XIth Party Congress in 1974, Gheorghe Cioară, the Mayor of Bucharest, proposed to extend Ceaușescu's office as General Secretary for life, but was turned down by the latter. Shortly before that moment, the collective leadership of the Presidium was replaced with a Political Executive Committee, which, in practice, elected itself; together with the Secretariat, it was controlled by Ceaușescu himself, who was president of both bodies. During the same year, the general secretary also made himself President of the Socialist Republic, following a ceremony during which he was handed a sceptre; this was the first in a succession of titles, also including Conducător ("Leader"), "supreme commander of the Romanian People's Army", "honorary president of the Romanian Academy", and "first among the country's miners". Progressively after 1967, the large bureaucratic structure of the PCR again replicated and interfered with state administration and economic policies. The President himself became noted for frequent visits on location at various enterprises, where he would dispense directives, for which the termed indicații prețioase ("valuable advice") was coined by official propaganda. Despite the party's independent, "national communist"course, the absolute control that Ceaușescu had over the party and the country led to some non-Romanian observers describing the PCR as one of the closest things to an old-style Stalinist party. For instance, Encyclopædia Britannica referred to the last 18 years of Ceaușescu's tenure as a period of"neo-Stalinism", and the last edition of the Country Study on Romania referred to the PCR's"Stalinist repression of individual liberties." Late 1970s crisis The renewed industrialization, which based itself on both a dogmatic understanding of Marxian economics and a series of autarkic goals, brought major economic problems to Romania, beginning with the effects of the 1973 oil crisis, and worsened by the 1979 energy crisis. The profound neglect of services and decline in quality of life, first manifested when much of the budget was diverted to support an over-sized industry, was made more drastic by the political decision to pay in full the country's external debt (in 1983, this was set at 10 billion United States dollars, of which 4.5 billion was accumulated interest). By March 1989, the debt had been paid in full. Two other programs initiated under Ceaușescu had massive consequences on social life. One of them was the plan, announced as early as 1965, to "systemize rural areas", which was meant to urbanize Romania at a fast pace (of over 13,000