NATO leaders will glimpse Romanian dictator's dreams

By Justyna Pawlak

BUCHAREST (Reuters) - When NATO leaders meet in Bucharest on Wednesday, they will be granted an inside glimpse of the megalomaniac dreams of Nicolae Ceausescu, Romania's communist-era dictator.

The Alliance's April 2-4 summit will be held in the giant Parliament Palace, built in the 1980s on the orders of Ceausescu to reflect his power and his vision of a mighty state.

Romanian guidebooks tout the building as the world's second largest after the Pentagon. Architects lament the demolition of Bucharest's historic centre, with its churches, synagogues and unique Modernist villas, to make room for construction.

The building is in some ways a monument to the scars inflicted on Romania by the late Ceausescu's brutal policies.

At the time of construction, its ostentatious excess contrasted with the harsh living conditions endured by ordinary Romanians, whose food was rationed to near starvation levels and whose heating came on for a few hours a day, if at all.

Almost 20 years after Ceausescu's execution in 1989 during a bloody revolution against his regime, authorities are still struggling to modernize the dilapidated city, get its chaotic traffic moving and ease the poverty of many inhabitants.

"The palace is a very good illustration of the totalitarian way of seeing the relationship between people and their leaders," said Mariana Celac, an architect and Ceausescu-era dissident.

"It has walls, boundaries, locked gates and huge distances to be walked through, presumably with humility."

Ceausescu, who initially named the building "House of the People", was once quoted as saying the Palace would become Romania's "Acropolis".

"I need something grand, something very grand, that reflects what we have already achieved," he is reported to have said.

KITSCH AND SECURITY

Thousands of tonnes of crystal, marble and wood were hauled to Bucharest from across Romania for the construction of the Palace, with its sprawling corridors and glitzy halls, as well as secret tunnels and a nuclear bunker.

The security features, a testimony to Ceausescu's fears of attack, might still be useful during the April NATO meeting if the Alliance's leaders were to come under threat, said its designer and chief architect, Anca Petrescu.

"The building is prepared for a high degree of security," she said.

Ceausescu and his feared wife Elena regularly inspected the construction site. Some 40,000 residents were evicted to make way for the palace, and many were housed in the drab apartment blocs that now make up large swathes of Bucharest, rusting and crumbling only a couple of decades after being built.