Ask Lemmygrad

my idea is that Ceausescu was one of the worst leaders

One of the worst leaders compared to who? Compared to any leader Romania has had before 1948 or after 1989? Compared to other socialist leaders? Which ones? Obviously he was no Stalin, no Ho Chi Minh, no Kim Il Sung...but compared to some of the later era Eastern European leaders i think he was not the worst. Better than Gorbachev for sure imo.

I think the only fair way to judge is to compare the level of development Romania was at before vs after. Obviously some pretty big mistakes were made, such as insisting too much on keeping a distance to the Soviet Union to the point where Romania took IMF loans instead of asking for assistance from a fraternal socialist state. That was certainly a massive error.

But i don't think that the level of infrastructure and industry development that was achieved during his time was a mistake. I think it is admirable how much Romania managed to build during that time, and how much the standard of living was improved. I also think that culture really flourished during that period, but this is something more intangible and subjective so let's put that aside and look at objective development.

Romania had virtually nothing before communism. It was a largely backwards, agrarian society with very little industry and only a few cities, primarily the capital and some older cities in Transylvania (Rom.: Ardeal) built under the Habsburg empire, which had parts that looked like modern European cities (for the late 19th, early 20th century), and those parts were exclusively built by and for the rich. The rest of the population lived in rural villages or very poor urban conditions.

During communism virtually entire cities were built, factories, dams, bridges, ports, hydroelecric powerplants, rail, an entire metro system...a good portion of that was built under Ceaușescu. People were guaranteed a good education, they were guaranteed housing, healthcare, a job. The older generation that remembers those "golden years" in the 50s, 60s and 70s still has a very positive view of that time compared to the corrupt, crime-ridden shithole that Romania became in the 90s.

I've read that people were evicted overnight in order to build the Palatul Parlamentului.

First, just a side comment about nomenclature: "Palatul Parlamentului" ("Palace of the Parliament") is the bourgeois name given to it by the counter-revolutionary regime. The communists who built it did not call it that, they called it Casa Poporului, which translates to House of the People. The fact that the traitors and criminals who took over the country took what was built by and for the people and turned it into a "palace" for a bourgeois political elite with entire wings dedicated to slandering the very system that built it is obscene and disgusting to me as a Romanian. It is essentially theft from the people.

Secondly, a lot of things were built that way. Much of the city where my grandparents live was built that way. This is nothing unusual to tear down old buildings to make space for new ones. What is usually not mentioned is what it looked like there before.

A lot of people living in Romania now weren't alive to see it but my grandparents were, and the way they describe it what was torn down in their city to make space for high rise apartment buildings were essentially slums, wooden buildings barely standing upright and narrow dirty, unpaved roads, no sewage system, barely any electricity, barely any running water. Afterwards you had broad clean boulevards instead, lined with apartments that for the time were actually very decent, with clean water, heating, electricity, etc. And people were not just thrown out into the street, they were given new modern apartments for free by the state.

It was the same in much of Bucharest too, i know this for a fact because i've talked to old people who grew up in those days and still remember what Bucharest was like before. Now i'm not an expert on the Casa Poporului and the history of how it was built, but i'm sure that any people who may have lived there were given adequate compensation. This is always the question with eminent domain (which happens in capitalist countries too): to what point do you allow a few individuals to stand in the way of modern development that benefits the whole of society?

he started building it while basic goods were sanctioned which I imagine was not the most popular move

Then by that logic the Soviet Union should also not have built any of its monumental architecture, because they too were sanctioned by the West for basically their entire history. But they did and i think Moscow looks very good today thanks to those grand socialist projects.

Now, do i think it was entirely necessary to build it? No. I also think that perhaps the resources could have been better spent elsewhere, especially in a time when a well intentioned but ultimately misguided austerity policy was being implemented. But there were some positives to it, such as that its building provided an enormous amount of jobs at the time. It also came with a larger re-design of the urban area around it (a lot of which had been damaged by a very severe earthquake and needed rebuilding anyway) which essentially built much of that part of Bucharest you see today.

And in principle there is nothing wrong with a socialist country wanting to build a few prestige projects that the people can rally around as a symbol of the new society and what the people can achieve when they work together toward one goal.

His house also seems needlessly luxurious.

I don't buy this argument. We've heard similar things before when anti-communists point to how this or that socialist leader lives (I've heard similar criticism leveled at Stalin and Kim Jong Un), but the reality is that almost always this is not their personal property, it's state property that essentially belongs to the people. As leaders of the country they get to use it for their time in office.

I will say this isn't something i personally think was a good thing, i think that it would set a great example for socialist leaders to live very modestly, but historically heads of state were always viewed as representing the nation and so there was an expectation that they be able to receive foreign dignitaries with the most luxury the country could offer.

But i also think that this is an argument that anti-communists don't have a right to make when we see how millionaires and billionaires (who are not even heads of state or any kind of high government position where at least you could make the argument that a certain level of luxury is expected for "national prestige" on the international stage) today live, in much more luxurious conditions than any socialist leader has ever lived, while the people at the very bottom of capitalist societies even today (look at homeless people in the US) live worse than anyone did in socialist Romania.