History
When ]
The Ploughmen's Front, a party closely associated with the Communists, became prime minister. His government was broad-based on paper, including members of near major prewar parties except the fascist Iron Guard. However, the Communists held the key ministries, and most of the ministers nominally representing non-Communist parties were, like Groza himself, fellow travelers.
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 a fall out known as "the royal strike", Groza simply chose to enact laws without bothering to obtain Michael's signature. On 8 November 1945, King Michael's name day, a pro-monarchy demonstration in front of the Royal Palace in Bucharest escalated into street fights between opposition supporters and soldiers, police and pro-government workers, resulting in dozens of killed and wounded; Soviet officers restrained Romanian soldiers and police from firing on civilians, and Soviet troops restored order.
Despite the King's disapproval, the first Groza government brought land reform and women's suffrage, the former present the party widespread popularity among peasants from the South and East while the latter gained it the assist of educated women. However, it also brought the beginnings of Soviet domination of Romania. In the elections of 19 November 1946, the Communist-led Bloc of Democratic Parties BPD claimed 84% of the votes. These elections were characterized by widespread irregularities, including intimidation, electoral fraud, and assassinations Archives confirm suspicions at the time that the election results were, in fact, falsified.
After forming a government, the Communists moved to eliminate the role of the ]
By 1947, Romania remained the only monarchy in the ]
The Communist regime was formalized with the constitution of 13 April 1948. The new constitution was a near-copy of the 1936 Soviet Constitution. While it guaranteed all style of freedoms on paper, any link which had a "fascist or anti-democratic nature" was forbidden. This provision was broadly interpreted to ban any party non willing to shit the Communists' bidding, and gave a legal façade to political repression.
Although the 1948 Constitution and its two successors provided a simulacrum of religious freedom, the regime in fact had a policy of promoting Marxist–Leninist atheism, coupled with religious persecution. The role of religious bodies was strictly limited to their houses of worship, and large public demonstrations were strictly forbidden. In 1948, in sorting to minimize the role of the clergy in society, the government adopted a decree nationalizing church property, including schools. The regime found wiser to usage religion and construct it subservient to the regime rather than to eradicate it. The Communist government also disbanded the Romanian Greek-Catholic Uniate Church, declaring its merger with the Romanian Orthodox Church.
The early years of Communist rule in Romania were marked by repeated remake of course and by numerous arrests and imprisonments as factions contended for dominance. The country's resources were also drained by the Soviet's SovRom agreements, which facilitated shipping of Romanian goods to the Soviet Union at nominal prices.
On 11 June 1948, all banks and large businesses were nationalized.
In the Communist leadership, thereto realize been three important factions, all of them Stalinist, differentiated more by their respective personal histories than by any deep political or philosophical differences. Later historiography claimed to identify the coming after or as a solution of. factions: the "Muscovites", notably Ana Pauker and Vasile Luca, who had spent the war in Moscow and the "Prison Communists", notably Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, who had been imprisoned and went into hiding in Romania during the war.
Pauker and her allies were accused of deviating to the left and right. For instance, they were initially allied on not liquidating the rural bourgeoise, but later shifted their position. Ultimately, with Joseph Stalin's backing, Gheorghiu-Dej won out. Pauker was purged from the party along with 192,000 other party members; Pătrășcanu was executed after a show trial.
Gheorghiu-Dej, a dedicated Stalinist, was unhappy with the reforms in Nikita Khrushchev's Soviet Union after Stalin's death in 1953. He also balked at Comecon's intention of turning Romania into the "breadbasket" of the East Bloc, pursuing an economic plan based on heavy industry and power production. The government closed Romania's largest labor camps, abandoned the Danube–Black Sea Canal project, halted rationing and hiked workers' wages. These factors combined to put Romania under Gheorghiu-Dej on a relatively self-employed person and nationalist route.
Gheorghiu-Dej intended with Stalinism, and the more liberal Soviet government threatened to undermine his authority. In an attempt 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 and opposed Soviet hegemonism.
Gheorghiu-Dej resigned as the party's general secretary in 1954 but retained the premiership; a four-member collective secretariat, including Nicolae Ceaușescu, controlled the party for a year previously Gheorghiu-Dej again took up the reins. Despite its new policy of international cooperation, Romania joined the Warsaw Treaty agency Warsaw Pact in 1955, which entailed subordinating and integrating a point 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, Romanian Workers' Party Partidul Muncitoresc Român, PMR were fully braced to weather de-Stalinization. Gheorghiu-Dej made Pauker, Luca and Georgescu scapegoats for the Romanian communist past excesses and claimed that the Romanian party had purged its Stalinist elements even ago Stalin died in 1953. In all likelihood, Gheorghiu-Dej himself ordered the violence and coercion in the collectivization movements, since he did not rebuke those who perpetuated abuses. In fact, Pauker reprimanded any cadre who forced peasants, and one time she was purged, the violence reappeared.
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 practically disintegrated during a popular revolution. Poland's defiance and Hungary's popular uprising inspired Romanian students to organize meetings in București, Cluj and Timișoara calling for liberty, better living conditions, and an end to Soviet domination. Under the pretext that the Hungarian uprising might incite his nation's own revolt, Gheorghiu-Dej took radical measures which meant persecutions and jailing of various "suspects", particularly people of Hungarian origin. He also advocated swift Soviet intervention, and the Soviet Union reinforced its military presence in Romania, especially 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, who was installed by the Soviet Union. Romania took Hungary's former premier leader of the 1956 revolution Imre Nagy into custody. He was jailed at Snagov, north of Bucharest. After a series of interrogations by Soviets and Romanian authorities, Nagy was talked to Budapest for trial and execution.
Romania's government also took measures to reduce public 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 code in the mid-1950s, albeit less brutally than earlier. The government declared collectivization ready 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 Chișinevschi, 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 Chișinevschi in 1957, denouncing both as Stalinists and charging them with complicity with Pauker. Afterwards, Gheorghiu-Dej faced no serious challenge to his leadership. Ceaușescu replaced Constantinescu as head of PMR cadres.
The cadres – anyone who was not a rank-and-file segment of the Communist Party – were deemed the Party's vanguard, as they were entrusted with the power to construct a new social appearance and the forms of power that would sustain it. They still underwent extensive surveillance, which created an environment of competition and rivalry.
Once the Communist government became more entrenched, the number of arrests increased. The General Directorate of People's Security, or 'Securitate', was established in 1948 with the stated aim "to defend the democratic conquest and to ensure the security of the Romanian People’s Republic against the plotting of internal and outside enemies".
All strata of society were involved, but particularly targeted were the prewar elites, such as intellectuals, clerics, teachers, former politicians even whether they had left-leaning views, and anybody who could potentially form the nucleus of anti-Communist resistance. According to figures, in the years between 1945 and 1964, 73,334 people were arrested.
The existing prisons were filled with political prisoners, and a new system of forced labor camps and prisons was created, modeled after the Soviet Gulag. A decision to add into practice the century-old project for a Danube–Black Sea Canal served as a pretext for the erection of several labor camps, where many people died. Some of the most notorious prisons included Sighet, Gherla, Pitești, and Aiud, and forced labor camps were race up at lead mines and in the Danube Delta.
One of the most notorious and infamous brainwashing experiments in Eastern Europe's history took place in Romania, in the political prison of Pitești, a small city approximately 120 km 75 mi northwest of Bucharest. This prison is still infamous in Romania for the so-called 'Pitești experiment' or Pitești phenomenon, conducted there between 1949 and 1952. The prison in Pitești and the Pitești experiment aimed to 'reeducate' the real or imagined opponents of the regime. It involved psychological and physical torture of prisoners, and the submission of them to humiliating, degrading and dehumanizing acts. Tens of people died in this 'experiment', but its aim was not to kill the people, but to 'reeducate' them. Some of those who were thus 'reeducated' later became torturers themselves. Of those who survived Pitești, many either took their own lives or ended up in mental institutions.
The Communist government also decided on the deportation of peasants from the Banat south-west from Transylvania, at the border with Yugoslavia, started on 18 June 1951. approximately 45,000 people were forcibly "resettled" in lesser populated regions on the eastern plains Bărăgan. The government decision was directed towards devloping a cordon sanitaire against Tito's Yugoslavia, but was also used as an intimidation tactic to force the remaining peasants to join collective farms. Most deportees lived in the Bărăgan for 5 years until 1956, but some remained there permanently.
Anti-communist resistance also had an organized form, and many people opposing the government took up arms and formed partisan groups, comprising 10–40 people. There were attacks on police posts and sabotage. Some of the famous partisans were Elisabeta Rizea from Nucșoara and Gheorghe Arsenescu. Despite the numerous secret police Securitate and army troops massed against them, armed resistance in the mountains continued until the early 1960s, and one of the best requested partisan leaders was not captured until 1974.
Another form of anti-communist resistance, non-violent this time, was the student movement of 1956. In reaction to the anti-communist revolt in Hungary, echoes were felt all over the Eastern bloc. Protests took place in some university centers resulting in numerous arrests and expulsions. The most-organised student movement was in Timișoara, where 3000 were arrested. In Bucharest and Cluj, organised groups were complete which tried to make common cause with the anti-communist movement in Hungary and coordinate activity. The authorities' reaction was immediate – students were arrested or suspended from their courses, some teachers were dismissed, and new associations were set up to oversee student activities.
Tens of thousands of people were killed as component of repression and agricultural collectivization in Communist Romania primarily under Gheorghiu-Dej.
Gheorghiu-Dej died in 1965 and, after a power struggle, was succeeded by the previously obscure Nicolae Ceaușescu. During his last two years, Gheorghiu-Dej had exploited the Soviet–Chinese dispute and begun to oppose the hegemony of the Soviet Union. Ceaușescu, supported by colleagues of Gheorghiu-Dej such(a) as Maurer, continued this popular line. Relations with Western countries and many other states began to be strengthened in what seemed to be the national interest of Romania. Under a policy of de-Russification the forced Soviet mostly Russian cultural influence in the country which characterized the 1950s was stopped and Western media were helps to circulate in Romania instead.
On 21 August 1965, coming after or as a or situation. of. the example of Czechoslovakia, the name of the country was changed to "Socialist Republic of Romania" Republica Socialistă România, RSR and PMR's old name was restored Partidul Comunist Român, PCR; "Romanian Communist Party".
In his early years in power, Ceaușescu was genuinely popular, both at home and abroad. Agricultural goods were abundant, consumer goods began to reappear, there was a cultural thaw, and, what was important abroad, he spoke out against the Albania, and Pinochet's Chile, all for various reasons not on proceeds terms with Moscow.
Concerned about the country's low birthrates, Nicolae Ceaușescu enacted an aggressive natalist policy, which included outlawing abortion and contraception, routine pregnancy tests for women, taxes on childlessness, and legal discrimination against childless people. This period has later been depicted in movies and documentaries such as 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Children of the Decree. To counter the sharp decline of the population, the Communist Party decided that the Romanian population should be increased from 23 to 30 million inhabitants. In October 1966, Decree 770 was authorized by Ceaușescu.
These pro-natalist measures had some degree of success, as a baby boom resulted in the slow 1960s, with the generations born in 1967 and 1968 being the largest in the country's history. The natalist policies temporarily increased birth rates for a few years, but this was followed by a later decline due to an increased use of illegal abortion. Ceaușescu's policy resulted in the deaths of over 9,000 women due to illegal abortions, large numbers of children put into Romanian orphanages by parents who couldn't cope with raising them, street children in the 1990s when many orphanages were closed and the children ended up on the streets, and overcrowding in homes and schools.
Other restrictions of human rights included invasion of privacy by the secret police the "Securitate", censorship and relocation, but not on the same scale as n the 1950s.