Author:  Vladimir Tismaneanu Vladimir Tismaneanu is a professor of politics at University of Maryland (College Park). He is also President of the Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania. Author of "Stalinism for All Seasons: a Political History of Romanian Communism" (University of California Press, 2003). Tismaneanu is editor of the forthcoming volume "Stalinism Revisited: The Establishment of Communist Regimes in Eastern Europe" (2009, CEU Press). He is currently working on a book on democracy, memory, and moral justice.

The communist regime in Romania was a totalitarian system founded upon a continuous violation of human rights. It relied upon on the supremacy of an ideology hostile to open society, Leninism, which expounded the power monopoly of a small group of individuals pretending to be the exponents of the national will and interests. The Romanian Communist Party (RCP) evolved from a marginal underground Leninist sect, made up of no more than 1,000 members, into a mass party and eventually became the vehicle for the establishment of Nicolae Ceauşescu’s personal dictatorship based on ultra-nationalist ideology, combined with some residual, even perfunctory, elements of Marxism.