Eastern Bloc abolished provisions guaranteeing the ruling Communist party its leading role. President Gustáv Husák appointed the first largely non-Communist government in Czechoslovakia since 1948, and resigned, in what was called the Velvet Revolution. Romania had rejected de-Stalinization. Following growing public protests, dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu ordered a mass rally in his support outside Communist Party headquarters in Bucharest. But mass protests against Ceauşescu proceeded. The Romanian military sided with protesters and turned on Ceauşescu. They executed him after a brief trial three days later. Even before the Bloc's last years, all of the countries in the Warsaw Pact did not always act
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