This article is part of the 
History of Romania series.
 Dacia
 Romania in the Middle Ages
 National awakening of Romania
 Kingdom of Romania
 Romania during World War II
 Communist Romania
 Romania since 1989

The Soviets pressed for inclusion of Romania's heretofore negligible Communist Party in the post-war government, while non-communist political leaders were steadily eliminated from political life. King Michael abdicated under pressure in December 1947, when the Romanian People's Republic was declared, and went into exile.

In the early 1960s, Romania's communist government began to assert some independence from the Soviet Union. Nicolae Ceauşescu became head of the Communist Party in 1965 and head of state in 1967. Ceauşescu's denunciation of the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and a brief relaxation in internal repression helped give him a positive image both at home and in the West. Seduced by Ceauşescu's "independent" foreign policy, Western leaders were slow to turn against a regime that, by the late 1970s, had become increasingly harsh, arbitrary, and capricious. Rapid economic growth fueled by foreign credits gradually gave way to wrenching austerity and severe political repression.

Table of contents
1 Rise of the Communists
2 Internecine struggle
3 The Gheorgiu-Dej era
4 The Ceauşescu regime
5 Downfall

Rise of the Communists

When King Michael (Mihai) overthrew Ion Antonescu in August 1944, breaking Romania away from the Axis and bringing it over to the Allied side, Michael could do nothing to erase the memory of his country's recent active participation in the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Although Romanian forces fought heroically under Soviet command, driving through Northern Translvania into Hungary proper, and on into Czechosolvakia and Germany, the Soviets still treated Romania as conquered territory.

The Yalta Conference had granted the Soviet Union a predominant interest in Romania, the Paris Peace Treaties failed to acknowledge Romania as a co-belligerant, and the Red Army was sitting on Romanian soil. The Communists played only a minor role in Michael's wartime government, headed by General Nicolae Rădescu, but this would change in March 1945, when Dr. Petru Groza of the Ploughmen's Front, a party closely associated with the communists, became prime minister. Although his government was broad, including members of most major prewar parties including the Iron Guard, the Communists held the key minstries.

The king was not happy with the direction of this government, but when he attempted to force Groza's resignation by refusing to sign any legislation, Groza simply chose to enact laws without bothering to obtain Michael's signature. On November 8, 1945, an anti-communist demonstration in front of the Royal Palace in Bucharest was met with force, resulting in numerous arrests, injuries, and an undetermined number of deaths.

Despite the king's disapproval, the first Groza government brought land reform and women's suffrage. However, it also brought the beginnings of Soviet domination of Romania. In the elections of November 9, 1946, as the Rough Guide to Romania has it, "virtually every device ever used to rig an election was put into play," and the communists and their allies claimed 80% of the vote. Using Machiavellian tactics, the communists worked with the Iron Guard to eliminate the role of the centrist parties; notably, the National Peasant Party was accused of espionage after it became clear in 1947 that their leaders were meeting secretly with US officials. Other parties were forced to "merge" with the Communists.

In 1946-1947 tens of thousands of participants in the pro-Axis regime were executed as "war criminals." Antonescu himself was executed June 1, 1946.

On December 30, 1947, the communists forced the abdication of King Michael and declared a People's Republic; this was formalized with the constitution of April 13,1948.

Internecine struggle

The early years of Communist rule in Romania were marked by repeated changes of course and by mass arrests and imprisonments, as factions contended for dominance. In 1948 the earlier agrarian reform was reversed, replaced by a move toward collective farms. This led to tens of thousands of arrests, as did the effort to liquidate the Uniate Church. In June 11 1948, all banks and large businesses were nationalized. Romania developed a system forced labor and political prisons similar to the Soviet Union, with an estimated 100,000 forced laborers dying in an unsuccessful effort to build a Danube-Black Sea Canal.

There appear to have been three important factions, all of them Stalinist, differentiated more by their respective personal histories than by any deep political or philosophical differences:

  1. The "Muscovites," notably Ana Pauker and Vasile Luca, had spent the war in Moscow.
  2. The "Prison Communists," notably Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, had been imprisoned during the war.
  3. The somewhat less firmly Stalinist "Secretariat Communists," notably Lucreţiu Pătrăşcanu had made it through the Antonescu years by hiding within Romania and had participated in the broad governments immediately after King Michael's 1944 coup.

Ultimately, with Stalin's backing, and probably due in part to the anti-Semitic policies of late Stalinism (Pauker was Jewish), Gheorghiu-Dej and the "Prison Communists" won out. Pauker was purged from the party (along with 192,000 other party members); Pătrăşcanu was executed after a show trial.

The Gheorgiu-Dej era

Gheorgiu-Dej, a firm Stalinist, was not pleased with the reforms in Nikita Khrushchev's Soviet Union after Stalin's death in 1953. He also blanched at Comecon's goal of turning Romania into the "breadbasket" of the East Bloc, pursuing a program of the development of heavy industry. This, combined with continuing resentment that historically Romanian lands remained part of the Soviet Union, in the guise of the Moldavian SSR, inevitably led Romania under Gheorgiu-Dej on a relatively independent and nationalist route.

Gheorgiu-Dej never reached a truly mutually acceptable accomodation with Hungary over Transylvania. (The same could be said of all leaders of the two nations as long as they have had identities as nations.) Gheorghiu-Dej took a two-pronged approach to the problem, arresting the leaders of the Hungarian People's Alliance, but establishing an autonomous Hungarian region in the Székely land. This erected an ulrimately meaningless façade of concern for minority rights.

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The Ceauşescu regime

Gheorgiu-Dej died in 1965 in unclear circumstances (it is supposed he was irradiate during his last visit in Moscow) and, after the inevitable power struggle, was succeeded by the previously obscure Nicolae Ceauşescu. Where Gheorgiu-Dej had hewed to a Stalinist line while the Soviet Union was in a reformist period, Ceauşescu initially appeared to be a reformist, precisely as the Soviet Union was headed into its neo-Stalinist era under Leonid Brezhnev.

Many would be loath to admit it now, but in his early years in power, Ceauşescu was genuinely popular, both at home and abroad. Agricultural goods were abundant, consumer goods began to reappear, there was a cultural thaw, and, most importantly abroad, he spoke out against the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. While his reputation at home soon paled, he continued to have uncommonly good relations with western governments and with institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank because of his independent political line. Romania under Ceauşescu maintained diplomatic relations with, among others, West Germany, Israel, China, and Albania, all for various reasons on the outs with Moscow.

The period of freedom and apparent prosperity was to be short-lived. Even at the start, reproductive freedom was severely restricted. Wishing to increase the birthrate, in [1966], Ceauşescu promulgated a law restricting abortion and contraception: only women over the age of 40 or who already had at least 4 children were eligible for either; in 1972 this became women over the age of 45 or who already had at least 5 children. In the 1980s, he went even further: compulsory gynecological examinations sought to identify women who were dodging their patriotic responsibility to breed; the tax structure was revised to penalize the single and the childless.

Where Gheorgiu-Dej's attitude toward the Hungarian minority had been two-faced, Ceauşescu's was simply oppressive. Hungarian-language schools, publishing houses, and cultural institutions were largely shut. Ethnic Hungarians were pressured to give their children traditionally Romanian names. The treatment of the Gypsies was comparably bad. Anyway, the years of ceasusecu were favourable to Gypsies, because of his demographfic policy. Jews and Germans fared relatively better: they were useful bargaining chips with the West German and Israeli governments.

Other abuses of human rights were typical of a Stalinist regime: a massive force of secret police (the "Securitate"), censorship, massive relocations, but not at the same scale as in the 50's.

Ceauşescu's Romania continued to pursue Gheorgiu-Dej's policy of industrialization, but still produced few goods of a quality suitable for the world market. Also, after a visit to North Korea, Ceauşescu developed a megalomaniacal vision of completely remaking the country; this became known as systematization. Entire towns and, ultimately, a large portion of the capital, Bucharest, were torn down and either replaced by bland concrete buildings or (when money ran low) by nothing at all.

Despite all of this, and despite the appalling treatment of HIV-infected orphans, the country continued to have a notably good system of schools and generally good medical care. Also, not every industrialization project was a failure: Ceauşescu left Romania with a reasonably effective system of power generation and transmission, gave Bucharest a functioning subway, and left many cities with an increase in habitable (if generally ugly) apartment buildings.

In the 1980s, Ceauşescu became simultaneously obsessed with repaying Western loans and with building himself a palace of unprecedented proportions, along with an equally grandiose neighborhood, the Centru Civic, to accompany it. There was also a revival of the doomed effort to build a Danube-Black Sea Canal. These led to an unprecedented level of poverty for the average Romanian. There was no meat to be had, because it was all being exported for foreign exchange. There was no marble to be had for tombstones, because it was all going to build the palace and the Centru Civic. In the era of glasnost, this was increasingly unacceptable to both the Soviet Union and the Western alliance.

Downfall

Unlike the Soviet Union at the same time, Romania did not develop a large, privileged elite. Outside of Ceauşescu's own relatives, government officials were frequently rotated from one job to another and moved around geographically, to reduce the chance of anyone developing a power base. This prevented the rise of the Gorbachev-era reformist communism found in Hungary or the Soviet Union. Similarly, unlike in Poland, Ceauşescu reacted to strikes entirely through a strategy of further oppression. Those who tried to warn him against this policy were treated as criminals.

In consequence, when the wave of revolution in 1989 hit Romania, it did so with an unmatched fury. Romania's was nearly the last of the Eastern European communist regimes to fall; its fall was also the most violent up to that time. Although the events of December 1989 are much in dispute, the following is at least a reasonable outline.

Protests and riots broke out in Timişoara on December 17. The issue was over the regime's planned arrest of Protestant minister Lazlo Toekes, who was an outspoken opponent of Ceauşescu. The first protesters were ethnic Hungarians, but within days they had been joined and outnumbered by ethnic Romanians. Soldiers opened fire on the protesters, killing about 100 people. The outrage over the shootings caused protests to spread to Sibiu, Bucharest, and elsewhere. Soldiers outside Timisoara generally refused orders to attack the demonstrators.

After a 2-day trip to Iran, Ceauşescu on December 21 addressed a hand-picked crowd of 100,000 in the center of Bucharest. Even here, the crowd began shouting against him. Securitate opened fire, but the military, under Secretary of Defense Vasile Milea generally refused to join them. Ceauşescu had Milea shot and he and his wife, Elena Ceauşescu attempted to escape from the capital by helicopter. Milea's execution turned the army from a neutral into an enemy. The Ceauşescus were ultimately arrested in Târgovişte. Their lives might have been spared if the Securitate had been willing to lay down their arms; as it was, they were subjected to a rapid and dubious trial, and shot on December 25. With their deaths, the Securitate began to surrender and soon dissolved itself, and the violence came to an end.

Controversy over the events of December 1989

Much more open to question is what may have been going on behind the scenes. At what point did which leaders of the army and police abandon Ceauşescu? Had they merely decided that Ceauşescu had become a liability, or did they genuinely want deeper change? How long before taking power on December 22, 1989 did the National Salavation Front (FSN), composed entirely of figures from the old regime, begin organizing itself and to what degree? (Some conjecture that the formation may date back as far as 1982.) Who was shooting at whom, and which side did they think they were serving? (At one point there was a battle over Otopeni Airport near Bucharest where each side apparently thought the other was fighting on behalf of Ceauşescu.)

For several months after the events of December 1989, it was widely argued that Ion Iliescu and the NSF had merely taken advantage of the chaos to stage a coup. While, ultimately, a great deal did change in Romania, it is still very contentious among Romanians and other observers as to whether this was their intent from the outset, or merely pragmatic playing of the cards they were dealt. What is clear that by December 1989 Ceauşescu's harsh economic and political policies had cost him the support of even the most loyal Communist Party cadres, most of whom joined forces with the popular revolution or simply refused to support him.

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