Nicolae Pleșiță Nicolae Pleșiță Nicolae Pleșiță (; April 26, 1929 – September 28, 2009) was a Romanian intelligence official and secret police investigator. From 1980 to 1984, he led the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Securitate, the secret service of Communist Romania. He was described by the "New York Times" and Associated Press at the time of his death as "a die-hard Communist and ruthless chief of the Securitate secret police." A participant in various actions taken against armed or peaceful anti-communist groups, Pleșiță began his career as a Romanian Communist Party cadre, and rose through the ranks of the Securitate while
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