Telegraph: Romania: beauty and the beast - by Adrian Bridge

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Inspired by the grandiose architecture of North Korea, Ceausescu decided in the Eighties to refashion Bucharest completely by building a vast “civic centre” district dominated by the “Palace of the People”, at the head of the “Boulevard to the Victory of Socialism” to be modelled on (but slightly longer than) the Champs-Elysées. To do so he ordered the demolition of a quarter of the city’s historic center. It was brutal, monumental architecture taken to the extreme and was a huge drain on the country’s resources and manpower (more than 1,000 people died during construction).