The Rise and Fall of a Megalomaniac
Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford
Pushkin Industries
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 12 April 2024
⏱️ 58 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
Nicolae Ceaușescu was not beloved. His regime was vicious and he treated Romania as his personal wallet: while Ceaușescu emptied the coffers to construct a vast, ornate palace, his people starved. He imposed disastrous population control policies on his country, too, which saw hundreds of thousands of unwanted children left to rot in squalid orphanages. Ceaușescu's rule endured for a quarter of a century - then crumbled overnight.
How do dictatorships unravel? In a second episode, Tim Harford partners with HBO's new series "The Regime" to investigate real-life dictatorships and the social science that explains them.
For a full list of sources, see the show notes at timharford.com.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Pushkin |
| 0:10.0 | This episode of Cautionary Tales is made possible by HBO and their new series The Regime, |
| 0:16.8 | which depicts a crisis in the rule of a fictional dictator, Elena Vernum, played by Kate Winslet. |
| 0:23.4 | You can stream the regime now on Max and you can find more episodes of this show |
| 0:28.6 | cautionary tales wherever you get your podcasts. |
| 0:34.0 | The regime is inspired by real events and real characters, |
| 0:38.0 | including the Romanian dictator Nikolai Shausescu and his wife another Elena. Today's cautionary tale is all about |
| 0:46.9 | their downfall and a word of warning it does contain one or two little spoilers for |
| 0:52.4 | the regime so you might prefer to watch that first. |
| 0:57.0 | Stick around at the end of this true story, to peer behind the scenes of the regime, |
| 1:02.6 | and hear me in conversation with writer, executive producer, and showrunner, |
| 1:07.2 | Will Tracy. But for now, on with the episode. |
| 1:22.0 | Dr Nikolai Decker is driving home in his little red dacha after finishing his shift at the local hospital. |
| 1:23.4 | Dr Decker is a short stout man in his 50s. |
| 1:27.5 | He's puttering along a quiet country road, |
| 1:30.7 | 50 odd miles outside Bucharest, Romania. The year is 1989, early in the afternoon on the last Friday |
| 1:40.4 | before Christmas. Dr Decker has made this journey many times, but today |
| 1:46.5 | everything is different. The news had buzzed around the hospital, the hated dictator |
| 1:52.1 | Nikolai Chaucescu and his even more hated wife Elena were on the run. |
| 1:58.0 | Protesters in Bucharest took over their palace. |
| 2:01.0 | They fled by helicopter. Now they were, who knows where? Maybe I'll catch the |
| 2:06.6 | bastards on my way home, joked Dr. Decker. For nearly 25 years, the country has been in the grip of the increasingly deranged |
... |
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