Nicolae Ceauşescu
Nicolae Ceauşescu was president of Romania from 1965 to 1989. Beginning in the 1960's, Ceauşescu had required all families to have at least five children in order to achieve his dream of a self-sufficient Romania. When families could not afford to raise their children, Ceauşescu encouraged them to turn their children over to state-run institutions. These state-run orphanages that housed more than 100,000 children when his regime fell in 1989.