Elena Ceauşescu

Elena Ceauşescu is presented through a brief, stark sequence of televised images from the end of her life: seated beside Nicolae Ceauşescu before an unseen tribunal, she argues with her accusers, accepts her husband's calming touch, and then disappears from view until the broadcast cuts to the couple's corpses. The scene becomes a point of tension between the couple's political guilt and the dignity the book finds in their final moments together.

The televised tribunal

In the footage, Elena sits beside Nicolae in chairs arranged at the right angle of two brown Formica tables, their backs to a blank wall. She wears a light-colored coat and a peasant's shawl; he wears a dark overcoat and scarf, with his sheepskin chapka placed on the table. The restricted camera frames them as an apparently retired couple, while the people confronting them remain invisible. An offscreen accuser charges them with living in unbridled luxury, causing children to starve, and committing genocide in Timişoara.

After each accusation, the unseen prosecutor invites a response. Nicolae says that he does not recognize the tribunal's legitimacy. Elena, by contrast, sometimes loses her temper and argues back. When she does, he puts his hand on hers to calm her, a familiar gesture that gives the staged proceeding an unexpectedly intimate detail. She is not given a separate account of her defense or of her own view of the accusations; the scene presents her through this exchange with her husband and the tribunal.

From accusation to execution

Nicolae repeatedly looks at his watch. The gesture led viewers to think he was waiting for troops to rescue them, but no troops arrive. After half an hour, the footage cuts away for a break; the next shot shows the couple's bloody corpses lying on the pavement of a street or courtyard, with the location impossible to identify from the images. Elena's death is thus shown not as a narrated account of the execution itself but as the abrupt visual consequence of the tribunal sequence.

Romanian television broadcast the footage on the evening of December 26, 1989, and it was shown across France. Emmanuel Carrère recalls seeing it before leaving for Prague for New Year's; Eduard Limonov saw it after returning from Moscow. Its nightmare-like editing and sudden cut from the couple facing accusations to their bodies make the broadcast at once a record of political defeat and a disturbing performance of justice.

Limonov's reading of the couple

Limonov responded to the broadcast by emphasizing the bond visible between Elena and Nicolae. He read the touch of a hand and the looks they exchanged as evidence of an elderly couple helping one another face death. His response did not deny that those who rule a country may bear guilt: he wrote that even the most innocent national leader will have signed a shameful decree or failed to pardon someone. But he turned the couple's final hours into a tragic image of shared endurance, describing Elena and Nicolae as having joined the immortal lovers of world history.

That reading gives Elena a place in Limonov's account not through her political career, which the passage does not recount, but through a gesture caught on film. The hand Nicolae lays over hers becomes the emotional center of the scene: an intimate act set against the accuser's public charges and the impending execution.

Dignity and the staging of justice

Carrère resists Limonov's lyrical idealization. He rejects the implication that the couple were guilty only of the unavoidable mistakes of those in power, yet describes the proceedings as a parody of justice and a summary execution. In his judgment, the exemplary staging failed: whatever their crimes, dignity in that moment belonged to the accused. Elena's composure is not the focus—the footage shows her losing her temper as well as accepting her husband's touch—but the book's contrast between accusation, intimacy, and death makes her part of its challenge to the spectacle's intended moral simplicity.

The sequence also closes against the atmosphere of the preceding year, when nonviolent revolutions had brought humanist figures such as Václav Havel to power. The execution footage, Carrère suggests, left that year ending on a sour note. Elena's brief presence in the book carries that contradiction: she is at once a member of a condemned ruling couple and a person visible in the last moments of a marriage, while the broadcast that seeks to display justice instead exposes the uneasy dignity of those about to die.