From The strange death of the Soviet empire, David Pryce-Jones 1995

. . . First Secretary from 1965 to 1989, Nicolae Ceausescu derived from Marxism-Leninism the parlance and strong-arm methods to justify tyranny in his own name and on his own account. ‘Giant of the Carpathians’ was only one of the many high-flown epithets he lavished on himself. His collected works in twenty-seen volumes of ghost-written guff went under the rubric ‘Romania on the Way of Building Up the Multilaterally Developed Socialist Society’. Socialism in theory and practice was unilateral profiteering. His Romania was a modern travesty of despotism out of the Middle Ages.

Ceausescu was born in 1918 into a large and poor peasant family. Politics for him was the fulfillment of a backwoods dream of self-aggrandizement through cunning, and where possible and if necessary, fraud and force. By the end of his career he owned no fewer than eighty-four palaces, hunting lodges, villas and retreats. Between fifty and sixty of his close relation held dominant and lucrative posts in the party-state. Coming from a similar background, his wife Elena shared his aspirations. Having left school at the age of eleven she seems to have wished to compensated for a sense of her own ignorance and inferiority by manufacturing an academic career. Scientists were hired to write papers published under her name. [etc]

New York : Metropolitan Books, H. Holt, 1995, pages 336-7.

Pryce-Jones, David, 1936- Title(s) The strange death of the Soviet empire / David Pryce-Jones. Edition 1st American ed. Publisher New York : Metropolitan Books, H. Holt, 1995. Paging viii, 456 p. : ill. ; 24 cm. Notes "Originally published in the United Kingdom in 1995 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson"--T.p. verso. Includes index.