Everything was cool for communist Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in early December 1989.

He’d just come off another reelection campaign against nobody, winning a sixth five-year term in power in a vote at the XIVth Congress of the Romanian Communist Party the previous month, during which state media praised “masterly lecture by comrade Nicolae Ceausescu at the extended plenary session of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Romania,” in its November 11th edition.

Global media had reported on something different that day.

It’s not clear how much the average Romanian knew about the rapid developments elsewhere in Eastern Europe during that stretch. Their lives were pretty freaking miserable, even by the low standards of the Communist bloc. Ceausescu almost certainly knew about what had happened in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square six months earlier and probably felt some degree of confidence that he could crush any uprising with the same relative ease that Deng’s Chicom regime did.

So the machine of his state-run personality cult kept cranking. Severe austerity, food and fuel rationing, high infant mortality rates, secret police torturing people just for complaining, weekly rallies in stadiums celebrating the greatness of Ceausescu, his family, and the Communist Party.

All suddenly, no gradually, it went to shit – and for the (relatively) pettiest of reasons. Members of Romania’s ethnic Hungarian minority had turned out to protest the eviction of a pastor, Laszlo Tokes, in the city of Timisoara. Tokes, a dissident who for whatever reasons had previously gotten away with various public criticisms of the regime, and the order came down on the Hungarian Reform Church’s local bishop to transfer Tokes to the countryside, thus depriving him of his apartment in the parish. Congregants turned out to protest the court-ordered eviction, then ethnic Romanian students from a nearby college joined the Hungarians, shots were fired, workers joined, and so on.

Realizing things were getting a little out of hand, on December 21st Ceausescu’s minions threw together a speech in central Bucharest announcing to a crowd of workers – many of whom had been bussed there at gunpoint – new increases in the minimum wage and in pensions.

Things got even more out of hand, with the speech being interrupted by protests. The 71 year-old Nicolae and his 73 year-old wife Elena Ceausescu must’ve been tired or something, because they waited until daylight to try to flee the city. The army had already turned on them by then and his pilot was informed that they would shoot down Ceausescu’s helicopter if he didn’t land immediately.

Ceausescu’s entourage landed in a field about 30 miles outside Bucharest and then carjacked a local doctor, who stalled pretending he had car trouble. The dictator and his wife then jumped in a bicycle repairman’s car. The repairman drove them to a local agricultural where the director locked them in a room and called local police, who had already flipped to the revolutionary side.

The revolutionary court was open for business on Christmas, but for quick and speedy procedures only. The Ceausescus’ trial lasted two hours and three paratroopers carried out their sentence.

Their 3,000-room palace, and built during the time of austerity in the 1980s, now houses modern Romania’s democratically elected parliament. But since there’s only so much space a national legislature can take up, a shit ton of the space in the building – the idea for which was inspired by North Korea’s Kumsusan Palace, built by Kim Il Sung in the 1970s – remains empty.

Well enough Christmas stories about egomaniacal dictators meeting a brutal end. Back to real news.