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Romania under the Communists

Communist Romania refers to the period of the history of Romania when its government was dominated by the Romanian Communist Party. During this period the country was consecutively known as Romanian People's Republic and Socialist Republic of Romania.

After World War II, the Soviet Union 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 and went into exile in December 1947, and the Romanian People's Republic was declared.

In the early 1960s, Romania's communist government began to assert some independence from the Soviet Union. Nicolae Ceausescu became head of the Communist Party in 1965 and head of state in 1967. Ceausescu'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 Ceausescu'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.

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 Transylvania into Hungary proper, and on into Czechoslovakia and Germany, the Soviets still treated Romania as conquered territory, because Romanian authorities were unable to ensure order on the newly-liberated territories and clashes between Romanian and Hungarian nationalists erupted.

The Yalta Conference had granted the Soviet Union a predominant interest in Romania, the Paris Peace Treaties failed to acknowledge Romania as a co-belligerent, 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 Radescu, 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 except the Iron Guard, the Communists held the key ministries.

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, about 90% of the votes went to the "traditional parties", with Communists gaining less than 10%. However, with the support of the Soviet Army, the Communists and their allies claimed 80% of the vote and as the Rough Guide to Romania has it, "virtually every device ever used to rig an election was put into play". 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 1946–7, tens of thousands of participants in the pro-Axis regime were executed as "war criminals." Antonescu himself was executed June 1, 1946. By 1948, all non-Communist politicians were either executed, in exile or in prison.

By 1947, Romania remained the only monarchy from the Eastern Bloc. On December 30, 1947, the Communists made King Michael chose between abdication and a violent repression against all anti-communists, including the executions of the 1,000 students arrested earlier for anti-communist demonstrations. The king abdicated and the Communists declared a People's Republic; this was formalized with the constitution of April 13, 1948.

The new constitution forbade and punished any association which had "fascist or anti-democratic nature", which in reality meant that it disallowed any association which displeased the Communists. It also granted the freedom of press, speech and assembly, but only "for those who work".

Justinian Marina, the new chosen Patriarch of the Romanian Orthodox Church with the help of the Communist government disbanded the Romanian Greek-Catholic Uniate Church merged it with the Orthodox Church.

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. The country's resources were also drained by the Soviet's SovRom agreements. 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. On June 11, 1948, all banks and large businesses were nationalized. Romania developed a system of 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:

The "Muscovites," notably Ana Pauker and Vasile Luca, had spent the war in Moscow.
The "Prison Communists," notably Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, had been imprisoned during the war.
The somewhat less firmly Stalinist "Secretariat Communists," notably Lucretiu

Patrascanu 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); Patrascanu was executed after a show trial.

The Gheorghiu-Dej era

Gheorghiu-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. He also closed Romania's largest labor camps, abandoned the Danube–Black Sea Canal project, halted rationing, and hiked workers' wages.

This, combined with continuing resentment that historically Romanian lands remained part of the Soviet Union, in the form of the Moldavian SSR, inevitably led Romania under Gheorghiu-Dej on a relatively independent and nationalist route.

Gheorghiu-Dej identified with Stalinism, and the more liberal Soviet regime threatened to undermine his authority. In an effort to reinforce his position, Gheorghiu-Dej pledged cooperation with any state, regardless of political-economic system, as long as it recognized international equality and did not interfere in other nations' domestic affairs. This policy led to a tightening of Romania's bonds with China, which also advocated national self-determination.

In 1954 Gheorghiu-Dej resigned as the party's general secretary but retained the premiership; a four-member collective secretariat, including Nicolae Ceausescu, controlled the party for a year before Gheorghiu-Dej again took up the reins. Despite its new policy of international cooperation, Romania joined the Warsaw Treaty Organization (Warsaw Pact) in 1955, which entailed subordinating and integrating a portion of its military into the Soviet military machine. Romania later refused to allow Warsaw Pact maneuvers on its soil and limited its participation in military maneuvers elsewhere within the alliance.

In 1956 the Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev, denounced Stalin in a secret speech before the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU. Gheorghiu-Dej and the PMR leadership were fully braced to weather de-Stalinization. Gheorghiu-Dej made Pauker, Luca and Georgescu scapegoats for the Romanian communists' past excesses and claimed that the Romanian party had purged its Stalinist elements even before Stalin had died.

In October 1956, Poland's communist leaders refused to succumb to Soviet military threats to intervene in domestic political affairs and install a more obedient politburo. A few weeks later, the communist party in Hungary virtually disintegrated during a popular revolution. Poland's defiance and Hungary's popular uprising inspired Romanian students and workers to demonstrate in university and industrial towns calling for liberty, better living conditions, and an end to Soviet domination. Fearing the Hungarian uprising might incite his nation's own Hungarian population to revolt, Gheorghiu-Dej advocated swift Soviet intervention, and the Soviet Union reinforced its military presence in Romania, particularly along the Hungarian border. Although Romania's unrest proved fragmentary and controllable, Hungary's was not, so in November Moscow mounted a bloody invasion of Hungary.

After the Revolution of 1956, Gheorghiu-Dej worked closely with Hungary's new leader, János Kádár. Although Romania initially took in Imre Nagy, the exiled former Hungarian premier, it returned him to Budapest for trial and execution. In turn, Kádár renounced Hungary's claims to Transylvania and denounced Hungarians there who had supported the revolution as chauvinists, nationalists, and irredentists.

In Transylvania, for their part, the Romanian authorities merged Hungarian and Romanian universities at Cluj and consolidated middle schools.

Romania's government also took measures to allay domestic discontent by reducing investments in heavy industry, boosting output of consumer goods, decentralizing economic management, hiking wages and incentives, and instituting elements of worker management. The authorities eliminated compulsory deliveries for private farmers but reaccelerated the collectivization program in the mid-1950s, albeit less brutally than earlier. The government declared collectivization complete in 1962, when collective and state farms controlled 77% of the arable land.

Despite Gheorghiu-Dej's claim that he had purged the Romanian party of Stalinists, he remained susceptible to attack for his obvious complicity in the party's activities from 1944 to 1953. At a plenary PMR meeting in March 1956, Miron Constantinescu and Iosif Chisinevschi, both Politburo members and deputy premiers, criticized Gheorghiu-Dej. Constantinescu, who advocated a Khrushchev-style liberalization, posed a particular threat to Gheorghiu-Dej because he enjoyed good connections with the Moscow leadership. The PMR purged Constantinescu and Chisinevschi in 1957, denouncing both as Stalinists and charging them with complicity with Pauker. Afterwards, Gheorghiu-Dej faced no serious challenge to his leadership. Ceausescu replaced Constantinescu as head of PMR cadres.

Gheorghiu-Dej never reached a truly mutually acceptable accommodation 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 ultimately meaningless façade of concern for minority rights.

Most Romanian Jews initially favored Communism, in reaction to the anti-Semitism of the Fascists. However by the 1950s, most were disappointed with the increasing discrimination of the Party and the limitations for emigration to Israel.

The Ceausescu regime

Gheorghiu-Dej died in 1965 in unclear circumstances (his death apparently occurred when he was in Moscow for medical treatment) and, after the inevitable power struggle, was succeeded by the previously obscure Nicolae Ceausescu. Where Gheorghiu-Dej had hewed to a Stalinist line while the Soviet Union was in a reformist period, Ceausescu initially appeared to be a reformist, precisely as the Soviet Union was headed into its neo-Stalinist era under Leonid Brezhnev.

In 1965 the name of the country was changed to Republica Socialista România (The Socialist Republic of Romania) — RSR — and PMR was renamed once again to Partidul Comunist Român — The Romanian Communist Party (PCR).

Many would be loath to admit it now, but in his early years in power, Ceausescu 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 Ceausescu 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 birth rate, in 1966, Ceausescu promulgated a law restricting abortion and contraception: only women over the age of 40 or who already had at least four children were eligible for either; in 1972 this became women over the age of 45 or who already had at least five children.

Other abuses of human rights were typical of a Stalinist regime: a massive force of secret police (the "Securitate"), censorship, massive relocations, but not on the same scale as in the 1950s.

During the Ceausescu era, there was a secret ongoing "trade" between Romania on one side and Israel and West Germany on the other side, under which Israel and West Germany paid money to Romania to allow Romanian citizens with certified Jewish or Saxon ancestry to emigrate to Israel and West Germany, respectively.

Ceausescu's Romania continued to pursue Gheorghiu-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, Ceausescu developed a megalomaniacal vision of completely remaking the country; this became known as systematization. A large portion of the capital, Bucharest, was torn down to make way for the Casa Poporului (now House of Parliament) complex and Centrul Civic (Civic Center), but the December 1989 Revolution left much of the huge complex unfinished, such as a new National Library and the National Museum of History. This area, known also as "Hiroshima", is currently being redeveloped as a commercial area known as Esplanada.

Prior to the mid-1970s, Bucharest, as most other cities, was developed by expanding the city, especially towards the south, east and west, by building high density dormitory neighbourhoods at the outskirts of the city, some (such as Drumul Taberei) of architectural and urban planning value. Conservation plans were made, especially during the 1960s and early 1970s, but all was halted, after Ceausescu embarked on what is known as "Mica revolutie culturala" ("The Small Cultural Revolution"), after visiting North Korea and the People's Republic of China.

The big earthquake of 1977 shocked Bucharest, many buildings — notably the Carlton block — collapsed, and many others were weakened; this was the backdrop that led to a policy of demolishing old buildings (even monuments of historical significance or architectural masterpieces) such as Vacaresti Monastery, Sfânta Vineri Monastery, the art deco Republican Stadium and even the Palace of Justice — built by Romania's foremost architect, Ion Mincu, and scheduled for demolition in early 1990 according to the systematisation papers — as well as abandoning and neglecting buildings and bringing them into such a state that they would require being torn down.

The policy towards the city after the earthquake was not one of reconstruction, but one of demolition and building anew, in the North Korean-inspired style. Post-earthquake estimates commissioned by the office of the city's mayor judged that only 23 buildings were beyond repair, none of them of any historic value. An analysis by the Union of Architects, commissioned in 1990, claims that over 2000 buildings were torn down, with over 77 of very high architectural importance, most of them in good condition. Even the Gara de Nord (the city's main train station), listed among The Romanian Architectural Heritage List, was scheduled to be torn down and replaced in early 1992.

Either systematic neglect or outright demolition affected 70% of historic Bucharest, including buildings in the areas such as Magheru-Universitate (the heart of Bucharest), Lipscani, Halelor, Domenii, St. John's Cathedral, Grivitei, and the Gara de Nord, systematization being halted only by the Revolution of 1989. Many of Bucharest's landmarks have since been partially repaired and consolidated, starting with the Gara de Nord in 1993, the Palace of Justice in 1997, and the University in 1999, but most buildings are in severe need of reconstruction even today.

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: Ceausescu 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 apartment buildings.

In the 1980s, Ceausescu 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. These led to an unprecedented shortage of available goods for the average Romanian. There was no marble to be had for tombstones, because it was all going to build the palace and the Centru Civic. By 1984, despite high crop yield and food production, food rationing was introduced on a wide scale (the government promoted it as "a means to reduce obesity" and "rational eating"). Bread, milk, butter, cooking oil, sugar, pork, beef, chicken, and in some places even potatoes were rationed in most of Romania by 1989, with rations being made smaller every year (by 1989, a person could legally buy only 10 eggs per month, half to one loaf of bread per day, depending on the place of residence, or 500 grams of any kind of meat. Most of what was available were export rejects, as most of the quality goods were exported, even underpriced, in order to obtain hard currency, either to pay the debt, or to push forward in the ever-growing pursuits of heavy industrialisation.

Romanians became accustomed to "tacamuri de pui" (chicken's wings, claws and so on), mixed cooking oil (mostly unrefined, dark, soy oil, of the poorest grade), "Bucuresti Salami" (consisting of soy, bonemeal, offal and pork lard), insect-infested flour, ersatz coffee (made of corn), oceanic fish and sardines as a meat replacement, and cheese mixed with starch or flour. Even these products were in very scarce supply, with queues whenever such products were available. All quality products, such as Sibiu and Victoria Salami, high- and mid-grade meats, and Dobrudja peaches were designated as "export-only", and were available to Romanians only on the thriving black market.

By 1985, despite Romania's huge refining capacity, petrol was strictly rationed, with supplies drastically cut, a Sunday curfew was instated, and many buses and taxis converted to methane propulsion (they were mockingly named "bombs"). Electricity was rationed to divert supplies to heavy industry, with a maximum monthly allowed consumption of 20 kWh per family (everything over this limit was heavily taxed), and very frequent blackouts (generally 1–2 hours daily). Streetlights were generally kept off, and television was reduced to a 2 hours each day.

Gas and heating were also turned off; people in cities had to turn to natural gas containers ("butelii"), or charcoal stoves, even though they were connected to the gas mains. According to a decree of 1988, all public spaces had to be kept to a temperature of no more than 16 degrees Celsius (about 63 degrees Fahrenheit) in winter (the only institutions exempted were kindergartens and hospitals), with some (such as factories), kept at no more than 14 degrees (about 59 degrees Fahrenheit). All shops were to close no later than 5:30 p.m., in order to preserve electricity. A thriving black market appeared, with Kent cigarettes becoming Romania's second currency (it was illegal and punished with up to ten years imprisonment to own or trade any foreign currency), used to purchase everything, from food to clothes or medicine. Health care dropped substantially, as drugs were no longer imported. Life expectancy became the lowest in Europe, and infant mortality rates highest.

Control over society became stricter and stricter, with an East German-style phone bugging system installed, and with Securitate recruiting more agents, extending censorship and keeping tabs and records on the entire population. By 1989, according to CNSAS (the Council for Studies of the Archives of the Former Securitate), one in three Romanians was an informant for the Securitate. Due to this state of affairs, income from tourism dropped substantially, the number of foreign tourists visiting Romania dropping by 75%, with the three main tour operators that organized trips in Romania leaving the country by 1987.

There was also a revival of the effort to build a Danube–Black Sea Canal, which was completed, along side a nationwide canal system and irigation network (some of it completed, most of it still a project, or abandoned) an effort to improve the railway system (with electrification and a modern control system), a nuclear power plant at Cernavoda, a national hydroelectric power system (including the Portile de Fier power station on the Danube in cooperation with Yugoslavia), a net of oil refineries, a fairly developed oceanic fishing fleet and naval shipyards at Constanta, a good industrial basis for the chemical and heavy machinery industries, and a rather well-developed foreign policy.

On the negative side, the legacy of the period was a bloated heavy industry using archaic production methods, consuming lots of resources, and producing low-value goods (the refining capacity is over ten times what was needed, the steel production capabilities two-and-a-half times, the aluminium production facilities five times). Most of what was produced could not be sold anywhere, and ended up sitting and deteriorating outside the factories where it was made, while light industries were ridiculously undersized (Romanians had to wait 3 years for a washing machine, 2–3 years for a colour TV, 7–10 years for a car), and technologically obsolete (Romania, in 1989, produced 1960s cars and 1970s TVs and washing machines). The communication network was, with the exception of the modernisation of the trunk railway lines, left at the 1950s' level. Romania had, in 1989, only a 100 km (68 mile) stretch, of motorway, and even that in a very poor state.

The telephone network was one of the least reliable in Europe, with 1930s–1950s manual switching technologies in villages, and early 1960s automatic switching in towns and cities, and based on an under-sized backbone. By 1989, in Romania, there were about 700,000 phone lines, for a population of 23 million. TV broadcasts were limited to two hours daily, exclusively propaganda, with most people choosing to watch Bulgarian, Serbian, Hungarian or Russian TV, wherever the signal was sufficiently strong. There were almost no computers — neither in factories, nor in schools — 8-bit clones of Western home computers being directly shipped to serve as workstations in factories and such.

Another legacy of this era was pollution, with Ceausescu's government scoring badly on this count even by the standards of the Eastern European communist states. Examples include Copsa Mica with its infamous Carbon Powder factory (in the 1980s, the whole city could be seen from satellite as covered by a thick black cloud), Hunedoara, or the plan, launched in 1989, to convert the unique Danube Delta — a UNESCO World Heritage site — to plain agricultural fields.

Downfall

Unlike the Soviet Union at the same time, Romania did not develop a large, privileged elite. Outside of Ceausescu'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, Ceausescu reacted to strikes entirely through a strategy of further oppression. Those who tried to warn him against this policy were treated as criminals.

Romania 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 Timisoara on December 17 soldiers opened fire on the protesters, killing about 100 people. After cutting short a two-day trip to Iran, Ceausescu held a televised speech on December 20, in which he condemned the events of Timisoara, considering them an act of foreign intervention in the internal affairs of Romania and an aggression through foreign Secret Services on Romania's sovereignty, and declared National Curfew, convoking a mass meeting in his support in Bucharest for the next day. The uprising of Timisoara became known across the country and in the morning of December 21 protests spread to Sibiu, Bucharest, and elsewhere. On December 21 the meeting at the CC Building in Bucharest turned into chaos and finally into riot, Ceausescu hiding himself in the CC Building after losing control of his own "supporters". On the morning of the next day, December 22, it was announced that the army general Vasile Milea was dead by suicide; people were besieging the CC Building, while the Securitate did nothing to help Ceausescu. Ceausescu soon fled in an helicopter from the rooftop of the CC Building, only to find himself abandoned in Târgoviste, where he was finally formally tried and shot by a kangaroo court on December 25.

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 Ceausescu? Had they merely decided that Ceausescu had become a liability, or did they genuinely want deeper change? How long before taking power on December 22, 1989 did the National Salvation Front (FSN — Frontul Salvarii Nationale), 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 Ceausescu.)

For several months after the events of December 1989, it was widely argued that Ion Iliescu and the FSN 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. Clear is that by December 1989 Ceausescu's harsh and counterproductive economic and political policies had cost him the support of many government officials and even the most loyal Communist Party cadres, most of whom joined forces with the popular revolution or simply refused to support him. This loss of support from regime officials ultimately set the stage for Ceausescu's demise.