The ninth of a sixteen-part series about twentieth-century Romania, this episode explores the baby-boom of Decree 770 and the distressing consequences of natalism, Romania's lovely-but-brief affair with Westernization, and the influence that North Korea and China bore on Ceaușescu's gestating cult of personality.

Series: Ceaușescu's Downfall (9/16)

Outro: the ProleteR remix of Frank Sinatra's "That's Life."

Further reading on the children of Bucharest's underground: Vice, National Geographic, Feature Shoot.

"I'd like to give the world a ghost, to keep them company..."