Socialist Republic of Romania

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 25th of December 1989, Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife Elena were executed by firing squad moments after a drumhead court-martial delivered its verdict. The trial lasted an hour and a half. Just days before, Ceaușescu had been addressing a crowd from the Central Committee Building in Bucharest, only to be openly booed and jeered in a reaction that would have been unthinkable for most of the previous quarter-century. He fled by helicopter from the rooftop, only to be abandoned in Târgoviște. It was the violent end of a state that had lasted forty-two years. The Socialist Republic of Romania was born from Soviet occupation, shaped by a single-party grip that reached into every household, and defined by a leader who once enjoyed genuine popular affection before presiding over one of the most repressive regimes of modern times. How did Romania go from post-war promise to a country where one in three citizens was an informant? What drew millions into nostalgia for that era even decades after it collapsed? And what does a country do with a revolution that some still argue was a coup?

• 2. Soviet Grip and Forced Abdication

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  King Michael overthrew Ion Antonescu in August 1944, breaking Romania from the Axis and joining the Allied side. The Soviets, however, treated Romania as conquered territory. The Yalta Conference had already granted the Soviet Union a predominant interest in the country, and the Paris Peace Treaties did not acknowledge Romania as an allied co-belligerent. On the 6th of March 1945, after mass demonstrations and Soviet political pressure, a new pro-Soviet government came to power under Dr. Petru Groza of the Ploughmen's Front. Groza's government was broad on paper, drawing from most major prewar parties, but the Communists held the key ministries. When Michael tried to force Groza's resignation by refusing to sign legislation, Groza simply enacted laws without bothering to obtain the king's signature. On the 8th of November 1945, a pro-monarchy demonstration in front of the Royal Palace in Bucharest turned into street fights between opposition supporters and pro-government forces; dozens were killed and wounded. The first Groza government brought land reform and women's suffrage, which earned it real popularity among peasants and educated women. The elections of the 19th of November 1946 returned the Communist-led Bloc of Democratic Parties with a claimed 84% of the vote; archives later confirmed those results were falsified. By 1947, Romania remained the only monarchy in the Eastern Bloc. On the 30th of December, Michael was summoned from his palace in Sinaia back to Bucharest, where Groza and Gheorghiu-Dej presented him with a pretyped instrument of abdication. With pro-Communist troops surrounding his palace and his telephone lines cut, Michael signed.

• 3. Building the Apparatus of Fear

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  Hours after Michael's abdication, Parliament abolished the monarchy and declared Romania a socialist republic. The constitution of the 13th of April 1948 was a near-copy of the 1936 Soviet Constitution. Its language guaranteed freedoms while banning any association of a "fascist or anti-democratic nature," a provision broadly interpreted to outlaw any party that would not serve Communist purposes. The General Directorate of People's Security, the Securitate, was established in 1948. Between 1945 and 1964, some 73,334 people were arrested. The existing prisons were filled with political prisoners, and a new system of forced labor camps modeled on the Soviet Gulag was created. Particularly targeted were prewar elites: intellectuals, clerics, teachers, and former politicians. Some of the most notorious prisons were at Sighet, Gherla, Pitești, and Aiud; forced labor camps were established at lead mines and in the Danube Delta. Between 1949 and 1952, the prison at Pitești, roughly 120 kilometers northwest of Bucharest, became the site of what the source describes as one of the most notorious brainwashing experiments in Eastern Europe's history. It aimed to "reeducate" opponents of the regime through psychological and physical torture, and through degrading acts designed to break down identity. Some of those subjected to the Pitești experiment later became torturers themselves. Many survivors either took their own lives or ended up in mental institutions. On the 18th of June 1951, the government began deporting peasants from the Banat region near the Yugoslav border. About 45,000 people were forcibly resettled on the eastern plains, most living there for five years, some permanently. Judicial executions between 1945 and 1964 numbered 137; deaths in custody are estimated in the tens or hundreds of thousands.

• 4. Gheorghiu-Dej and the Turn Toward Independence

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  Gheorghiu-Dej, a committed Stalinist, found himself in an awkward position after Stalin died in 1953. Khrushchev's reforms in Moscow threatened to undermine his authority, so Gheorghiu-Dej chose a different tactic: he made Ana Pauker, Vasile Luca, and Georgescu into scapegoats for the party's Stalinist excesses, claiming Romania had purged its Stalinist elements even before Stalin died. Pauker was removed from the party along with some 192,000 other members; Pătrășcanu was executed after a show trial. Gheorghiu-Dej also refused Comecon's goal of turning Romania into the breadbasket of the East Bloc, pursuing instead a program of heavy industry and energy production. The government closed Romania's largest labor camps, abandoned the Danube-Black Sea Canal project, halted rationing, and raised workers' wages. Soviet troops withdrew from Romania by 1958. Romania joined the Warsaw Pact in 1955 but later refused to allow Warsaw Pact maneuvers on its soil and limited its participation in military exercises elsewhere. A four-member collective secretariat, including the then-obscure Nicolae Ceaușescu, briefly controlled the party in 1954 before Gheorghiu-Dej resumed control. After the Hungarian uprising of 1956, Romania took Hungary's former premier Imre Nagy into custody at Snagov, north of Bucharest; after interrogations by Soviet and Romanian authorities, Nagy was returned to Budapest for trial and execution. Collectivization was declared complete in 1962, when collective and state farms controlled 77% of the arable land. Tens of thousands of people were killed under repression and agricultural collectivization during the Gheorghiu-Dej era.

• 5. Ceaușescu's Rise and the Illusion of Openness

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  Gheorghiu-Dej died in 1965 and was succeeded by Nicolae Ceaușescu after a power struggle. On the 21st of August 1965, following Czechoslovakia's example, the country was renamed the Socialist Republic of Romania and the party restored its older name, the Romanian Communist Party. In his early years, Ceaușescu was genuinely popular at home and abroad. Agricultural goods were abundant, consumer goods began to reappear, and there was a cultural thaw. His denunciation of the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia earned him unusual goodwill in the West. Romania maintained and at times improved diplomatic relations with West Germany, Israel, China, Albania, and Pinochet's Chile; none of those states were on easy terms with Moscow. Romania joined the United Nations on the 14th of December 1955 and the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in 1972. In July 1980, Romania signed a comprehensive trade agreement with the European Economic Community. From 1951 to 1974, Romania's gross industrial output grew at an average annual rate of 13 percent. The infant mortality rate fell from 139 per 1,000 during the interwar period to 35 in the 1970s. Illiteracy, which had affected half the population during the interwar years, was eradicated. A secret arrangement also operated during this period: Israel and West Germany paid money to Romania to allow citizens with certified Jewish or German ancestry to emigrate, a transaction Romania treated as a source of hard currency.

• 6. Natalism, Demolition, and Control

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  Concerned about low birth rates, Ceaușescu authorized Decree 770 in October 1966, which outlawed abortion and contraception, introduced routine pregnancy tests for women, imposed taxes on childlessness, and created legal discrimination against childless people. A baby boom followed in the late 1960s, with the generations born in 1967 and 1968 becoming the largest in the country's history. But the policy's long-term consequences were severe. More than 9,000 women died from illegal abortions. Large numbers of children were placed in orphanages by parents unable to cope; when many orphanages closed in the 1990s, the children ended up on the streets. The earthquake of 1977 gave Ceaușescu a pretext for demolitions on a scale the city had never seen. An analysis commissioned by the Union of Architects in 1990 found that over 2,000 buildings were torn down, with over 77 of very high architectural importance, most of them in good condition at the time of demolition. Lost structures included the Văcărești Monastery, built in 1722; the Sfânta Vineri Church, built in 1645; the Enei Church, built in 1611; and the art deco ANEF Stadium, built in 1926. Ceaușescu's obsession with building the Palace of Parliament, together with the surrounding Centrul Civic neighborhood, leveled roughly eight square kilometers of the historic center of Bucharest. By the late 1980s, according to the Council for Studies of the Archives of the Former Securitate, one in three Romanians was a Securitate informant. Foreign tourist numbers fell by 75%, and the three main tour operators organizing trips in Romania had left the country by 1987.

• 7. Austerity and the End

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  Between 1950 and 1973, Romania, Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria all recorded average annual growth rates above both the Central European and the West European average. Romania had industrialized faster during the first three post-war decades than Spain, Greece, or Portugal. From 1950 to the mid-1980s, average net wages increased more than eightfold. Then came the collapse. Ceaușescu's desire to repay Western debts led to food rationing, gas rationing, heating restrictions, and electricity rationing set at a maximum monthly allowance of 20 kWh per family, with heavy taxes on any consumption beyond that limit. Only one in five streetlights was kept on; television was reduced to a single channel broadcasting two hours a day. Romania paid off its external debt of about 11 billion United States dollars, several months earlier than even Ceaușescu had expected, but at enormous human cost. In the autumn of 1981, an angry mob threw rocks at Ceaușescu's helicopter as it flew over Transylvania. The anti-communist riot in Brașov on the 15th of November 1987, which began as a strike on the night shift at the Trucks Brașov enterprise, became the first public signal of the regime's fragility. On the 16th of December 1989, protests began in Timișoara over the attempted eviction of pastor László Tőkés from his church flat. Soldiers opened fire on protesters in Timișoara on the 17th of December, killing about 100 people. When Ceaușescu addressed a rally at the Central Committee Building in Bucharest on the 21st of December, the crowd booed him openly. On the morning of the 22nd, it was announced that army general Vasile Milea had died by suicide; rank-and-file soldiers went over almost en masse to the rebellion. More than 1,100 protesters were killed during the fighting over the following days.

• 8. Legacy and Contested Memory

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  The 1965 Constitution remained technically in effect after the republic's dissolution and was only replaced by a new constitution on the 8th of December 1991, following a nationwide referendum that abolished the socialist system of government and established a semi-presidential system. Romania joined NATO in 2004 and the European Union in 2007. Yet polls taken long after those transitions reveal something striking. More than 53% of Romanians responding to surveys said they would prefer to live once again under the Communist regime, and 63% said their lives were better under it. In December 2018-64% of those polled held a good opinion of Ceaușescu, giving him the highest approval rating of any president in the country's history as measured at that time. A fine of 25,000 lei, equivalent to roughly 9,000 United States dollars, was levied against television presenter Dinel Staicu for praising Ceaușescu and displaying his image on his private channel, 3TV Oltenia. Today, presenting Nazi or Communist governments apologetically or denigrating their victims in audio-visual media is prohibited by decision of the National Audiovisual Council. The gap between official condemnation and popular sentiment may be the republic's most durable inheritance.