Red Horizons: The True Story of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescus' Crimes, Lifestyle, and Corruption |
|
|
|
| Title: | Red Horizons: The True Story of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescus' Crimes, Lifestyle, and Corruption |
| Author: | Ion Mihai Pacepa |
| Publisher: | Regnery Publishing, Inc. |
| Type: | Book / Paperback |
| Publication Date: | 25 April, 1990 |
| ISBN / ISBN-13: | 0895267462 / 9780895267467 |
| List Price: | $12.95 |
| Amazon Price: | $12.95 |
|
This book is also available, brand-new, from 3rd-party marketplace sellers at Amazon.com, from $9.43.
|
The HTML code below can be pasted onto your web-site, your MySpace page, or blog - or any number of similar places - to create a link to this page:
If, instead of a text link, you'd like to create a link to this page which will display the book cover, if it's available, then the code below will do exactly that:
Check for the same book at these other US book sites:
• [ Abebooks ]
• [ Alibris ]
• [ Barnes & Noble ]
• [ Half.com ]
• [ Powells ]
… or check UK bookstores
|
Editorial Review / Publisher's Information:
Product Description
A former chief of Romania's foreign intelligence service reveals the extraordinary corruption of the Nicolae Ceausescu government of Romania, its brutal machinery of oppression, and its Machiavellian relationship with the West. An in side story of how Communist Party leaders really live.
|
Other Items You May Enjoy:
Browse Books From These Related Subjects:
Customer Reviews:
• Very Difficult To Follow The Author's Storyline For A Lay Reader
14 January, 2009
I purchased this book because I have visited Romania several times on business since 1995. I love Bucharest, and I am very impressed with post-Communist Romania and its delightful people. One cannot be in Romania very long without hearing varying accounts of the Ceausecsus and their horrible treatment of the Romanian people, their repressive government, and their awful excesses and posh lifestyle when their country was essentially starving. So I wanted to learn more about them.
Unfortunately this book, written by a government insider who served under Nicolae Ceausescu and who defected, is very difficult to understand. It is not really written for the lay person who is not familiar with the inner workings of Romanian Communism, and so I found myself floundering throughout much of the text.
There is some interesting information in the book about how weird Elena Ceausescu was -- she was basically an illiterate peasant who passed herself off as a scientist/intellectual, with the full knowledge and cooperation of her husband. But the book is poorly organized, and is hard to follow.
I still would like to know more about these people, but this is not the book to start with if you want a basic primer into the rise and fall of the Ceausecus. I hope someone writes a more reader-friendly, informative text on this fascinating subject.
- Amazon Customer Review
• Very Enlightening
19 November, 2009
As a son of a Romanian father with many family members having come from Romania to the United States, I have always known only what I was told by my family. This book helps to clear up many things which were unanswered.
My uncle, a Colonel in the Romanian army, was a "food" engineer and worked on food research. When he attended military schooling for officers, his friend fellow officer was Ceasescu himself. My uncle told me little about him, but he did say that in his early years as an officer, Ceasescu was not so extreme or weird.
In this book, the author, Pacepa, mentions that Ceasescu force Jews and Germans to pay for their "freedom" from Romania. I can attest to that as being very true. Also, the author mentions that bribery was a common practice to get people to do things for you. My father used to load up on "Kent" cigarettes and other American items including cash with which to buy the freedom of members of my family. Some ended up in Israel and eventually came to the US, others went by way of Italy or Greece and ended up in the US.
One thing my family told me which always stuck in my mind was that in Romania, in the 60s and 70s, you never saw litter on the streets. They described immaculate streets with no trash to be seen anywhere. They made it a point to mention that because of their shock at seeing filthy streets in Chicago. I asked them why the streets were able to be maintained so clean in Romania, and they said you can get into "big trouble" if you are caught littering.
Reading this book makes me ask questions about what happened after Pacepa's defection, both to him and to Romania, and it helps me to understand more about what my family had been through.
I realize that the author can omit things or American Intelligence might have censored some of the book, but what I have read has both shocked me and helped me to understand.
Two things, among many, which shocked me were first, I think Ceasescu was in his own way very brilliant to concoct this scheme called operation "Horizon" and other schemes as well. Scondly, I was shocked by both his and his wife's viciousness on the one hand, and her, Elena, fixation on her sexual appetite.
- Amazon Customer Review
• I Should Have Read The Description More Carefully
28 August, 2009
The Ceausescus were overthrown and executed in December 1989, but this book was written by a high-level Romanian defector to the West three years previous to that.
I thought it was a retrospective on their rule, but actually it was still written while they were in power. For this edition, though, the author has included a new preface (1990) and a transcript of the dramatic trial, but the text itself has not been changed to meditate upon their shocking overthrow.
- Amazon Customer Review
• The Ghost Of Communism Lives On.
25 April, 2009
I was shaking my head in disgust so much from reading this book. I think I have whiplash. The detailed account of the Communist regime in Romania is almost unbelievable. I have to check myself though. Because this book is true. There is pure evil in the world and when left unchecked, we have the slimy Ceausescus'.
But it doesn't rest with Communism. Every dictatorship past, present and future follows the same patterns. Any nation that tramples on the rights of its own citizens can only lead to moral and physical destruction. Good riddance they no longer on this earth. Justice has been served.
The title of this review serves a purpose. The main themes I got out of this book are:
1) The United States complicity in placing the Ceausescus' on a pedestal. This includes all Communist nations in general. With their entrenched racism and xenophobia; Jimmy Carter was as inept as they come. His policy of appeasement blew up in his face with the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan. Hence his weak move of boycotting the Olympics.
2) The willingness of Americans and other Western citizens to sell out their country for tyranny. In the name of watches and cash; these individuals, who were too dumb to understand the type of system they were working for gave Top Secret materials to Romania. This shows how totalitarism can only endure on the back of Western Civilization(free societies that respect individual rights and its technological advances).
3) Substitute Communism with Islamic terrorism, the United States still has not learned the lessons. We are in a new faze of the War on Terrorism( I mean "overseas contingency operations"). We now have appeasement of theocratic regimes as the "new" foreign policy.
I wish everyone in Washington would read this book. But I highly doubt they will even make the effort. So I implore all Americans to read this book as well. Place yourself in the shoes of Papeca or an ordinary Romanian trying to make a life in an inhuman enviroment.
- Amazon Customer Review
• Bought It Because Of This Op Article
02 June, 2009
I bought the book because of an opinion article by the author in the Wall Street Journal. This is history repeating itself right now with GM and Chrysler..... Beware.
What I Learned as a Car Czar
History shows government and automobile manufacturing don't mix.
By ION MIHAI PACEPA
They say history repeats itself. If you are like me and have lived two lives, you have a good chance of seeing the re-enactment with your own eyes. The current takeover of General Motors by the U.S. government and United Auto Workers makes me think back to Romania's catastrophic mismanagement of the car factories it built jointly with the French companies Renault and Citroen. I was Romania's car czar.
When the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu decided in the mid-1960s that he wanted to have a car industry, he chose me to start the project rolling. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. I knew nothing about manufacturing cars, but neither did anyone else among Ceausescu's top men. However, my father had spent most of his life running the service department of the General Motors affiliate in Bucharest.
My job at the time was as head of the Romanian industrial espionage program. Ceausescu tasked me to mediate the purchase of a minimum, basic license for a small car from a major Western manufacturer, and then to steal everything else needed to produce the car.
Three Western companies competed for the honor. Ceausescu decided on Renault, because it was owned by the French government (all Soviet bloc rulers distrusted private companies). We ended up with a license for an antiquated and about-to-be-discontinued Renault-12 car, because it was the cheapest. "Good enough for the idiots," Ceausescu decided, showing what he thought of the Romanian people. He baptized the car Dacia, to commemorate Romania's 2,000-year history going back to Dacia Felix, as the ancient Romans called that part of the world. In that government-run economy, symbolism was the most important consideration, especially when it came to things in short supply (such as food).
"Too luxurious for the idiots," Ceausescu decreed when he saw the first Dacia car made in Romania. Immediately, the radio, right side mirror and backseat heating were dropped. Other "unnecessary luxuries" were soon eliminated by the bureaucrats and their workers' union that were running the factory. The car that finally hit the market was a stripped-down version of the old, stripped-down Renault 12. "Perfect for the idiots," Ceausescu approved. Indeed, the Romanian people, who had never before had any car, came to cherish the Dacia.
For the Western market, however, the Dacia was a nightmare. To the best of my knowledge, no Dacia car was ever sold in the U.S.
Ceausescu, undaunted, was determined to see Romanian cars running around in every country in the world. He tasked me to buy another Western license, this time to produce a car tailored for export. Oltcit was the name of the new car -- an amalgam made from the words Oltenia, Ceausescu's native province, and the French car maker Citroen, which owned 49% of the shares. Oltcit was projected to produce between 90,000 and 150,000 compact cars designed by Citroen.
Ceausescu micromanaged Oltcit, but he didn't even know how to drive a car, much less run a car industry. To save the foreign currency he coveted, he decreed that the components for the Oltcit were to be manufactured at 166 existing Romanian factories. Coordinating 166 plants to have them deliver all the parts on time would be a monumental job even for an experienced car producer. It proved impossible for the Romanian bureaucracy, which pretended to work and was paid accordingly. The Oltcit factory could produce only 1% to 1.5% of its intended capacity owing to the lack of the parts that those 166 companies were supposed to furnish simultaneously. The Oltcit project lost billions.
Ceausescu was an extreme case, but automobile manufacturing and government were never a good mix in any socialist/communist country. In the late 1950s, when I headed Romania's foreign intelligence station in West Germany, I worked closely with the foreign branch of the East German Stasi. Its chief, Markus Wolf, rewarded me with a Trabant car -- the pride of East Germany -- when I left to return to Romania.
That ugly little car became famous in 1989 when thousands of East Germans used it to cross to the West. The Trabant originally derived from a well regarded West German car (the DKW) made by Audi, which today produces some of the most prestigious cars in the world. In the hands of the East German government, the unfortunate DKW became a farce of a car. The bureaucrats and the union that ran the Trabant factory made the car smaller and boxier, to give it a more proletarian look. To reduce production costs, they cut down on the size of the original, already small DKW engine, and they replaced the metal body with one made of plastic- covered cardboard. What rolled off the assembly line was a kind of horseless carriage that roared like a lawn mower and polluted the air worse than a whole city block full of big Western cars.
After German reunification, the plucky little "Trabi" that East Germans used to wait 10 years to buy became an embarrassment, and its production was stopped. Germany's junkyards are now piled high with Trabants, which cannot be recycled because burning their plastic-covered cardboard bodies would release poisonous dioxins. German scientists are now trying to develop a bacterium to devour the cardboard-and-plastic body.
Automobile manufacturing and government do not mix in capitalist countries either. In the spring of 1978 Ceausescu appointed me chief of his Presidential House, a new position supposed to be similar to that of the White House chief of staff. To go with it he gave me a big Jaguar car. That Jaguar, which at the time had been produced in a government-run British factory, was so bad that it spent more time in the garage being repaired than it did on the road.
"Apart from some Russian factories in Gorky, Jaguars were the worst," Ford executive Bill Hayden stated when Ford bought the nationalized British car maker in 1988. How did the famous Jaguar, one of the most prestigious cars in the world, become a joke?
In 1945, the British voters, tired of four years of war, kicked out Winston Churchill and elected a leftist parliament led by Labour's Clement Attlee. Attlee nationalized the automobile, trucking and coal industries, as well as communication facilities, civil aviation, electricity and steel. Britain was already saddled by crushing war debts. Now it was sapped of economic vigor. The old empire quickly passed into history. It would take decades until Margaret Thatcher's privatization reforms restored Britain's place among the world's top-tier economies.
The United States is far more powerful than Great Britain was then, and no American Attlee should be capable of destroying its solid economic and political base. I hope that the U.S. administration, Congress and the American voters will take a closer look at history and prevent our automotive industry from following down the Dacia, Oltcit or Jaguar path.
Lt. Gen. Pacepa, the highest ranking Soviet bloc official granted political asylum in the U.S., is the author of the memoir "Red Horizons" (Regnery, 1987).
- Amazon Customer Review
|
