Palace of the Parliament of 13 years (1984–97), it was built as a monument for a totalitarian kitsch style of architecture, in Totalitarian and modernist Neoclassical architectural forms and styles, with socialist realism in mind. The Palace was ordered by Nicolae Ceaușescu (1918–1989), the dictator of Communist Romania and the second of two longtime autocrats in power in the country since World War II, during a period in which the personality cult of political worship and adoration was in full force for him and his family. Known for its ornate interior composed of 23 sections, it houses the two houses of the Parliament of
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