Following the Second World War, an authoritarian communist regime was established in Romania. After the death of president Gheorghiu-Dej in 1965, Nicolae Ceausescu came to power. In 1982, he ordered that most of the country's agricultural and industrial production would be exported, in an effort to pay off a large foreign debt that the government had accumulated in the 1970s. The resulting drastic shortages of basic necessities such as food, fuel and medicine drove many Romanians from a state of relative economic well being into poverty and starvation. While the population of the Soviet Union - Romania's powerful neighbour country - gained more freedom under Mikhail Gorbachev in the end of the 1980s, Ceausescu did not change his repressive domestic policy. Finally, in December 1989, protests against Ceausescu's rule and the economic hardships expanded into a rebellion. Government forces used one-sided violence against demonstrators and clashed with the anti-government National Salvation Front. The conflict culminated in the execution of Ceausescu and his wife.

Source: Uppsala Conflict Data Program (Date of retrieval: 2014-08-25) UCDP Conflict Encyclopedia, Uppsala University