As Gheorghiu-Dej's successor, Ceausescu was confronted with the necessity of consolidating his power. No member of the party Secretariat owed his position to Ceausescu, and he found particular challenges to his authority from three men who had been among Gheorghiu-Dej's closest associates: Chivu Stoica, a veteran party leader; Gheorghe Apostol, first deputy premier and a former PCR secretary; and Alexandru Draghici, minister of internal affairs and, as such, head of the powerful state security apparatus.

A temporary solution to the problem was found in a system of collective leadership by which Ceausescu became head of the party and Stoica took over Gheorghiu-Dej's other leading position as president of the Council of State and, as such, head of state. Apostol continued as first deputy prime minister, and Draghici remained as minister of internal affairs. Ion Gheorghe Maurer, who had served as prime minister under Gheorghiu-Dej, continued in that position. At the same time, changes were made in the party statutes to prevent one man from holding dual party and government offices as Gheorghiu-Dej had done.

In April, just one month after taking over as head of the PCR, Ceausescu announced that a party congress would be convened in July. During the month of June, while preparations were being made for the congress, he revealed plans to redefine the character and structure of the party and announced that its name would no longer be the Romanian Workers' Party, as it had been known since 1948, but would again be the Romanian Communist Party. Observers of East European political affairs saw the change of name as an assertion of the equality of Romanian communism with the communist parties of the Soviet Union and other communist states. During the same month the new PCR leaders also proclaimed that the official designation of the state would be the Socialist Republic of Romania rather than the Romanian People's Republic as it had previously been known (see ch. 8).

At the July party congress Ceausescu was successful in adding a number of his supporters to an enlarged PCR Central Committee and in having his own title changed to general secretary. At the same time the party structure was changed to add a new body, the Executive Committee, between the Standing Presidium (Politburo) and the Central Committee. Although he was not able to gain full control of the Executive Committee immediately, in time this new body provided Ceausescu with the means for including his supporters in the leading organs of the PCR and for implementing his own policies.

During the party congress Ceausescu was able to turn the PCR proscription against an individual's holding dual party and government positions to his own advantage by engineering the election of Draghici to the party Secretariat, a move that resulted in Draghici losing his power base as minister of internal affairs as well as his direct control over the state security forces. Later in the year the appointment of two additional "first deputy prime ministers" undermined the power of Apostol who had been, until that time, the only first deputy. Simultaneously, Ceausescu was making preparations for even more definitive actions against his rivals, preparations that took the form of an unpublicized decision of the PCR Central Committee, in November 1965, to establish a commission of inquiry to reexamine the political trials conducted by the Gheorghiu-Dej regime during the 1950s. The commission was particularly directed to investigate the 1954 trial and execution of Lucretiu Patrascanu, who had been the Romanian minister of justice from 1944 to 1948 and an important member of the party hierarchy. The formation of the commission of inquiry and its findings were not announced publicly until April 1968.

Political observers identified three principal factions within the PCR during the 1965-67 period: Ceausescu and his supporters; the veteran party men led by Stoica, Apostol, and Draghici; and the intellectuals, of whom Maurer was perhaps the nominal representative. Those allied with Ceausescu, who was forty-seven years old when he came to power, tended to be men of his own generation and outlook, and whenever possible he engineered their appointment or promotion into important party, government, and military positions.

One of Ceausescu's foremost concerns was what he termed the revitalization of the PCR. To achieve this end, he not only brought his own younger men into the top party organs but also sought to broaden the professional skills represented in these bodies through the recruitment of technically trained men and academicians. At the same time, increased technical and scientific contacts were permitted with Western nations, and previously banned works of foreign writers and artists were allowed to be reintroduced—moves that helped Ceausescu gain additional support among the PCR's intellectuals.

Although the party encouraged a revival of nationalism and introduced several limited domestic reforms, it did not relax its tight political control and continued to direct the country's economy through a highly centralized system. The maintenance of strict party control was evidenced in the congresses of the youth and labor union organizations in mid-1966, when the delegates were informed that the PCR would begin to enforce the "patriotic education" of their members.

The 1967 National Party Conference

At a specially convened National Conference of the PCR in December 1967—the first such conference in twenty-two years—Ceausescu continued to strengthen his own position. The conference was attended by the members of the Central Committee as well as by 1,150 delegates from local party organizations. Ceausescu elected to employ the technique of the party conference rather than a special party congress in order to have his proposals approved by a larger body than the Central Committee. At the same time, he wanted to avoid the requirement of having to elect a new Central Committee, which would have been the case had a congress been held.