World Gets a Look Inside Ceausescu’s Obsession : Palace: The monument is Gargantuan, with rooms that may number in the thousands. And the new government will have to decide what to do with it.

Nicolae Ceausescu’s “House of the Republic” is big.

Very big.

The total floor area (53,500 square yards) is three times larger than the largest public park in the city of Bucharest.

Even the engineer in charge of building it claims he doesn’t know how many rooms it has. “I’m not sure,” shrugged Army Col. Constantin Luta. “Probably thousands.”

In the “Plenary Hall,” where Nicolae Ceausescu’s humble Communist Party applauders were one day to gather to provide standing ovations for his five-hour speeches, two chandeliers meant to illuminate the proceedings weigh 5 tons each. Not exactly the size of frigates, as one observer suggested, more like America’s Cup racing sloops. But, as chandeliers go, definitely big.

This Gargantuan building, a sort of post-modern socialist pyramid, rises 13 stories at the end of a broad avenue of apartment buildings, all of them empty. This is the “Avenue of Socialist Victory,” a bizarre and nearly deserted swath of forbidding Pharaonic grandeur, a construction project that required the destruction of nearly 20% of the oldest parts of Bucharest. About 50,000 residents were moved to make room for it.

For the first time since Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, were executed last Monday by firing squad, the Romanian dictator’s obsession, his largest monument to himself, was opened for inspection Saturday. Luta guided the tour for visiting journalists and provided the commentary, but pointed out that it would be only the short, hourlong version.

“I’m afraid it would take several days to see the whole thing,” he said.

He also warned the visitors not to “wander off” and “get lost.”

First, a few facts:

The building is 918 feet long, 787 feet wide and 282 feet high, or 360 feet if you include the stainless steel spiral flagstaff affair on the very top. The biggest room in the palace ( house is hardly the appropriate word, whatever the official title) is the Romania Hall, a ballroom 262 feet long by 98 feet wide, with a curved glass and gold ceiling about 125 feet high.

On a normal working day, 15,000 workers were employed in its construction--and it’s still only about 70% complete. About half this work force was made up of soldiers from the national army. The exact number of architects working on the project is uncertain. There were scores of them, working in teams, on different parts of the project. The building’s foundations were laid in 1984, with an original completion date of 1986, many times set back. The Ceausescus, like fussy rich people, changed the plans repeatedly. The central staircase in the main entrance hall was built, torn down and rebuilt at least six times.

As with his difficulty counting the rooms, Luta has no idea of the number of chandeliers in the place. But, he notes, an entire crystal industry was created and mobilized in Romania to cope with the demand.

Likewise, he said, an entire industry was created around the mining, milling and carving of the lovely white Romanian marble that lines the pillars and walls. Still another swarm of artisans was schooled to apply the gold leaf (“all Romanian gold, and of very high carat”) to hundreds of yards of interior plaster and marble molding. The towering doors in Romania Hall are of native walnut, oak and cherry woods.

When they were not otherwise busy with the administrative demands of their family-run police state, the Ceausescus visited the construction about three times a week. At least one of those visits, Luta said, could be counted on to take two or three hours, as the ruling couple, accompanied by the usual retinue of bodyguards, would study various aspects of the project while the engineers hovered nervously, yearning for their approval.

The Ceausescus, naturally enough, did not always agree on how it ought to look. One columned hallway that looked roughly the length of Los Angeles’ Second Street tunnel (“the Hall of Honor,” it was to be called), was a problem. He wanted a marble floor. She decided wood would be better. The marble came up, the wood went down.

“As a rule,” Luta said, “she agreed with his opinions, but if not, they went away and thought it over and came back with a family decision.”

Ceausescu’s last visit, without Elena, was on Dec. 16, the day that the residents of Timisoara, in western Transylvania, were beginning the demonstrations that would lead to his flight from Bucharest six days later.

“This visit was very short,” Luta said. “He was preoccupied. He came to inspect the placement of lights in the Hall of Conventions.”

It was never quite clear to anyone whether the Ceausescus intended to live in the palace, but a “presidential apartment” was included in the design, although, Luta said, it is not yet finished. Ceausescu’s office, however, was a certainty in the design, although it was not included in the tour. The lighting in this office, the colonel said, amounted to 85,000 watts. It is, presumably, a big office.

This wattage seemed particularly interesting to the project’s head engineer, probably because, for the last several years, Romanians were strictly limited in the amount of electricity they could use. Romanians have made do with 40-watt bulbs at night and heat so reduced that people slept in their coats in the winter. These austerity measures were said to be necessary so that Romania could follow Ceausescu’s crash scheme to pay off the national debt.

But the austerity also helped to finance the House of the Republic, although its cost is unknown and may be incalculable. Construction on the project went on 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Floodlights and the flash of the arc-welder’s torch burned through the night, while the rest of Bucharest was plunged in darkness, with even the street lights turned off at night.

Luta was at a loss to explain what might now happen to the building, although he could not imagine having it torn down. “That,” he said, “would be a greater crime than Ceausescu.”

The new provisional government, busy with more urgent matters, has not yet expressed itself on the subject, but sooner or later it will have to deal with it and decide whether to finish it and, if so, what to do with it.

It is a strange problem, deciding whether or not to finish off a dictator’s half-mad monument to himself. Loony as it is, Romania’s press-ganged artisans produced workmanship that is detailed and, apparently, fine. There are still acres of marble to lay, and hundreds of yards of molding still awaiting the application of gold leaf.