Elena Ceaușescu

Elena Ceaușescu (Romanian pronunciation: [eˈlena t͡ʃe̯auˈʃesku]; née Lenuța

Petrescu; 7 January 1916[2] – 25 December 1989) was a Romanian communist
politician who was the wife of Nicolae Ceaușescu, General Secretary of the
Romanian Communist Party and leader of the Socialist Republic of Romania. She was
also the Deputy Prime Minister of Romania.

Background
She was born Lenuța Petrescu into a peasant family in Petrești commune, Dâmbovița
County, in the historical region of Wallachia. Her father worked as a ploughman. She
was able to acquire only an elementary school level education. After elementary
school, she moved along with her brother to Bucharest, where she worked as a
laboratory assistant before finding employment in a textile factory. She joined the
Bucharest branch of the Romanian Communist Party in 1939 and met 21-year-old
Nicolae Ceaușescu. Ceaușescu was instantly attracted to her which, reportedly,
made him never look at another woman in a romantic manner.[3] Their relationship
was interrupted by Ceaușescu's frequent stints in prison, but they finally married on
23 December 1947.

Career in government

Elena Ceaușescu receiving an honorary doctorate in Manila (1975).

After the Communists took power, Elena Ceaușescu worked as a secretary in the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs and was an unimportant figure until her husband became
Communist Party General Secretary. Starting in July 1972, Elena Ceaușescu was given
various offices at senior levels in the Romanian Communist Party. In June 1973 she
became a member of the Politburo of the Romanian Communist Party, becoming the
second most important and influential person after Ceauşescu himself. She was
deeply involved in party administration alongside her husband, and was one of the
few spouses of a Communist Party leader to have a high political profile of her own.

Elena Ceaușescu frequently accompanied her husband on official visits abroad.

During a state visit to the People's Republic of China in June 1971, she took note of
how Jiang Qing, Chairman Mao Zedong's wife, maintained a position of real power.
Most likely inspired by this, she began to engineer her own political rise in Romania.
In July 1971, after a mini-cultural revolution launched by her husband, she was
elected a member of the Central Commission on Socio-Economic Forecasting, and in
July 1972, she became a full member of the Romanian Communist Party Central
Committee. In June 1973, after having been nominated by Emil Bodnăraș, she was
elected to the party's Executive Committee. In November 1974, at the 11th Party
Congress, she was made a member of the (renamed) political executive committee,
and in January 1977, she became a member of the highest party body, the
Permanent Bureau of the Political Executive Committee. In March 1975, she was
elected to the Great National Assembly, the country's national legislature, holding
the seat for Pitești, Arges County, the most important industrial region of the
country, until her death in 1989. In March 1980, she was made a First Deputy Prime
Minister, a state title she also held until she was executed in the Romanian
Revolution.[4]

Elena and Nicolae Ceaușescu with Emperor Hirohito during a visit in Tokyo in 1975
From the early 1980s onward, Elena was the object of a personality cult as intense as
that of her husband, which exalted her as the "Mother of the Nation". By all
accounts, her vanity and desire for honours exceeded that of her husband. As with
her husband, Romanian Television was under strict orders to take great care
portraying her on screen. For instance, she was never supposed to be shown in
profile because of her large nose and overall homely appearance.[3]