His tongue could not get round seemingly simple phrases like tutulor, a form of address meaning 'to everybody'. When Ceausescu said it, it sounded li… - John Sweeney

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.

Poor man: history will never forgive him for proposing Ceausescu as the new general secretary of the party on the death, in 1965, of Gheorghiu-Dej.

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.