It is extremely hard to come to a settled judgement on the weight of Russian opinion polls. My take is that if you say what you really think in twent… - John Sweeney

Red Horizons is no better than Bucharest secret policeman's gossip: sordid, dully pornographic, intrusive, morally repugnant, incoherent yet endlessly fascinating. Ceausescu is seen as a power-mad, deeply dishonest paranoiac, as well as someone who cheats at chess. Elena comes of worse, if that is possible, as a sluttish, bad-tempered moron.

For most of its history Romania has been divided, skewered and kebabed by a succession of foreign invaders and masters, some of whom were unspeakably nasty. Cruel as Ceausescu's time was, it was not without precedent in his country's history.

So was he a bit of a fascist? Yes, for a time. But I suspect that his spell in America changed him. At Yale, he could have hung out with all sorts, including white conservative neo-fascists in one of their yucky alpha beta frat houses. Instead, his gang were an African called Lumumba, a Nicaraguan and a black guy from Brizzle. His three months at Yale would have opened his eyes to the land of liberty, its absurdities, its crassness, its cult of money, but also to the fact that power is, more or less, democratic, that the authorities, more or less, respect the rule of law, that liberal democracy, more or less, works, that an open society open to all talents is so much brighter than the dark Soviet basement he had been born into and the place Vladimir Putin wanted Russia to return to.
After Yale, the fascist in Navalny slunk off into a dark corner.