But the Conducator need not have worried about his subsequent reputation.

Worse still, a determined, if diminutive, assassin might find his way through the system in order to attack the Conducator.

Only once was the Conducator's arbitrary revision of a design previously imposed by him challenged.

The palace complex was just part of the Conducator's plans to transform Romania as a whole.

Subtle word-play had never been the Conducator's forte.

Despite evident irritation, the Conducator blamed the local officials and issued firm instructions to resolve matters, in the hearing of the miners.

He once told the Conducator the old (apocryphal) story about Churchill's meeting with Stalin in October 1944.

Only around Bucharest itself, where veteran drivers of bulldozers operated occasionally under the eye of the Conducator himself, was much done.

Noted revolutionary Gelu Voican carpeted the apartment of the Conducator with braids of garlic.

In fact, only the square in front of the eastern face of the building was intended for their use: up to 250,000 could assemble there to cheer the Conducator.

Rather like Mussolini's 'improvement, of the approach to Saint Peter's in the 1930s, the Conducator wanted the full glory of the building to be evident from a distance.

The fewer Western states wished to receive the Conducator, the more he had to fill his diary with visits to other self-proclaimed National Heroes and Liberators of the People.

In fact, the Conducator went so far as to command the peasants to 'maintain the customs and dress of our great-great fore-bears, so that they shall always be in our memory.

Died: Ion Antonescu, prime minister and "Conducator" (Leader) of Romania during World War II was executed after being found guilty of betraying the Romanian people to German occupiers.

Antonescu, soon to be called the Conducator (Romanian "Fuhrer"-a title Ceausescu would later appropriate), showed himself to be equal to the organizational problem of murdering the huge numbers of people demanded under Hitler's program of genocide.

Undoubtedly, the Prince of Wales' unprecedented public denunciation in April 1989 of Ceauşescu's demolitions in Bucharest and his plan to 'systematize, rural Romania represented genuine revulsion at the human consequences of the Conducator's policies.

The existing museums had all been converted into celebrations of the life and achievements of Nicolae Ceauşescu so what could be more natural than that the Conducator's body should rest in the museum as the culminating exhibit of Romanian national history.

Having used his troops and tanks to smash the putsch attempted by the Legion of the Archangel Michael in Bucharest in January 1941, Conducator Antonescu's next order of business was to recover Bessarabia, which Stalin had unilaterally annexed seven months before, in June 1940, under Carol II's watch.