 Wishing to reinforce the role of the state in the 1970s and 1980s, Nicolae Ceaușescu enacted the systematization programme, which consisted of the demolition and reconstruction of existing hamlets, villages, towns, and cities, in whole or in part, in order to make place to standardized apartment blocks across the country ("blocuri").Under this ideology, Ceaușescu built Centrul Civic of Bucharest in the 1980s, which contains the Palace of the Parliament, in the place of the former historic center.Even by the late 1980s, sanitary conditions in most Eastern Bloc countries were generally far from adequate.