TV Reviews : Study of Ceausescu’s Reign of Terror in Romania

For some episodes in history--such as Nicolae Ceausescu’s spectacularly disastrous totalitarian hold on Romania from the mid-’60s to 1989--no explanation is sufficient.

Certainly, author-journalist Edward Behr doggedly sifts through the evidence and eyewitness accounts of this rule by terror in his BBC-produced “The Rise and Fall of Ceausescu” (tonight at 9 on KPBS Channel 15, at 11 p.m. on KCET Channel 28). Yet even the clearly rational and cool Behr, who brilliantly narrates, seems to eventually fall under a spell of macabre fascination at the Ceausescu phenomenon, a reign that was like Lewis Carroll’s mad tea party come to life.

The unlikely course by which Ceausescu rose from a stuttering, barely literate cobbler’s apprentice through the ranks of the Communist Party and outmaneuvered superiors to take power in 1965 is bizarre and fascinating enough; but his ability to hoodwink foreign leaders, plus his growing paranoid megalomania, is what really capture Behr’s attention. Ceausescu’s anti-Soviet stance bought him a great deal of goodwill (meaning aid) with Western powers; Jimmy Carter went so far as to call him a champion of human rights.

Others, such as the dictator’s daughter, Zoia, knew better, seeing how his deteriorating health “changed” him, resulting in domestic policies only a madman could have conceived. Behr’s account isn’t just of absolute power corrupting absolutely, but of an entire nation with no democratic tradition bowing to that power without question.