The events of December 1989 remain controversial. Many, including Filip Teodorescu, a high-ranking Securitate officer at the time, allege that a group of conspiring generals in the Securitate took advantage of this opportunity to launch a coup in Bucharest. Some have made more specific claims about the nature of the conspiracy. Colonel Burlan asserts that the coup had been prepared since 1982, and was originally planned to take place during the New Year celebrations, but it was spontaneously adapted to the new developments. It remains a matter of controversy whether there had been any advance conspiracy to stage a coup, and, if so, who was precisely involved. The two main alternative possibilities are that these events were simply a combination of genuine revolutionary drive and inherent confusion, or that various figures in the military simply took opportunistic advantage of public protests, in an effort to capture power for themselves or for others whom they supported.

According to Burlan, the plot leaders were generals Stănculescu and Neagoe, Ceauşescu's closest security advisors; Burlan claims that they convinced him to hold the first mass rally in the Square by the Central Committee building, and that it was prepared in advance with remotely controlled automatic guns. During Ceauşescu's speech, the remotely controlled guns were set to fire randomly over the crowd and agitators started to cry anti-Ceauşescu slogans through loudspeakers. Scared by these developments, the people first tried to run away. However, given the loudspeaker messages stating that they were being shot at by Ceauşescu's forces and that a "revolution" was underway, the people were compelled to join the "revolution". The rally turned into a protest demonstration. The machine-gun fire and the messages over the loudspeakers appear to be universally acknowledged; the other aspects of this remain controversial.

On December 22 the army found itself without a leader: Ceauşescu (the official commander-in-chief of the army) had vanished, being sent by his (possibly conspiring) advisor Stănculescu to the countryside, and defense minister Vasile Milea was dead. (Initially the "revolutionary" leaders claimed that Milea was assassinated on behalf of Ceauşescu. This is possible, but other possibilities abound, notably that he might have refused to join them and been killed on that account. The (still) official account that he committed suicide has almost no credibility.) Confused, the army leadership in Bucharest decided to avoid conflicts and ordered their troops to fraternize with the demonstrators.

Fierce fighting occurred at that time at Bucharest Otopeni International Airport between troops sent one against another under claims that they were going to meet terrorists. There are various reports of other similar events. Filip Teodorescu claims that a number of instigators—possibly a small number, and probably Russians—started various incidents (including the violence in Timişoara); he also alleges that the level of violence was greatly exacerbated by elements within the military who propagated a myth of "securist-terrorists". According to Colonel Dumitru Burlan's book, the generals who were part of the conspiracy (led by general Victor Stănculescu) did their best to create such terrorist stories in order to induce fear and to draw the army on the conspirators' side. Generally, there is a consensus that there were some people instigating terror, and that others effectively caused incidents out of confusion. The relative magnitude of the two factors is not agreed upon, and no individual has ever been charged with or convicted of participating in deliberate acts of terror.

There are any number of popular theories about the motivation of the coup. Some point out that the first law passed by the incoming leadership abolished (without any referendum or legal basis) the constitution article that forbade external debts. At that time, the debts had been fully paid, and there are various allegations about the intended beneficiaries of these new desired debts: corrupt politicians, or international banks. There is no question that some individuals who were active in the December events greatly profited in terms of money and power (especially in the form of ownership in privatized industries), fame, advancement in rank, or merely the settling of personal grievances; it is also possible that any number of foreign interests may have been involved, possibly including the KGB and/or other Soviet interests.

The end of Ceauşescu

Ceauşescu and his wife Elena fled the capital by helicopter together with Emil Bobu and Manea Mănescu. They headed for Ceauşescu's Snagov residence, from where they fled again, this time for Târgovişte. The presidential couple kept moving through the countryside more or less aimlessly. Near Târgovişte they abandoned the helicopter, having been ordered to land by the army, which by that time had already declared Romania to be restricted air space. The flight included grotesque episodes: a car chase to evade citizens attempting an arrest, leaving their aides behind, a short stay in a school. The Ceauşescus were finally held in a police car for several hours, while the policemen listened to the radio, presumably in an attempt to get a clue as to which political faction was about to win. Police eventually turned over the presidential couple to the army. On Christmas Day, the two were condemned to death by a military kangaroo court on charges ranging from illegal gathering of wealth to genocide, and were executed in Târgovişte. During their trial, and before their execution, the couple recited from the "Internationale". They were shot dead after they sang the fourth word.

The Ceauşescus were executed by an officer named Ionel Boeru who shot them with his sub-machine-gun.

The "trial" and execution were videotaped. The footage was promptly released in France and other western countries. Several days later, footage of their trial and pictures of their corpses (but not of the execution itself) was released on television for the Romanian public.

The execution is still contested by many people in Romania and outside of it. Romanians claim that even if the two must have been executed, it should have not been done on Christmas Day.

Other

The Ceauşescus had one adopted son, Valentin Ceauşescu (he was adopted in order to give a personal example of how people should take care of orphans, a big problem in Romania), a daughter Zoia Ceauşescu (born 1950) and a younger son, Nicu Ceauşescu (born 1951).

Ceauşescu's official annual salary was 18,000 lei (equivalent to 3,000 U.S. dollars at the official exchange rate). Of this, some 5,000 lei was deposited in a bank every month for the use of his children. Nevertheless, he used to receive presents (e.g., a golden plated door handle) from countries and organizations that he was visiting, the misappropriation of which was one of the accusations against him at his trial. While he tried to keep account of his finances, his biological son Nicu was much less restrained and rumors abounded that he paid a gambling debt incurred in Las Vegas with a herd of horses belonging to the Communist Party.

Ceauşescu's security detail was relatively small compared to that of the current Romanian government, numbering only 40 people for his residences and for his whole family. His security chief was Col. Dumitru Burlan who claims that his troops had only two guns (insufficient for any serious defense). Col. Burlan claims that Ceauşescu was overconfident that the Romanian people loved him, and believed that he did not need protection. This explains much of the ease with which Ceauşescu was deposed and captured.

A rough sketch of "Ceauşism"

While the term Ceauşism became widely used inside Romania, usually as a pejorative, it never achieved status in academia. This feature can be explained taking in view the largely crude and syncretic character of the dogma.

Ceauşescu attempted the inclusion of his views in mainstream Marxist theory, to which he added his belief in a "multilaterally developed socialist society" as a necessary stage between the Marxist concepts of Socialist and Communist societies (a critical view reveals that the main reason for the interval is the disappearance of the State and Party structures in Communism). A Romanian Encyclopedic Dictionary entry in 1978 underlines the concept as "a new, superior, stage in the socialist development of Romania [...] begun by the 1971-1975 [sic] Five-Year Plan, prolonged over several [succeeding and projected] Five-Year Plans".

The main trait observed was a form of Romanian nationalism, one which arguably propelled Ceauşescu to power in 1965, and probably accounted for the Party leadership that was gathered around Ion Gheorghe Maurer choosing him over the more orthodox Gheorghe Apostol. Although he had previously been a careful supporter of the official lines, Ceauşescu came to embody Romanian society's wish for independence after what were broadly considered to have been years of Soviet directives and purges, during and after the SovRom fiasco. He carried this nationalist option inside the Party, manipulating it against the nominated successor Apostol. This nationalist policy was not without more timid precedent: for example, the Gheorghiu-Dej regime had overseen the withdrawal of the Red Army in 1956, and it had engineered the publishing of several works that were subversive of the Russian and Soviet image, such as the final volumes of the official History of Romania, no longer glossing over the traditional points of tension with Russia and the Soviet Union (even alluding to an unlawful Soviet presence in Bessarabia). In the final years of Gheorghiu-Dej's rule more problems were brought out in the open, with the publication of a collection of Karl Marx texts that dealt with Romanian topics, showing Marx's previously-censored, politically uncomfortable views of Russia.

However, Ceauşescu was prepared to take a more decisive step in questioning Soviet policies. In the early years of his rule, he generally relaxed political pressures inside the Romanian society, which led to the late 1960s and earliest 1970s being the most liberal decade of Communist Romania. Gaining the public's confidence, Ceauşescu took a clear stand against the 1968 crushing of the Prague Spring by Leonid Brezhnev. After a visit by paid by Charles de Gaulle earlier in the same year (during which the French President gave recognition to the incipient maverick), Ceauşescu's public speech in August deeply impressed the population, not only through its themes, but also by the unique fact that it was unscripted. He immediately attracted Western sympathies and backing, which lasted, out of inertia, beyond the liberal phase of his regime; at the same time, the period brought forward the threat of armed Soviet invasion: significantly, many young men inside Romania joined the Patriotic Guards created on the spur of the moment, in order to meet the perceived threat.

Alexander Dubček's version of Socialism with a human face was never suited to Romanian communist goals. Ceauşescu found himself briefly aligned with Dubček's Czechoslovakia and Josip Broz Tito's Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The latter friendship was to last well into the 1980s, with Ceauşescu adapting the Titoist doctrine of "independent socialist development" to suit his own objectives. Romanian proclaimed itself a "Socialist" (in place of "People's") Republic to show that it was fulfiling Marxist goals without Moscow's overseeing.

The system exacerbated its nationalist traits, which it progressively blended with Juche and Maoist ideals, a synthetis that may find a parallel in Hoxhaism. In 1971, the Party, which had already been completely purged of internal opposition (with the possible exception of Gheorghe Gaston Marin), approved the April Thesis, expressing Ceauşescu's disdain of Western models as a whole, and the reevaluation of the recent liberalization as bourgeois. The 1974 11th Congress tightened the grip on Romanian culture, guiding it towards Ceauşescu's nationalist principles: notably, Romanian historians were demanded to refer to Dacians as having "an unorganized State [sic]", part of a political continuum that culminated in the Socialist Republic. The regime continued its cultural dialogue with ancient forms, with Ceauşescu connecting his cult of personality to figures such as Mircea cel Bătrân (whom he styled Mircea the Great) and Mihai Viteazul; it also started adding Dacian or Roman versions to the names of cities and towns (Drobeta to Turnu Severin, Napoca to Cluj).

A new generation of committed supporters on the outside confirmed the regime's character. Ceauşescu probably never gave importance to the fact that his policies constituted a paradigm for theorists of National Bolshevism such as Jean-François Thiriart, but there was a publicised connection between him and Iosif Constantin Drăgan, an Iron Guardist Romanian-Italian émigré millionaire (Drăgan was already committed to a Dacian Protochronism that largely echoed the official cultural policy).

Nicolae Ceauşescu had a major influence on modern-day Romanian populist rhetoric. In his final years, he had begun to rehabilitate the image of pro-Nazi dictator Ion Antonescu. Although Antonescu's was never a fully official myth in Ceauşescu's time, today's xenophobic politicians such as Corneliu Vadim Tudor have coupled the images of the two leaders into their versions of a national Pantheon. The conflict with Hungary over the treatment of the Magyar minority in Romania had several unusual aspects: not only was it a vitriolic argument between two officially Socialist states (as Hungary had not yet officially embarked on the course to a free market economy), it also marked the moment when Hungary, a state behind the Iron Curtain, appealed to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe for sanctions to be taken against Romania. This meant that the later 1980s were marked by a pronounced anti-Hungarian discourse, which owed more to nationalist tradition than Marxism, and the ultimate isolation of Romania on the World stage.

Nicolae Ceauşescu championed a version of the virtually defunct Non-Aligned Movement in the 1970s. While the regime was sought after as mediator of several conflicts between the Arab world and Israel throughout the decade, it moved towards supporting only the Palestine Liberation Organization and, gradually, showing interest in an alliance with Islamism. As such, Romania was the only Socialist state to openly condemn the Soviet war in Afghanistan.

The strong opposition of his regime to all forms of perestroika and glasnost placed Ceauşescu at odds with Mikhail Gorbachev. In a dramatic twist, Ceauşescu demanded that the Soviet leadership return to its previous stance, even asking for a Soviet crackdown on all Eastern Bloc liberation movements of the second half of 1989.