Romania Historical Setting
Alexandru Ioan Cuza, prince of the United Principalities of
Moldavia and Walachia (1859-66)
THE ROMANIAN PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC, later renamed the
Socialist
Republic of Romania, came into being in 1948 when the
country's
communist party, under Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej,
consolidated its
power and promulgated a Soviet-style constitution.
Romania, in
spite of its fierce prewar anticommunism and long
antipathy toward
tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union, became one of the
first East
European states to suffer a Soviet-sponsored communist
takeover
after World War II. For nearly a decade after the war,
Romania
obediently followed Moscow's lead, but in the late 1950s
Gheorghiu-Dej defied a Soviet attempt to make his country
a
"breadbasket" for the East bloc and insisted on continuing
his country's rapid industrial expansion. The Romanian
leader also
developed an independent foreign policy and launched a
campaign
promoting Romanian nationalism. Nicolae Ceausescu
succeeded
Gheorghiu-Dej in 1965 and continued his mentor's policies.
Ceausescu, however, appended to them an extravagant cult
of
personality that once promoted him as Romania's "secular
god" and
heir to the wisdom of Romanian rulers from ages past.
Romanians descend from the Dacians, an ancient people
who fell
under Rome's dominance in the first century A.D.,
intermarried with
Roman colonists, and adopted elements of Roman culture,
including
a Vulgar Latin that evolved into today's Romanian.
Barbarian tribes
forced the Romans out of Dacia in 271. In the eleventh
century the
Magyars, the ancestors of today's Hungarians, settled the
mountainous heart of ancient Dacia, Transylvania.
Hungarian
historians claim that Transylvania was almost uninhabited
when the
Magyars arrived; Romanians, however, assert that their
ancestors
remained in Transylvania after Rome's exodus and that
Romanians
constitute the region's aboriginal inhabitants. This
disagreement
was the germ of a conflict that poisoned relations between
Romanians and Hungarians throughout the twentieth century.
For thousands of years, Romania suffered from an
unfortunate
location astride the invasion routes of migrating hordes
and the
frontiers of ambitious empires that plundered its wealth
and
enslaved its people. For centuries Transylvania, with its
repressed
Romanian majority, was a semi-autonomous part of Hungary.
Romanians
fleeing Transylvania founded the independent
principalities of
Walachia and Moldavia in the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries.
The Ottoman Empire dominated all three regions from the
sixteenth
to the late seventeenth century, when Austria's Habsburgs
gained
full control of Transylvania. Walachia and Moldavia came
under
Russian protection soon afterward and remained under
Russian
influence until the Crimean War (1853-56) ended the
protectorate.
In 1859 Walachia and Moldavia merged to form Romania, and
in 1881
its prince renounced Turkish suzerainty and Romania became
a
kingdom. Austria reunited Transylvania and Hungary in
1867, but the
union lasted only until the end of World War I, when
Romania
acquired Transylvania. World War II brought dismemberment
of
Greater Romania, and the country sided with Germany hoping
to
regain its lost territories. In 1943 the Red Army crushed
Romanian
forces before Stalingrad, and in 1944 Romania's King
Michael
overthrew the country's radical right-wing premier and
signed an
armistice with the Soviet Union. Moscow forced Michael to
appoint
a communist sympathizer to lead the government in 1945,
and three
years later Romania found itself under strict communist
control.
Data as of July 1989
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