After 24 years in power, Nicolae Ceaușescu lost control within hours as protesters who had jeered him during a televised speech the day before overran central Bucharest. He and his wife Elena escaped by helicopter but were captured hours later in Târgoviște. Three days later a military tribunal executed them by firing squad, ending Romania's Communist regime in the bloodiest of the 1989 Eastern European revolutions.
The end came with startling speed. Just a day earlier, Ceaușescu had stood on a balcony expecting the adoring chants he'd heard for decades; instead, the crowd booed and jeered, and the state television broadcast cut away in confusion—a moment many Romanians remember as the instant they realized the regime was finished.
By noon on December 22, army units had begun defecting to the demonstrators, and a mob surged toward the Central Committee building. Ceaușescu and Elena scrambled onto a waiting helicopter from the rooftop as protesters broke through the doors below. The pilot, fearing he'd be shot down, told them Bucharest's airspace was closing and landed the couple on a highway, where they commandeered a car. They were arrested in Târgoviște that afternoon. Their hasty trial and execution on December 25, filmed and broadcast, remains one of the most startling images of the Cold War's collapse—a dictator who ruled with a personality cult rivaling Stalin's, dead within a week of losing his grip.
Key people: Nicolae Ceaușescu, Elena Ceaușescu