renting land from whatever noble owns it and paying them kind of ruinous taxes in order to get to farm it so it's kind of a worse situation than being a serf because they're actually like they're technically free but they have to pay their boss being you know whatever nobles in charge of the area for the privilege of getting to work the land enough to produce enough food to

not starve to death which is a bad like what the one of the most common foods that romanian peasants live on in this period of time is like cheese that's infested with maggots um yeah that and like pickled vegetables is a lot of their uh their their diet um and hey maggots it's like still it's like illegal but it's like a super delicacy from there, right? They still do that. I don't know if it's from Rome. I know there's a cheese in Sicily that's all maggoty. Like, I think there's probably a few different versions of it.

But back in the day, it is not a nice food, right? It's I think maybe now it's become a delicacy. But then it's like, well, we're not going to not eat this cheese just because it's filled with maggots because otherwise we'll die. So speaking of maggots, the products and services that support this podcast will add maggots to any order you make. Hit us up. All of a sudden, he says, Linda, I see a skull. Deep in the heart of the Ozarks, a mysterious disappearance turns into a grisly discovery.

Two young women murdered. My name is M. William Phelps. For the past several years, I've been reinvestigating the cases of two young women abducted from their small towns, their bodies dumped deep in the Ozark woods. With a connection to one very familiar name. He chose his own moniker, binded them, tortured them, killed them, B2K. Cold cases I'm breaking wide open as a heated confrontation with an alleged psychopath ensues. Did you kill those girls?

You got all this information. Now why did you ask me if you already knew? Long-held secrets finally revealed, sending authorities rushing to confront a suspect who's been hiding in plain sight for decades.

Listen to Paper Ghosts Season 4 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you find your favorite podcasts. Jon Stewart is back in the host chair at The Daily Show, which means he's also back in our ears on The Daily Show Ears Edition podcast. Join late night legend Jon Stewart and the best news team for today's biggest headlines, exclusive extended interviews, and more. Now this is a second term we can all get behind. Listen to The Daily Show, ears edition on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. SaveGeorgeBailey.com. Subscribe now. We're back, and I just had a hoagie made entirely out of maggots. Delicious. I had a maggot protein shake. It was nice. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Maggot proteins, the cleanest burning protein out there. You can't do better than maggots. That's the motto of this podcast behind the bastards you can't do better than maggots no no that's it's the true super feud if you just all you actually need in your diet just a 50 50 mix of maggots and a and and you'll never die yeah i looked up casu marzu just to see that's the cheese and boy that was the romanian one yeah yeah it's it's like a pecorino from sheep's milk yeah

yeah it is it is not a delicacy at the time yeah um so one of the big like reasons that uh that king frederick doesn't want to go to war doesn't want to get involved in world war one is because he doesn't feel like he has a good handle on the peasantry kind of as they go into this period and a big part of why is that there's an uprising in like 1907 right which is you know pretty recent still in 1914 and this uprising this peasants uprising starts because this guy named i think i think it's basically pronounced John Dohescu, traveled to a protest outside of the mayor's house in a town called Flamazi. And Dohescu and his fellow peasants, again, they're basically starving. This feudal system that governs their lives is super corrupt. And the way that it works is you've got these royals who own the land,

and these royals basically hire a group of middlemen to manage it for them. And so the middlemen get their money off of skimming what they can off the top, and anything they're skimming is extra shit that the peasants are paying for, right? In addition to the pretty ruinously high taxes that the royals are imposing. Kenyon in his book notes that the peasantry in Romania is, quote, so comprehensively exploited that they were effectively paying their landlords for the privilege of working. So there's this protest outside of the mayor's house and these peasants, including John Dohescu, wind up outside yelling at this estate manager, who's, again, kind of like this middle manager type guy. And he throws a rock at one of them and it hits dohesku in the eye um this for whatever reason start shit you know sometimes like

oh yeah that's gonna start shit you ever been hit in the eye with a rock yeah yeah you're not not gonna throw a punch after that no sure sure but this also starts shit on a bigger scale like everyone gets outraged on the behalf of this guy, which shit like this, I don't know, it happens here too. Like you'll have the same kind of horrible violence being done by the same people every day. And then one day, suddenly thousands of people take to the streets, right? And this is that version of that thing happening in Romania. So the peasants around Ohescu form a mob and they start going through town and attacking all of the middlemen that these local aristocrats have been using to manage their land. And for a variety of reasons, most of these middlemen are Jewish, right?

That's just who the aristocracy is like. Yeah, we'll have these guys. decision by the aristocracy, because like if you have if like you have this group of people managing your stuff and they're all Jewish, when the peasants get angry, you can just use racism to deflect from the fact that you're really the one responsible for their suffering. So that that works very well in this case. And so the peasants revolt that follows is both an act of protest against economic exploitation that is very justified and a vicious rate a vicious racist pogrom that is not justified you know what's funny

is every time i do the show that phrase vicious racist pogrom shows up and i'm just like oh yeah let's bring it on let's see let's see who's doing terrible things to to decent people to be fair we keep bringing you on for episodes that are about europe from like 1800 to 1950 so you're gonna have to talk about pogroms it's gonna happen nowhere that doesn't have them a little playfully violent anti-semitism to get us through the day every time yeah of course yeah yeah good stuff good stuff so the peasants revolt starts with these peasant mobs marching through towns dragging Every time. Yeah, of course. Yeah. Yeah. Good stuff. Good stuff. So the Peasants' Revolt starts with these peasant mobs marching through towns, dragging Jews out of their homes and then lighting the homes on fire. But as the revolt wears on, because it's 1907, 1905, Russia's just had an

unsuccessful socialist revolution. And a lot of these revolutionaries who are kind of like on the run from the czar wind up heading over to Romania. And they start preaching to the masses that like, hey, guys, the Jews as a group are not responsible for your suffering. It's the property holding class who's exploiting you. And this actually has a positive impact. There's less pogroms kind of later in the peasants uprising. They were just attacking rich people. So that's good.

Yeah, they relaxed a little bit yeah um the whole thing comes to a head in april of 1907 when 6 000 peasants gather with axes to protest for redistribution of land right and what they're protesting for is like we we want to own the land that we live on and work our entire lives rather than it being owned by some guy who can just like jack up the rent and starve us effectively so the government of romania is like absolutely not because the people who have control of the artillery are the people who own the land so those people just have the military fire artillery directly into the crowd killing 600 people in a matter of minutes yeah i know it's pretty, well, actually,

by the end, I mean, the whole revolt, they kill about 11,000 people. So, they do, they kill, that's a good number of people killed. That's pretty good repressive state shit. It's solid for a few minutes, if I'm being 100% honest. It takes Manhattan Project level shit to get

numbers like that so quickly. Yeah, yeah. this goes on for a few months but like 11 000 people it's pretty bloody so king ferdinand who takes over seven years after this is like we just tested the peasantry a little bit and it we got closer to losing control than we want to admit so i really don't want to like have to conscript a bunch of people and deal with the problems that that might cause. Yeah, we dipped the toes in a little bit and found out that we get butchered. So yeah, and staying out of World War One absolutely would have been the right call

for Romania. But here's the problem, Jeff. British people exist and British people keep whispering in the romanian king's ear oi governor you want that transylvania do you we can get you that what are you doing that's new english my english accent what the fuck are you doing i'm doing i'm doing an english accent sophie he was like bruv bruv night bruv in it jesus we got a wolf coming in bruv so so that's what the british empire is whispering into the ears of king frederick um and you know basically the promise they're making him is again like hey you you guys are like transylvania is majority romanian population

it's controlled by hungary we agree that's unjust. If you come into the war on our side and like help us throw a wrench in the fucking German war effort, we'll make sure that you wind up with this greater Romania thing that all the nationalists in Romania are super gung-ho about when the war finally ends. And eventually this kind of thought of getting Transylvania back and all of these others, a couple of other provinces too, is too enticing for the king and sort of the nationalists in the Romanian government to not try to do. So in 1916, Romania enters World War I on the side of the Entente, and they attack attack the central powers this briefly goes well for

about six weeks romania takes back like a bunch of transylvania they take a couple other areas from from hungary they're like they're having a real good time for for like six weeks um but then then then the germans show up now the imperial german army is an army so competent that it took the entire world to beat them in this war like literally everyone else it's reminded it's a good reminder that the german military and obviously you know when you trace back to auto von bismarck and basically his description of creating a country based on the world's greatest army. Like that was his whole thing. Yeah. And like, so like, yeah, like that's going to be, that's going to be a big deal because they're so, they're just so good at war. That's been like their whole thing. They've been training for this.

And they are, the Germans at this point are obviously they are tied up the two years into the war on the Western front, which has killed more men more quickly than probably any other war in history prior to this point. They're also fighting all of Russia, which is a fifth of the planet's landmass, not that far from Romania. And then Romania enters. And so the Germans take like

a tiny little chunk of their forces and they send it towards Romania and they just curb stomp them. It's like, how about fuck you? Like, yeah. yeah within days it becomes clear that like oh they are going to occupy the entire country romania will no longer be in it like they are coming for the capital the royals start fleeing right they are fucking getting the hell out of town um and so the british decide well first off this didn't work um clearly romania did not have what it took to take the

germans out of the fight yeah they're like so we fucked around and it turns out we found out they found out yeah um which you know as the british empire is always our preference someone other than us find out but now we have this problem romania has like basically the largest oil reserves in europe is certainly at this point. And Germany does not have any oil right on its own pretty much. So the Germans are about to gain access to these oil fields that would effectively allow them to gain an enormous material advantage in this war that is kind of a squeaker. So the Germans send over or the british send over a guy this lieutenant

colonel named john norton griffiths who sounds like a war crimes guy and is about to do him a war crime because he lights every oil field in romania on fire um it's just like set it all on fire fuck this shit he does like a saddam yeah i was gonna say that's like iraq yeah yeah it like blots out the sun it's obviously it's an ecological disaster um but it's a military success he does stop the germans from gaining access to romania's fuel reserves um which you know is the smart play on a mill it's just awful um but yeah that's war it's's the salting the earth of natural resources. Yeah. Yeah. So Romania does not do well in World War I.

They get occupied by the Germans. But a couple of years later, the Germans eventually do lose the war. And when they lose the war, Romania actually kind of winds up in a really good position. And we're not going to get into like all of the wheeling and dealing that occurs. But, you know, a lot of folks feel like they kind of a lot of folks who side with the central powers kind of feel like they get fucked over this is particularly an issue with the italians right where italy's like we did all this fucking dying fighting austria and we got basically nothing at the end of the war like what the fuck is wrong with you people um romania does really well they

get transylvania um like the british their credit, actually do give them what they had promised here. And so after World War I, Romania is like 30 or 40% larger and has a substantially larger population, a whole lot of resources and really productive land. That's called buying low and selling high. That's right. They're like, we're not going to do much to help you win this war, but we will reap the benefits. They bought the dip of European civilization. Yeah, Transylvania to the moon.

So after World War I, Romania is in this really interesting position. They are subject to a lot of the same forces that are going wild in Russia. This is the height of the Russian Civil War. So the left has this huge surge in popularity. But Romania also has a pretty stable constitutional monarchy with this like parliamentary system, right? And so because, and you know, it's interesting that it works this way. But rather than kind of all of the the the energy on the left that is obviously like plays a huge role in what happens in Russia, rather than that leading to the establishment of a super radical political part, left wing political party in Romania that wants to get rid of the monarchy, change the nature of the state entirely, institute a socialist

state, they get a left-wing political party called the national peasants party um which is is very large i think it wins like 78 of the vote in its its most successful election jesus um and is advocating for like a lot well it's because they're saying like we want land reform right this thing that they had just had an uprising about but they don't ever get like an organized, large communist movement. And in fact, for most of the 20s and 30s, there's maybe a thousand like organized communists in all of Romania, which is not a ton. Like there's several million people in the country. So it's a very small population. Now, the organized far right is a lot larger than the communist left. Obviously, it's still a smaller chunk of the country because Romania, Romanian people tend to vote sort of progressive left in this period. But the organized far right in Romania is very aggressive and very organized. And they start carrying out a lot of violent fascist marches and particularly attacks against the Jewish population of towns and cities.

This becomes more and more common in the 20s and 30s. So, yeah, this is the country and the political situation that our hero for this week, Nicolae Ceausescu, is born into on January 23rd, 1918. So he like comes into being right as this, you know, post-World War I Romania starts to be a thing. His father, whose name is Andruta, owned a small farm in a village called Scornicesti. And I'm going to try on the names here. I listen to pronunciations. I'm not going to get all of these right, guys. I'm sorry. There's a lot of Romanian names. And I look, Scornacesti is probably close enough his dad raised sheep and worked part time as a tailor the family was about

as poor as it is possible to be and any money that did come into them went swiftly to Andruda's drinking habit so he is a religious extremist and an alcoholic and for mysterious reasons Nikolai Ceausescu is going to decide he does not want to live around this guy for much longer.

Very shocking. So there's this journalist, a Romanian journalist, Catalin Gruia, who interviewed people in Ceausescu's hometown after his demise. Here's what he writes about Andruta. He didn't take care of his kids. He stole. He drank. He was quick to fight, and he swore, said the old priest from Scornicesti. His mother was a submissive, hardworking woman.

The family slept on benches along the walls of a two-room house. Corn mush was their staple food. Nikolai went to the village school for years. The teacher taught simultaneous classes for different years in a one-room schoolhouse. The young Ceausescu did not have books, and he often went to school barefoot. An outsider from early on, he did not have books and he often went to school barefoot. An outsider from early on. He did not have friends. He was anxious and unpredictable.

You brought a lot of Boston energy to the beginning there. Oh, thank you. Thank you. He was just like his father was a drinker. He was quick to fight all the time. Always down at the chowder house. That's right. Yeah, that's right.

Very good. Getting into fights at the Duncan. Yeah. And Ceausescu, he doesn't ever fit in right he's not he certainly doesn't fit in in this small rural village um he's an anxious kid he's got a stutter um he seems to be pretty smart uh surviving records indicate he did well in primary school he had like the third highest grade in his class but education was never going to be like a focus on his early life uh and in 1929 at age 11 he leaves home he just is like fuck fuck living with an abusive religious

fundamentalist i'm gonna go to bucharest and live with my sister um so he goes in with her and he yeah at 11 i didn't do life was hard back then yeah 11 is like a hard 28 like nowadays yeah 11 is like 11 is like 28 from like the the grizzledest guy that you knew in your 20s right yeah yeah yeah yeah tough as nails this guy's like i lift for ultimate fighting yeah he has as many stories of woe as like a 75 year old Irish farmer by this point. It's like when you see those like pictures of like 25 year olds coming back from war. You're just like, oh, no. Yeah.

So he gets to Bucharest. He moves in with his sister. He's working as a shoemaker. And this is what first brings him into contact with Romania's fairly small communist movement, because the guy he apprenticed for was a member of the Romanian Communist Party and he takes Nikolai under his wing. This is an act of pure happenstance. Again, the National Peasants Party is pretty left-wing and a lot more popular.

So there's just not a whole lot of people who do fall in with the communists in this period. And the fact that Nikolai wound up under the influence of one of the fairly few active communists in Bucharest is a wild stroke of fate that would prove pretty bad for everyone involved, including the communists. At first, though, Ceausescu just did odd jobs for his boss. The Romanian Communist Party had been made illegal by the king because royals don't tend to like communists and vice versa. So even basic things like sending letters

and distributing newspapers had to be done underground. It was illegal to advocate for the Communist Party. So Nikolai is kind of a low level errand boy, helping them do this, helping them keep up communication between different cells, helping them distribute newsletters and all that stuff in this communist underground that's kind of growing up in Bucharest. letters and all that stuff in this communist underground that's kind of growing up in Bucharest. He did not occupy a privileged position. And to his credit, he seems to be the kind of kid who had no problem throwing down in the street for his beliefs. He is not like he's not like taking a taking the easy jobs. Right. His first arrest. He's not a Twitter pundit here.

No, he is not a Twitter pundit. One thing is not a twitter pundit one thing you have to give the kid is that he is putting his skin in the game his first arrest is at age 15 when he gets picked up in this massive street fight outside of a strike basically he's like siding with a bunch of striking workers and the police show up and he winds up brawling in the street with the fucking cops and such hell yeah next year if you're if somebody's ever like they were caught brawling in the street with the cops you're like all right like our point yeah at this point he's a 15 year old boy who's been arrested for throwing hands in order to offend striking workers that's the cops yeah the next year he gets busted for circulating a petition protesting the treatment of rail workers who had unionized illegally, right? So the state is punishing these workers because they're not

allowed to unionize and they try to. And he circulates a petition being like, that's fucked up, and he goes to jail again. So some historians, there's a debate here between at least the people that I've encountered as to whether or not, is Ceausescu a committed, ideologically committed communist? Or is this kind of just something he falls into and winds up committing to because of other reasons? Ketelin Gria puts it this way, the switch from a world in which he couldn't find his place, his own village, to another in which he still couldn't find his place, the intimidating city, marked him. His initiation into the marginalized movement of the communists was his alternative solution for integrating into social life, says sociologist Pavel Kampanyu, author of the book

Ceausescu, The Countdown. So that's one angle that Kampanyu and it certainly seems Gruya are pushing, which is that like, he doesn't really fit in anywhere. And the communist movement, even though it is a very fringe and dangerous to be involved with, it offers him like this sense of belonging that he hasn't found anywhere else. So this is kind of his way of having a social life. There's a different argument, and Paul Kenyon makes it in his book, that is also kind of adjacent to that one. It's just, it's interesting. Quote, contemporaries said he had little genuine interest in politics and might easily have chosen the green shirts or the green shirts of Cadreano's Iron Guard, which is like the fascist movement. But Nikolai Ceausescu wanted to meet girls, and some of his friends had told him the prettiest were in the Communist Party. that he falls in with the communists because it's the kind of the only place he fits in socially and also part of why he thinks he'll fit in socially there is someone tells him the prettiest

girls are communists it seems like he might be just going with the flow that his ideologies are not ironclad that he's just like yeah they're pushing over there all right i'm gonna go to there i think that seems realistic that like he's looking for friends and he's looking to hit on chicks and the communists offer him that opportunity and also over time as he like fights with them in the street and does time he just kind of gets more committed because when you when you do prison time for a cause maybe you wind up reading about it which i think is kind of the way his his his story goes also you don't want to double you want to double down if you've done damn if like you've damaged yourself because of your commitment

to a belief it's so much harder to reject that belief than it is to be like let me tell you why i was right i still defend my choice to get a sega genesis over a super nintendo even though i know i was wrong well and as i always say being a sega Sega Genesis kid in the 90s is the being a communist underground activist of 1920s Romania. You know, same essentially identical experiences right down to the fact that Jeff, you in the 1970s wound up in charge of a small eastern european nation that you then led into tremendous calamity how did i do it you know things just happen you should at least you didn't get a dreamcast then then we'd be dealing with a death toll in the millions oh let me tell you yeah i had a friend you could just bootleg games on dreamcast what a time that was you could just burn games these days you jinzeers don't know with your with your steams and your whatever nintendos you got now

we we used to have real variety in gaming there was that game with the dolphin there was go the dolphin yeah taxi game that was kind of like grand theft auto crazy was that simpsons game that was a ripoff of that taxi game oh it was a glorious age yeah uh-huh what what a time to be alive that was i i worked at a video game i worked at the toys r us video game section then so i'm like oh i can name all of these things so nikolai chauchescu is uh you know he's the um he's the he's the sega dreamcast uh uh owner of the of the romanian political spectrum i guess um by which i mean he was very very vocal about his beliefs and very committed at a certain point at least to them but he was also not the most competent activist and a number of his fellow communists would later argue that like the fact that he kept getting arrested for the cause was not evidence that he was like a very good at what he was doing more just that like he was he

had like a short fuse and would get into fights and he kept getting arrested and he was bad at hiding from the cops and and not getting scooped up everyone's like let's put him in charge of everything yeah yeah this guy that's fist fighting everybody in the streets one of the fun things about Ceausescu is no one ever says that and he winds up in charge anyway he's you know it's very Andrew Jackson energy yeah um yes he is he he'll have one or two things in common with Jackson um although I guess his big wheel of cheese would have been filled with maggots although I think Jackson's big wheel of cheese was probably filled with maggots too um so regardless the fact that he keeps doing time and he keeps getting the fuck beaten out of him by the cops and tortured and all that stuff obviously this earns him respect even

from the people who are like jesus dude like try running you know like try not getting arrested every time you go out into the street. That's a New England thing to where it's like I know I'm going to die, but I'm going to fight you in this public restroom. Yeah, exactly. What are you doing? Yeah, the entire world is his waffle house in South Carolina. And yeah, he gets busted repeatedly. His biggest prison sentence so far comes when he gets sentenced to two years in 1938. And by that time, he is a pretty notable figure in the Romanian Communist Party, even though he's not universally respected. Now, 1938 is an important year in Romanian

politics. After the death of King Ferdinand, his young son Michael was technically regent, but a council of guys governed in his stead. They were sympathetic to the main conservative party in Romania. And when the National Peasants Party wins a resounding victory in the 28 elections, the head of the National Peasants Party decides to try and reduce his enemy's power by bringing in a new king, right? So you've got this child king who has like this guy basically governing for him as a as regent um and that guy is sympathetic to the conservatives so when this kind of liberal left party takes power they decide well if we bring in a new king who wants to work with us then we can sideline this guy and that'll be good for the peasants party unfortunately the new king they

pick is prince carol ii now carol ii up to this point has been like a playboy royal he spent actually a lot of his life outside romania because he falls in love with this chick but he's not allowed to marry her because she's not royal enough so he's like fucking mom and dad move man yeah yeah i'm gonna go live somewhere else with this broad um and he had been as far as i can tell kind of apolitical most of his life again he's mostly interested in like fucking and partying um and was probably most famous in in when at the outbreak of world war one he's in a military unit like a lot of royals are and he immediately deserts he's just like absolutely not hell yeah man i am not doing a

world war one so again unproblematic so far. But once he gets brought in as king, he, well, I mean, he immediately proves to be problematic, actually. So Carol II effectively derails the progressive land justice-oriented policies of the National Peasants Party while playing the conservative

and the growing far-right parties off of each other. And this is a pretty impressive balancing act at the time, that he's able to kind of like weaponize all these groups against each other to And this is a pretty impressive balancing act at the time, that he's able to kind of like weaponize all these groups against each other to solidify his own power. Throughout this period, the Great Depression hits and Romania is obviously suffering as much as at least as much as everywhere else is. And the fact that Carol II is kind of derailing the Peasants Party's ability to push for real reform leads for leaves a lot of voters to abandon them and abandon kind of the progressive left and start siding with these weird domestic fascists

that have started to become very popular in Romania called the Iron Guard. That could never happen here. No, no, no. It only happens in Romania this one time. So the Iron Guard are also called the Legionaries or the Legionary Movement. Again, like Romania, there's a big heart on, especially in kind of like the nationalist side of things for Roman history. So they are kind of consciously like talking back to their Roman heritage and calling these guys the Legionary Movement. The Iron Guard are founded by a fascist death squad member and a medieval mystic mystic uh named cornelio cadriano um and cadriano we'll do an episode on him at some point he's a fascinating fascist and one that we don't talk about enough he's fascinating he is fascinating

um he is kind of a mix between like there's an element of him that's like the g McGinnis Proud Boy type where he forms this street fighting organization. But he also like he becomes famous because he assassinates a dude like he one of the things he's he tells his young followers is you need to be forming death squads and murdering people. And it's okay if we get executed, like that's actually dope. If we get killed for assassinating leftists, like that's a thing if we get killed for assassinating leftists like that's a thing that we should seek to do um so he definitely sucks another one of his beliefs is that he needs to father thousands of children with women at all levels of romanian society

because the saint that he liked he believes did that too um so that's a good way to find a saint man yeah which saint is all about straight fucking this horny fascist uh uh uh fucking mystic who yeah dresses like a medieval like basically dresses in renfair gear marching from town to town and inciting pogroms right that's kodrianu's like primary method of uh of pushing tour like he's on an anti-semitic tour yeah now obviously hitler loves this guy hitler is a big kodrianu fan um and as his movement gains power the nazis start shipping guns over to the iron guard right kind of like underground here have some guns we'll be over there pretty soon guys so get ready um king carol the second he finds the iron guard useful in some ways and he's you know perfectly willing

to overlook a few pogroms even though his mistress is jewish um because he's like hey you know whatever helps me whatever helps me stop these peasant people from reducing the power of the royals political anti-semites were selective in their choice of enforcement that's shocking another thing that only occurred once in romania so king carol ii generally considers the fascists useful whereas the socialists and the peasants party people they want to reduce his power so he he sides with them a lot throughout the 20s um and early 30s but then in like 1937 the Iron Guard starts to win larger and larger shares of the vote. I think they top out at like 22 percent of the vote in the 37 election. And he's like, oh, shit.

Well, I can't really control these guys necessarily. Right. Like they were it was a good bet to back them earlier. But now Kodrianu is like getting within spitting distance of real power. And he doesn't owe me anything. Right. Like he's not i can't actually trust this guy he could fuck me up even worse than these peasants party people would so carol the second starts to panic so hard for me not to hear you go party people whenever you say party people by the way yeah i mean most of these parties would have would have sucked ass i mean i i assume the national peasants party parties would have been okay not a lot of um there it is happening and yeah apparently hey

although all the hot people are at the communist party so that sounds that sounds like it could be good um although you might wind up fucking nikolai chauchescu which is a mixed bag although sophie says he's hot so you know sophie is down only one photo i take down. Only one photo. I take it back. Only one photo. Oh, he was just one of those guys that got caught at a good angle. So he's hot forever in history books. It looked almost like a mugshot.

I don't know if it actually is or not, but there was like one photo. And then you like, look at the rest. You're like, Oh no. It's like everyone sharing the hot Stalin photo. Yeah.

Yeah. Which is is not not accurate shockingly you can't rely on uh on pictures of joseph stalin to know how he actually looked um but you know what you can rely on robert us and no one else the and the products and services that support the show well sure i just don't separate between us and the products and services that support the show. Well, sure. I just don't separate between us and the products and services that support our show. You know, we're one beautiful amalgam that you should just dive into and let it subsume you. Swim in us. I mean, if you... Swim in us.

Stop. Just absorb it in here. You know what? I love goods and services that are provided by the sponsors of this podcast. As a matter of fact, it should be known that I am a subscriber slash purchaser slash user of all of these things. Yeah, Jeff's buying gold. He's joined the Washington State Highway Patrol. He's doing all of the things our sponsors are just to do.

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get to help form the government. And that's not going to end well. And I'm going to quote from the book Children of the Night here. And now it was for the king to decide who would become prime minister. He knew the public wanted to change and began looking down the table of results. In fourth place, behind Codriano's legionaries, was the moderately fascist National Christian Party, led by Octavian Goga. The anti-Semitic poet was a great friend and supporter of the king and codriano's most bitter rival he had scored just nine percent of the vote as far as carol was concerned he was perfect for the job and it's anti-semitic poet is the most fascinating combination of two words in history yeah just just just a racist but a moderate fascist yeah they'll be like nazi ballerina like there's just there's certain

words that you don't necessarily conflate the two things together yeah and you don't also you don't hear a lot of moderate fascists uh these days but i guess it is i mean it is actually a thing in this period like it's a it's reasonable to draw a line between the two of them because the iron guard um and the national christian party are pretty pretty bitter rivals and spend a lot of time fighting each other i would add that i would add that we have that here with the the quote law and order uh yeah people that that really they're like well you know i don't believe in all of these things but you know we should make sure that anybody that commits a crime is shot in the face yeah yeah it's it's those weirdos who are like i think we should execute people for spraying

graffiti during protests but also fuck the january 6th folks where it's like yeah you're a moderate fascist yeah yeah just a diet fascist a little yeah yeah so so that's who uh that's who uh this moderate fascist poet uh anti-semite goga gets made prime minister by the king and within two days of his appointment um he has shut down both of the large jewish owned newspapers in romania um he has the b Bucharest Bar suspend the licenses of every Jewish lawyer that they can find. He rescinds the right to sell liquor and tobacco by Jewish shopkeepers.

And he withdraws citizenship from all 225,000 naturalized Romanian Jews. Now, I'm going to go out on a limb here. Not cool. Not cool. Not cool. cool not cool sorry if i'm sorry if i'm courting controversy here but that is an uncool move kind of a dick move some would say and this podcast is brought to you by the letter p for pogroms because that's what that's what comes next is there's a bunch of pogroms are they a sponsor because i don't support that

that specific one i do not do i do not do not consume that yeah that i mean we we never know who's going to sponsor the show in the programmatic ad so it's not impossible but we we we do we did we do have a hard no pogrom line in our in our ad sheet and now back to our regularly scheduled program yeah um so there's a bunch of pogroms. There's also fighting in the streets between yeah, and his green shirts and between these moderate fascists,

right? Because they're the green shirts are angry that they don't get the full fascism. They get some pogroms, but not all of the pogroms that they had wanted. The idea of a moderate anything

getting into a fist fight is just very yeah yeah i want racism i want slightly less racism and then a little less racism in the street racism so this is all uh basically a a con by king carol like he knows that well if i put you know this fucking goga guy in power he's going to do a bunch of horrible shit. And also the legionaries are going to try to do them an uprising. And it's going to be this big, gnarly mess. And it is this big, gnarly mess.

And he uses that to be like, hey guys, parliamentary democracy just can't work for some reason. So you know what? We're putting an end to that. I'm suspending the constitution. And now I'm the dictator king. So he does that in the 10th of February, 1938 now i'm the dictator king uh so he does that in the 10th of february 1938 he becomes the dictator king of romania um so that's cool good good for him

uh and he's not going to be good at this right carol the second is kind of shitty at everything um the good thing that he does i will give him credit for one thing which is that he has codriano murdered um they arrest him and a bunch of his supporters and just execute them at a black site basically um and that's okay i'm i'm i'm not against that um but he mainly executes quadriano because he's creating his own fascist movement that is very deliberately ripping off the legionaries he basically like does the does the fucking kirkland brand uh iron guard movement um and in fact like hitler and the nazis will like make fun of him for being a fake fascist they're like look at this guy he's not even like a real fascist he's just

copying this dude he murdered it's like when transformers came out and sci-fi had transmorphers yeah yeah he is the transmorphers of romanian fascism um he also steals a huge percentage of the national budget to siphon into his private bank account for when he inevitably gets forced out of the country and has to abdicate we couldn't have this happening happening soon yeah we would not have this happening anytime soon in america no no no of course not of course not because we don't call them kings so it's fine yeah so it's not the same thing yeah yeah so the you know he's he's not a very successful royal dictator he is not going to last long um and while he is kind of trying to solidify his

hold on power the ussr and nazi germany are deciding that you know why can't we be friends which is what that song is about. Actually, it's about the Molotov Ribbentrop Pact. So the USSR and the Nazis have them a pact and they're like, what if we what if we met in Poland and kissed at the line we draw and and enforce with an unbelievable quantity of human blood to be fair, by the way, that song is by the band war. So it really, it really does fit. It does.

It's actually kind of perfect. So yeah, the USSR and Nazi Germany are like briefly BFFs in, in taking Poland and the Molotov Ribbentrop pact. A lot of people don't know this, but it contains some secret provisions. And one of those secret provisions is the Nazi saying Stalin, you can take Bessarabia from Romania, which is Bessarabia is like one of the wealthiest parts of Romania. It's like literally a third of like the population

and the economy of Romania is in Bessarabia. So when the Soviets move in and take it, Romania is like, Hitler, come on, guy, we're kind of fascist. You want to have our back? And Hitler's like, no, man, you killed my boy, Kodrianu. Fuck you guys. So this doesn't work great for anybody. It certainly does not increase Carol II's popularity back home. So that's going to be one of the reasons why he doesn't last very long. And while all this is going on, right, in the late 30s, you've got this fascist movement becoming ascendant. You've got increasing crackdowns on the communists. There's maybe 700 of them, many of whom are not free in the country at this point in time. But Ceausescu, you know, manages to stay alive, in part because the

fascists are not, obviously, like the romanian fascists like all fascists have a lot of anti-communist rhetoric but the communists are not the iron guards focus because there's just not that many of them right it's not like they're actually have bigger threats from the state and so that's who they focus on and so you know while ceausescu is continuing his his string of getting arrested for a bunch of bullshit, he doesn't get murdered by the Nazis, and he doesn't, I don't think, spends a particularly large amount of time fighting with them in the street. What he does do is spend a lot of time hitting on the women of the Romanian Communist Party.

This is how, in 1939, he meets his future wife, Elena Petrescu. She had grown up in a tiny rural village like Nikolai and become a communist after moving to the city. Elena did not do well in school. Unlike Nikolai, she does not appear to be a good book learner. She failed basically every class, but in the 1930s,

she gets a job at a black market pill mill and decides that this means that she's a chemist. So her lifelong ambition is going to be to become a chemist because she works at a pill mill that's basically reverse engineering diet pills and then pressing them. I mean, look, honestly, if you work in a place that's going to war a lot, having what is essentially speed on demand, that's great. Give me some of that bootleg ephedrine or whatever.

Not a bad idea. So in the summer of 1939, the Romanian Communist Party holds a picnic and a small fair that includes a fundraising competition. And the way they do this competition is that all of the girls get together and they give each of them a number. And the girl who is able to basically sell the most tickets to raise funds at this party is named Queen of the Ball. Now, Elena is not a charismatic person.

She is not good at talking to people. She does not like crowds. She is not social. She is not someone who is going to be very good at selling tickets on her own. But Nikolai seems to pretty much falls in love with her at first sight. He has just gotten out of prison for distributing communist propaganda at this point and he is like uh she obviously likes him too because he's this like hard son of a bitch who's just gotten out of prison he's like a fighter

for the party and so they make eyes and kind of as his first gesture to win her favor he threatens to beat up all of his friends if they don't buy tickets from elena uh in order to so that she can win uh queen of the ball uh which is both will show because in the future he is going to do like the nationwide version of this like sending out squads to beat the shit out of people who don't vote for the communist party um also she looks like uh the kid from dick tracy yeah like she looks she certainly does like the kid from Dick Tracy. Yeah. Like she looks like the nerd from Can't Hardly Wait. If you remember, like she looks exactly like that, dude. Yeah, she is.

That's a good way of looking at her. And she's a handsome woman. Nikolai Ceausescu looks like a Muppet version of a communist. Like he's got that big head that you could if you look at a picture of adult ceausescu you can't imagine him talking normally you can only imagine the entire top of his head flapping backwards yeah he looks like sam eagle yeah he does he has strong sam eagle characteristics so um this is i don't know it's kind of sweet it's it there's a darker tone to it because he's going to like violently fake an election later in his life um know it's kind of sweet it's it there's a darker tone to it because he's going to like violently fake an election later in his life but it's

kind of sweet now that he's doing that to you know make this girl he likes feel pretty so that's that's kind of nice in the future yeah if she if the thing is this like look not for nothing but seeing her

win a beauty contest I'd be like, well, this is clearly a fix, right? Well, yeah. Apologies to her family. No, no. I mean, her family is terrible. Anyway, so yeah, that goes great for him and the two of them hook up and they get married and he's going to spend a lot more time in prison, but they seem to have legitimately been a love match. Now, normally that's sweeter than it turns out to be because they are both some of the worst people who have ever lived, but

I'll give them one thing. They seem to have been legitimately in love. So that's... That's, yeah, monsters can be in love. That's the thing. Yeah, there you go. In 1940, Carol II's dictatorship collapses with some help from the Nazis. And the new cat in town is a military man named Marshal Antonescu, who basically runs a military dictatorship with fascist trappings.

He uses the Iron Guard. He puts them adjacent to power. But Antonescu, he's a monster, but he's not ideologically a fascist. Like you can again, this is where we get into the terms because he like is a major player in the Holocaust. He's a terrible, terrible person. I'm not saying that to be like he's not as bad as these fascists. He just he is a military dictator.

He is not a fascist dictator, and he doesn't really like the Iron Guard all that much. He's willing to use them because he's a strong nationalist, but he considers them way too radical to actually run things. And while all this is going on, all of Romania's communists are either in prison or hiding out in the USSR. And again, there's maybe 600 or 700 of them in the country still. The leaders of the movement in Romania are Anna Parker, a Jewish woman and a veteran revolutionary Stalinist,

and Georgi Georgiude. He's an electrician who became an illegal train union organizer and spends some of Ceausescu's first arrests are like supporting his Georgi georgie day's um um illegal train strikes and he's also a stalinist everybody's a stalinist right um so georgie was a poor peasant uh with what marxists considered unimpeachable proletarian pedigrees he's basically like the the archetype of the kind of guy stalin pushed as the ideal new soviet man he's this like, born poor working his entire life organizing unions and fighting in the streets to support the rights of workers to organize. Parker, meanwhile, she's also does a lot of time for the cause. She is a tough lady. In fact, she gets the nickname the Iron Woman of the Iron Lady of Romania. But she's also an intellectual,

right? She's one of these people who comes to communism like through reading about it and and is is a is a like as opposed to like george uday does not read books right does not does not talk a lot about reading he's not citing a whole lot of like passages from marxist tracks which pawker is um she is fiercely devoted to the cause, but the fact that she's also on kind of this creative, ideological side of things means that she's going to run into conflict during the messy early years of the USSR. And for a little while, Pocker is in Stalin's good books. She flees to the USSR for a period. She goes to this Soviet school for revolutionaries where she studies tactics to help her build the covert communist movement in Romania. But she also encounters a lot of difficulties because, number one, she's Jewish.

And number two, she's a woman. And so those things are not good at the time. Not not great at the time. Now it's perfect for all of those people, especially in America. Yeah, yeah. Everything's everything's fine now. But but back at the time, back back America. Yeah, yeah. Everything's everything's fine now. But but back at the time, back back at the day, difficult. And she also runs into problems because she she runs

afoul of Stalin and she gets executed for or and her husband gets executed for being a Romanian spy. Right. I don't believe he is. I've never seen any evidence that Parker's husband was spying for anyone. He seems to have been a really committed communist, but he gets executed over in the USSR and Anna finds out about it while she's four years into a 10-year prison sentence in Romania. She had formed a group of prisoners called the Women's Collective of Anti-Fascist Prisoners. And when the news reaches them that Anna's husband has been executed, she doesn't even get time to mourn him before the other women demand that she explain why she'd married a traitor. A criticism session is held in prison in which Anna is blamed for not warning the party that her husband was an agent provocateur. And eventually Anna tells them,

I am now racking my brain to find something, a sign of any kind that would have led me to believe he was an enemy of the people. I'm not placing any doubt on the party's decision. The party knows better than I, but I did not see anything. And as much as I searched my soul, my recollections, my memory, I don't find anything that could prove such a thing, which is like almost certainly true and kind of a devastating thing to

imagine this woman who's stuck in prison, who's just found out the love of her life has been killed by the state and is now like, well, I, the party must have been right in killing him but i just didn't see a sign of it um it's super fucked up and the rest of the best way to handle that is to just be like well look i'm sure the people that are still alive

with the guns they had great reason to do that i'm just saying i personally didn't see but they probably nailed that shit i just maybe he was tricking me. It doesn't go well for her because she doesn't she does not like repudiate him fully. And so these these ladies that she's formed into a group in prison, like sin backward to Stalin saying, and I won't denounce her dead husband. And this winds up being one of the justifications Stalin would later use for backing Georgie over Anna because she winds up. Yeah, it would be funny if it was like a real true lies scenario where he was like this huge jacked like austrian sounding god's like i sell computers

yeah no it doesn't it doesn't work out that way, uh, unfortunately. Um, but yeah, um, any, okay. In any case, uh, Georgie, Georgie day also spends his war years locked away in a fascist prison because the

Antonescu regime is not quite as Nazi as the straight up Nazis wanted it to be. Um, communists in concentration camps there did have a higher rate of survival than they did in like Germany. So what actually happens is once all these people get thrown into these prisons they kind of settle out what the communist government of the future romania is going to be in these prison cells which is a thing that happens every time you throw a bunch of radical revolutionaries into prison cells together is they wind up sorting out the future regime that they're going to uh bring into power at a certain

point they got they got time yeah exactly they've got time to like read books about communism and figure out who's going to do what when they eventually wind up in power when our number comes up we're gonna have to go ahead and make a perfect communist government yep and that's exactly what's going to happen um so georgeday is obviously, I think everyone kind of is aware just because he's such a powerful person that he's going to wind up being like the top man if they ever do wind up in power. And Ceausescu sees this. And he is, again, he gets thrown into prison again during the World War II years for conspiring against the social order. And he kind of turns himself into a gopher uh for george uday he makes himself available for like whatever sort of side jobs they need done he does everything

that'll keep it like he doesn't care what he has to do no no matter how like banal or low the task is as long as it's going to keep him on the lips of his betters right i just want to stay around george uday you know as long as he keeps seeing me and knows me as this guy who can handle anything he wants. That's what I'm going to do. He's just jazzed to be on the show, man. Yeah, just happy to be here, man. Just happy to be here. And this strategy worked splendidly, as Paul Kenyon writes.

They had a lackey in prison, a young hooligan who brought them food packages and ran messages. prison, a young hooligan who brought them food packages and ran messages. His name was Nikolai Ceausescu, a 22-year-old trainee cobbler who was regularly in trouble for fighting and delivering communist leaflets. Some of his fellow inmates thought him weird and said that they avoided him because he was such a bore with absolutely no sense of humor. In the presence of big men like George Uday, Ceausescu remained largely silent and deferential. He avoided speaking whenever possible because of a stutter so severe it made his legs shake. But he also possessed a powerful memory and an instinctive intelligence and sat among the future leaders listening to everything they said and slowly learning. And this actually works out well for him because since he's too kind of scared and nervous to speak up or say anything, he never winds up running afoul of George Uday, right? He puts himself

in positions to help with stuff, but he's never running anything that can go badly and reflect poorly on him. And he pays attention to the social relationships and kind of worms his way closer and closer to George Uday over time, which is the, I mean,alin does a version of this that's how he rises to power too this this is a pretty effective tactic so if you are ever in a revolutionary underground movement that's seeking to overthrow the state and institute a new form of government keep an eye out for like the weird quiet kid who just hangs around doing chores shoot that guy pretty quick okay that's my official my official advice. I need to have in my in my. I need to have that written down. Yeah, just make a note. Drop that kid before he gets

too far. That's where all the problems start. Yeah, gonna get on the moves ready, you know, legally and Robert does not mean that literally. I do mean that literally. Yeah, no, he does before you overthrow the government kill the quiet kid in your movement just drop them all what did what is this amateur take a page out of dracula's book burn them in a thing put them all in a building and light it on fire only let the loud assholes inherit power because that will never go badly. No, we've as we just mostly just get podcasts. Yeah,

exactly. Uh, and I think that's going to do it for our part one of Chow Chesku and, uh, boy, howdy. Have you had a good time here? Jeffrey,

it's all I could ask for. Jeff Toberfest. That's me. That's, that's who I am. I'm glad that you got my name correct. That's right. That's me. That's that's who I am. I'm glad that you got my name correct. That's right. That's right.

That's that's you and the festival dedicated to celebrating your many accomplishments. Every October. I got to say, I love being here. Love spending time with you guys. It's a real blast. I love relearning. Sometimes I'm like that degree I got wasn't worth anything. And then I do this show every once in a while.

And I'm like, that's good enough. Jeff, you got to plug anything here before we roll out are people still listening at this point in time when we do plugs let's do it man um i so uh depending on when this goes up uh i run a stand-up show a live stand-up show at a toy store in burbank california uh called mint on card at a store called blast from the past on magnolia in burbank california you can check that out the second friday of every month i have a great podcast called jeff has cool friends where i interview my friends that i think have really cool jobs and i think you should pay attention to them you can get that for free or you can get early access to uncensored episodes with bonus content at patreon.com slash jeff may it's just my name i also

have shows like ugh fine with Kim Crawl. Isn't that easy? It's so easy. Ug Fine, my monthly show with Kim Crawl. And I also have a great show called Nerd with Dre Alvarez that we do.

We do on the Patreon and for free. And that is, we just do deep dives on nerdy shit. I also do Tom and Jeff Watch Batman on the Gamefully Unemployed

Network, which we keep needing to bring you on to. I know you like, you on to i know you like the you want to do batman stuff i do want to do batman stuff by which i mean i want to i want to beat up poor people in the street while wearing ten thousand dollars in in body armor in armor yeah yeah of course as an olympic level athlete yes yeah as a master martial artist beating the shit out of a heroin addict in an alley perfect yeah just

breaking someone's back for stealing a magnavox yeah and uh you can also hear me on unpopular opinion and you don't even like sports both on the unpops network um other than that uh you know thank you this is fun we have fun yes i i had fun here relax good time yeah yeah i wish i knew better health insurance after this that's what i'm saying so be look there are a lot of things said at the end there buddy i'm i'm not gonna give our followers bad advice about how to form their underground anti-government terrorist cell the The question is, why aren't you giving that advice, Sophie? Because I really like having health insurance. Well, I like making sure that some weird quiet kid doesn't wind up in charge after the revolution

and murders tens of millions of people. I thought I thought I really there's a lot of really it's you could be really not like i've encouraged violence against so many less deserving i hear what you're saying and i know that you're like well i'm not i'm not worse and like you have but i particularly hate sophie sophie's tanky arc has begun tonight this is good this is unfortunately this was sophie's choice to hate the thing oh yes sophie's choice joke we did it get it we did the whole thing and she has a boston accent in that movie no yep no so do i anyway that's gonna be the episode. Come back tomorrow. Well, not tomorrow, but soon. Thursday. And there will be more. More Ceausescu.

Sweet. Less Romanian history. More getting into the weeds of Ceausescu. So stick around for that, folks. It ends in tens of thousands of starving orphans. As it always does.

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