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Romania The Agrarian Crisis and the Rise of the Iron Guard
Romania's economy boomed during the interwar period.
The
government raised revenue by heavy taxation of the
agricultural
sector and, after years of Liberal Party hesitation, began
admitting foreign capital to finance new electric plants,
mines,
textile mills, foundries, oil wells, roads, and rail
lines. Despite
the industrial boom, however, Romania remained primarily
an
agricultural country. In 1929, when the New York Stock
Exchange
crashed, world grain prices collapsed, and Romania plunged
into an
agricultural crisis. Thousands of peasant landholders fell
into
arrears, and the government enacted price supports and
voted a
moratorium on agricultural debts to ease their plight. In
1931
Europe suffered a financial crisis, and the flow of
foreign capital
into Romania dried up. Worse yet, the new industries could
not
absorb all the peasants who left their villages in search
of work
resulting in high unemployment. When recovery began in
1934, the
government used domestic capital to fund new industries,
including
arms manufacturing, to pull out of the agricultural slump.
The
depression slowed capacity growth, but industrial
production
actually increased 26 percent between 1931 and 1938, a
period when
practically all the world's developed countries were
suffering
declines.
In the early 1930s the Iron Guard, a macabre political
cult
consisting of malcontents, unemployed university
graduates, thugs,
and anti-Semites, began attracting followers with calls
for war
against Jews and communists. Peasants flocked to the Iron
Guard's
ranks, seeking scapegoats for their misery during the
agrarian
crisis, and the Iron Guard soon became the Balkans'
largest fascist
party. Corneilu Zelea Codreanu, the Iron Guard's leader
who once
used his bare hands to kill Iasi's police chief, dubbed
himself
Capitanul, a title analogous to Adolf Hitler's Der Führer
and
Benito Mussolini's Il Duce. Codreanu's henchmen marched
through
Romania's streets in boots and green shirts with small
bags of
Romanian soil dangling from their necks. Codreanu goaded
the Iron
Guards to kill his political opponents, and during
"purification"
ceremonies Guard members drew lots to choose assassins.
After an Iron Guard assassinated Premier Ion Duca of
the
National Liberal Party in 1933, Romania's governments
turned over
in rapid succession, exacerbating general discontent. Iron
Guards
battled their opponents in the streets, and railroad
workers went
on strike. The government violently suppressed the
strikers and
imprisoned Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej and other Communists who
would
later rise to the country's most powerful offices.
In December 1937, when the National Liberals were voted
out of
office, King Carol handed the government to a far-right
coalition
that soon barred Jews from the civil service and army and
forbade
them to buy property and practice certain professions.
Continuing
turmoil and foreign condemnation of the government's
virulent
anti-Semitism drove Carol in April 1938 to suspend the
1923
constitution, proclaim a royal dictatorship, and impose
rigid
censorship and tight police surveillance. Carol's
tolerance for the
Iron Guard's violence wore thin, and on April 19 the
police
arrested and imprisoned Codreanu and other Iron Guard
leaders and
cracked down on the rank and file. In November police
gunned down
Codreanu and thirteen Iron Guards, alleging that they were
attempting to escape custody.
Codreanu's violent activities were endorsed and funded
by Nazi
Germany, which by the late 1930s was able to apply
enormous
military and economic leverage on Bucharest. Throughout
the 1920s
and early 1930s, however, Romania's foreign policy had
been
decidedly anti-German. In 1920 and 1921, Romania had
joined with
Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia to form the Little Entente,
agreeing
to work against a possible Habsburg restoration and oppose
German,
Hungarian, and Bulgarian efforts to seek treaty revisions.
France
had backed the agreement because it hemmed in Germany
along its
eastern frontiers, and the three Little Entente nations
had signed
bilateral treaties with France between 1924 and 1927. In
February
1934, Romania had joined Yugoslavia, Turkey, and Greece to
form the
Balkan Entente, a mutual-defense arrangement intended to
contain
Bulgaria's territorial ambitions. By the mid-1930s,
however,
support for Romania's traditional pro-French policy waned,
and
right-wing forces clamored for closer relations with Nazi
Germany;
at the same time League of Nations-imposed trade sanctions
against
Italy were costing the Balkan countries dearly. Germany
seized the
opportunity to strengthen its economic influence in the
region; it
paid a premium for agricultural products and soon
accounted for
about half of Romania's total imports and exports. The
Little
Entente weakened in 1937, when Yugoslavia signed a
bilateral pact
with Bulgaria, and Hitler gutted it altogether in
September 1938,
when he duped Britain and France into signing the Munich
Agreement,
which allowed Germany to annex Czechoslovakia's
Sudetenland. After
Munich, Romania and Yugoslavia had no choice but appease
Hitler. On
March 23, 1939, Romania and Germany signed a ten-year
scheme for
Romanian economic development that allowed Germany to
exploit the
country's natural resources.
Data as of July 1989
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