This is the first general single-volume history in English of Romania under Gheorghiu-Dej, its first Communist ruler and predecessor of Nicolae Ceausescu. Based extensively on Securitate and Party documents inaccessible under the Communist regime and consulted since 1990 by only a handful of scholars, the book focuses on the use of terror by the Communists and the attempt to transform Romanian society totally through Communist rule. The Ceausescu regime, for all its appalling abuses of human dignity, never repeated the tactics of mass arrests and wholesale deportations that were a feature of most of the Gheorghiu-Dej era. The book provides a case-study in totalitarian methods of change, giving the reader an idea of what it was like to live in the Romania of Gheorghiu-Dej. (From description on Amazon.com.)