Nicolae Ceaușescu the country in the three days since the Ceaușescus fled Bucharest. Similarly, Victor Stănculescu, who had been defense minister before going over to the revolution, said in 2009 that the alternative would have been seeing the Ceaușescus lynched on the streets of Bucharest. The Ceaușescus were the last people to be executed in Romania before the abolition of capital punishment on 7 January 1990. Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu were originally buried in simple graves at Ghencea Cemetery in Bucharest, on opposite sides of a path; their graves were often decorated with flowers and symbols of communist rule. In April 2007,
Censorship in Communist Romania the loosest during the early period of Ceauşescu's rule, which ended with the July Theses. The purpose of the censorship apparatus was to subordinate all the aspects of the Romanian culture (including literature, history, art and philosophy) to the Communist Party's ideology. All features of the Romanian culture were reinterpreted according to the regime's ideology, and any other interpretations were banned as forms of "bourgeois decadence". Under Nicolae Ceauşescu’s second communist Romanian regime, propagandist material was the only available information to the public across the country and even this propagandist material (spread mostly via the national television and the party’s