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 Cent