That was the first country I backpacked through and I met a fair number of people who were like 18-40 during the 80s. The austerity was brutal enough that it made a lot of older people traumatic hoarders. They've got drawers full of little utilitarian items because "paying off all foreign debt" meant selling off all excess production. The country's largest luxury shopping mall, Plaza Romania, was built on the corpse of one of Ceausescu's 1980s public works projects. Collectively they're referred to as "hunger circuses" because he was building monumental domed public markets during a borderline famine. I don't see any leader, much less a mediocre one like Ceausescu, being able to navigate a period like that with the external conditions placed on them. Their past was so shitty that they wouldn't have been able to turn eastward for Soviet help even if the Soviets weren't in the process of Perestroika liberalisation themselves. Maybe the maths work out for partially selling off production and lessening the consumer impact of the decade, but they were facing the austerity that turned the people against their revolution either way.