Kiss the Hand You Cannot Bite: The Rise and Fall of the Ceausescus

During Christmas week of 1989, the overthrow of a dictator appeared live on television, and the world belatedly came to realize that Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife, Elena Ceaușescu, had been criminal, paranoid rules on a grand scale. On December 22, 1989, the Ceaușescus ignominiously fled Bucharest by helicopter after a huge crowd of Romanians summoned enough collective courage to boo them off the balcony of the Central Committee building. The brutal images of the couple's Christmas Day "trial" and their bullet-ridden corpses are now part of history. Why were we unaware for so long of the savage reign of Nicolae and Elena? What do we know of the historical background from which they emerged? How could they have ascended to such all-powerful, unchallenged heights? Is there, in Romania's own past, a possible explanation for the events that baffled and shocked the world? Kiss the Hand You Cannot Bite is the first book to answer these all-important questions and to posit the reasons why Romania's history has been so troubled and so tragic. In his inquiry into the rise and fall of the Ceaușescus, Edward Behr, distinguished journalist and author of Hirohito: Behind the Myth, explores their tangled private lives and political careers. Only now are key witnesses to the Ceaușescus' early years coming forward to tell the real story. Behr has interviewed former cell companions, Party workers, and army colleagues who watched with chagrin as a laughably ignorant peasant couple overcame complex Party politics and skillful rivals to establish a fearful Marxist–Leninist regime that lasted over a decade and a half. Behr has also spoken to members of the Ceaușescus' personal entourage — cooks, doctors, bodyguards, and maids — to get an inside look not only at their ostentatiously vulgar life-style and shocking excesses but at their strange marriage and family life. Edward Behr's investigation shows that the Ceaușescus retained their power through a Byzantine system that included informers, secret police, a personality cult to rival Mao's, and a subterranean city of tunnels beneath Bucharest. Perhaps even more frightening were the carrot-and-stick techniques the regime used to tempt Romanians into collaboration with the very system that was destroying them. Sadly, the overwhelming majority of the Romanian establishment and intellectual elite vied with one another in currying favor in return for personal advancement and material rewards. Today's Romania, though free of the Ceaușescus, is still coping not only with the paranoia and shame despotic rule breeds, but with an economy and culture fallen into almost total disrepair. The grim legacy of the Ceaușescus lives on. Kiss the Hand You Cannot Bite is a masterful and terrifying account of how absolute power corrupts absolutely and how, for some countries, democracy remains an elusive dream.