Postscript : Mystique Rises From Grave of Ceausescu : Most Romanians cringe at the mention of the Communist dictator, but a few lionize him.

A light spring breeze blows out at least three matches before Eugenia Stanciu succeeds in lighting a candle and fixing it to the sooty brick atop the grave of Nicolae Ceausescu.

She lays a handful of red tulips onto a pile of wilted floral tributes and stands back to pay her respects to the conducator , the fuehrer , the man once known to 23 million Romanians as the “Genius of the Carpathians.”

“He was our master. No one will ever be able to repeat the good he did for our country,” 75-year-old Stanciu insists with fierce sincerity. “He tried all his life to do something for all the people, not just the privileged. And he would have succeeded if he had been allowed to live.”

Stanciu, a retired furniture factory laborer in threadbare coat and plastic shoes, claims to have lived “an extraordinary life” and wanted for nothing.

“It’s no use listening to those who say we had nothing to eat” during the Ceausescu era, argues the pale old woman with gapped teeth. “People weren’t able to go around with big bellies and jowls like pigs, but we had everything we needed.”

Such distorted recollections of one of modern history’s most harrowing eras of dictatorship are the exception in Romania, where the masses still cringe at any reference to the dictator or his brutal deeds.

But Ceausescu’s burial site has become a place of pilgrimage for increasing numbers of the disaffected as Romanians suffer through the transition to a new system that has so far brought little relief or reward.

Historians and intellectuals also fear nostalgia for the Communist period--even for Ceausescu himself--is building among confused Romanians because of the nation’s collective refusal to analyze the tortured past.

More than two years after the bloody December, 1989, revolution that culminated in the execution of Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, there is not a single textbook reference, museum exhibit, film, book or other generally available account of his quarter-century rule or the entire period after the Communist Party’s founding in 1921.

Until Romanians come to grips with their recent history, educators warn, an aura of mystery will grow around Ceausescu’s memory and retard the nation’s recovery from what outsiders have universally judged to have been a despotic regime.

“After the revolution, the tendency was to freeze history after World War I. The initial reaction was to liquidate the entire Communist period. That is why today there is no mention of it in museums or schools,” explains Ioan Scurtu, director of the Romanian State Archives and a history professor at Bucharest University. “University history exams this spring will cover only up to 1918. This is not normal, but there is no way to study without books or a proper analysis.”

Scurtu believes it is high time Romanians face up to their past and begin putting Ceausescu into some historical perspective.

But the political turmoil that has endured since the revolution has frustrated the few attempts at dispassionate assessment, allowing most events of this century to disappear into a vacuum.

The second floor of Romania’s National History Museum used to be devoted to Ceausescu and the triumphs of communism. Hundreds of sycophantic tributes to the leader and deifying portraits covered the vast display halls visited daily by thousands of schoolchildren.

Since January, 1990, the great galleries enshrining the Communist era have been closed to the public. Nothing, however, has been assembled to take their place.

All likenesses of Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, who was also a hated deputy to the dictator, have been collected and warehoused on the museum’s closed second floor. The plastic-bead mosaics of the dictator, the stamped leather images of Elena, the hand-embroidered map of the world with the face of Ceausescu rising from the Balkans, are hidden away behind dusty velvet drapes, awaiting a time when Romanians feel they can look back without wincing.

Gheorghe Trohani, assistant curator of the museum, argues that authorities should “wait for the emotions to calm down” before attempting to recast the Ceausescu era.

“We need to rethink the whole period after the First World War, because the role of the Communist Party was always exaggerated,” says Trohani, who sees no educational value in the thousands of Ceausescu tributes in his care.

“Before, no one was interested in contemporary history. Now people are curious,” says the overseer of the propaganda storehouse. “We should not be in a hurry. There is no real risk from silence or delay. Most people lived through this period and have their own memories of it. There are probably some who are nostalgic for that era, but that’s their problem.”

The ruling National Salvation Front, which rose to power amid the revolutionary confusion and is now widely distrusted, initially bared Ceausescu’s misdeeds as a means of rallying the population to its side. The Gargantuan, 1,000-room Palace of the Republic that was to have been Ceausescu’s residence and the Communist Party seat of power was opened to the public for a couple of months in early 1990 to show Romanians the extreme decadence of their late ruler.

But the display seemed only to further agitate the public. Romanian visitors, convinced that the late dictator had built his opulent palace at their expense, began pilfering its gold hardware, marble floor tiles, copper wires and lighting fixtures. After only three months, the incomplete complex was closed again.

Even Ceausescu’s place of burial was long hidden from the public, apparently out of official concern that a new cult of personality might form around the late dictator. Rising unemployment and triple-digit inflation have made many Romanians resentful of post-Ceausescu reforms.

Just such an aura of mystery has sprung up around the dictator’s plot at the Ghencea Cemetery since his daughter Zoe was spotted laying flowers there more than a year after her parents’ death.

“Criminals killed our national hero!” asserts Ion Serban, a 40-year-old research institute worker who recently visited Ghencea to honor Ceausescu. “Everything he did was for the good of the people, not for the thieves and those who want to live well without working. They are the only ones benefiting from the system we have today.”

Views of Ceausescu as victim rather than perpetrator have been abetted by persistent rumors that his execution was part of an internal Communist Party plot, not a popular revolution. Many Romanians now believe that Ceausescu was toppled in a palace coup, winning for him a modicum of sympathy and exaggerated credit for occasionally breaking with Moscow.

Romania was the only Warsaw Pact country that refused to take part in the 1968 Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia. It also defied the East Bloc’s boycott of the 1984 Olympic Summer Games in Los Angeles and retained relations with Israel after other Communist countries broke them off.

But those who rattle off purported accomplishments tend to overlook the social atrocities committed by Ceausescu. His rush to pay off foreign debts led to widespread food shortages, which his wife covered up by imposing the “scientific diet” prescribing virtual starvation. In a campaign to boost Romania’s population, he banned contraception and abortion and fined families with fewer than five children. Hundreds of thousands of children were born to parents who could not care for them, flooding ill-staffed orphanages.

Intellectuals say they are pessimistic that either the current government or the anti-Communist opposition will soon produce any impartial assessment of the Ceausescu era. Some influential figures in the National Salvation Front leadership were party activists under Ceausescu, and the fractured opposition has tended to present Romania’s complex politics in black and white.

Liliana Stratulat, 58, a university professor whose husband’s grave lies only a few plots away from Ceausescu’s, explains that Romanians remain too scarred and distrustful to accept any political party’s version of events.

Despairing of the steady stream of compatriots coming to honor their late dictator, she says she worries that those suffering in the name of reform are beginning to delude themselves about the past.

“We have to keep the troubles of that time alive,” Stratulat says. “Now there is too much silence.”