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Romania POSTWAR ROMANIA, 1944-85
On October 9, 1944, British prime minister Winston
Churchill
and Joseph Stalin met in Moscow. Without President
Franklin D.
Roosevelt's knowledge, Churchill offered Stalin a list of
Balkan
and Central European countries with percentages expressing
the
"interest" the Soviet Union and other Allies would share
in
each--including a 90 percent Soviet preponderance in
Romania.
Stalin, ticking the list with a blue pencil, accepted the
deal. In
early February 1945, however, Roosevelt, Churchill, and
Stalin
agreed at Yalta to a declaration condemning "spheres of
influence"
and calling for free elections as soon as possible in
Europe's
liberated countries. The Soviet leader considered the
percentage
agreement key to the region's postwar order and gave
greater weight
to it than to the Yalta declarations; the United States
and Britain
considered the Yalta accord paramount. The rapid communist
takeover
in Romania provided one of the earliest examples of the
significance of this disagreement and contributed to the
postwar
enmity between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union.
In late 1944, the political parties belonging to the
BND
organized openly for the first time since King Carol had
banned
political activity in 1938. The key political forces were:
Maniu's
National Peasants, who enjoyed strong support in the
villages and
had the backing of democratic members of the middle class,
rightists, nationalists, and intellectuals; the Social
Democrats,
who were backed by workers and leftist intellectuals; and
the
Communists, who had reemerged after two decades
underground. The
National Liberals still campaigned, but their leaders'
close
association with King Carol and quiet support for
Antonescu
compromised the party and it never recovered its prewar
influence.
Romania's Communist Party at first attracted scant
popular
support, and its rolls listed fewer than 1,000 members at
the war's
end. Recruitment campaigns soon began netting large
numbers of
workers, intellectuals, and others disillusioned by the
breakdown
of the country's democratic experiment and hungry for
radical
reforms; many opportunists, including former Iron Guards,
also
crowded the ranks. Two rival factions competed for party
leadership: the Romanian faction, which had operated
underground
during the war years; and the "Muscovites," primarily
intellectuals
and nonethnic Romanians who had lived out the war in
Moscow and
arrived in Romania on the Red Army's heels. The leaders of
the
Romanian faction were Patrascanu, the intellectual prewar
defense
lawyer who became the minister of justice, and Gheorghe
Gheorghiu,
an activist railway worker who added Dej to his surname in
memory
of the Transylvanian town where he had been long
imprisoned. The
Muscovite leaders included Ana Pauker, the daughter of a
Moldavian
rabbi, who reportedly had denounced her own husband as a
Trotskyite, and Vasile Luca, a Transylvanian Szekler who
had become
a Red Army major. Neither faction was a disciplined,
coherent
organization; in fact, immediately after the war the
Romanian
Communist Party resembled more a confederation of fiefdoms
run by
individual leaders than the tempered, well-sharpened
political
weapon Lenin had envisioned. The party probably would not
have
survived without Soviet backing.
Soviet control handicapped the Romanian government's
efforts to
administer the country. The National Peasants called for
immediate
elections, but the Communists and Soviet administrators,
fearful of
embarrassment at the polls, checked the effort. In October
1944,
the Communists, Social Democrats, and the Plowmen's Front
and other
Communist front organizations formed the Frontul National
Democrat
(National Democratic Front--FND) and launched a campaign
to
overthrow Sanatescu's government and gain power. The
Communists
demanded that the government appoint more pro-Communist
officials,
and the left-wing press inveighed against Sanatescu,
charging that
hidden reactionary forces supported him. Sanatescu
succumbed to the
pressure and resigned in November 1944; King Michael
persuaded him
to form a second government, but it too collapsed in a
matter of
weeks. After Sanatescu's fall, the king summoned General
Nicolae
Radescu to form a new government. Radescu appointed a
Communist,
Teohari Georgescu, undersecretary of the Ministry of
Interior;
Georgescu in turn began introducing Communists into the
police and
security forces.
Chaos erupted in Romania and civil war seemed imminent
just
days after the Yalta conference had adjourned. Communist
leaders,
with Soviet backing, launched a vehement anti-Radescu
campaign that
included halting publication of National Peasant and
National
Liberal newspapers. On February 13, 1945, Communists
demonstrated
outside the royal palace. Six days later Communist Party
and
National Peasant loyalists battled in Bucharest, and
demonstrations
degenerated to street brawls. The Soviet authorities
demanded that
Radescu restore calm but barred him from using force. On
February
24, Communist thugs shot and killed several pro-FND
demonstrators;
Communist leaders, branding Radescu a murderer, charged
that
government troops carried out the shootings. On February
26
Radescu, citing the Yalta declarations, retaliated by
scheduling
elections. The next day, the Soviet deputy foreign
minister, Andrei
Vyshinsky, rushed to Bucharest to engineer a final FND
takeover.
After a heated exchange, Vyshinsky presented King Michael
an
ultimatum--either to appoint Petru Groza, a Communist
sympathizer,
to Radescu's post or to risk Romania's continued existence
as an
independent nation. Vyshinsky sugared the medicine by
offering
Romania sovereignty over Transylvania if the king agreed.
Portents
of a takeover appeared in Bucharest: Red Army tanks
surrounded
Michael's palace, and Soviet soldiers disarmed Romanian
troops and
occupied telephone and broadcasting centers. The king,
lacking
Western support, yielded. Radescu, who lashed out at
Communist
leaders as "hyenas" and "foreigners without God or
country," fled
to the British mission. Meanwhile, Western diplomats
feared that
the Soviet Union would annex Romania outright.
Data as of July 1989
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