Mircea Răceanu United States, Răceanu became an American secret agent, giving information from an insider's point-of-view on the politics of Romania and information on human rights and religious freedom. He claimed that he sent no national security or military information and that he betrayed his ruler, but not his country. In fact, Ceauşescu claimed during a talk with Rabbi Arthur Schneier that Răceanu did not actually leak any real secrets, but "betrayed me personally". In 1989, a group of six former Romanian Communist officials, including his stepfather, Grigore Răceanu, signed an open letter which was a critique of Nicolae Ceauşescu's policies. Mircea
Nicolae Ceaușescu's cult of personality former Communist Party members. Nicolae Ceaușescu's cult of personality During the Cold War, Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu presided over the most pervasive cult of personality within the Eastern Bloc. Inspired by the personality cult surrounding Kim Il-sung in North Korea, it started with the 1971 July Theses which reversed the liberalization of the 1960s and imposed a strict nationalist ideology, established Stalinist totalitarianism and a return to socialist realism. Initially, the cult of personality was just focused on Ceaușescu himself. By the early 1980s, however, his wife, Elena Ceaușescu—one of the few wives of a Communist leader to become a