The Establishment of the Communist Regime (1945–1965)

The Soviet army occupied Romania in 1944, and the Armistice of 12 September 1944 placed the country under the control of the Allied (Soviet) Control Commission. The Communist Party, weak at the time, with only a few hundred members, became the instrument of Soviet influence. At the Moscow Conference (October 1944), Churchill and Stalin settled the spheres of influence, and Romania was left in the Soviet sphere. Under pressure from Moscow, on 6 March 1945 the Communist-dominated government of Petru Groza was imposed, following intervention by Andrei Vyshinsky.

The elections of 19 November 1946 were massively rigged by the Communists, who declared that they had won a majority of the votes, even though the historic parties, led by Iuliu Maniu and Constantin I.C. (Dinu) Brătianu, were very popular. The opposition was repressed, and its leaders, arrested in 1947, died in prison. On 30 December 1947 King Michael I was forced to abdicate, under threat, and Romania was proclaimed a People’s Republic. The Constitution of 1948 copied the Soviet model. The Romanian Workers’ Party, formed from the merger of the Communists and the Social Democrats, seized power.

The regime began a total transformation of society. On 11 June 1948 the main industrial enterprises, the banks and the mines were nationalized. Agriculture was forcibly collectivized between 1949 and 1962 through the creation of collective farms, and the peasants who resisted, called “chiaburi” (kulaks), were arrested, deported or expropriated. The Securitate, founded in 1948, became the regime’s political police. Education and culture were placed under the control of ideology. The Greek-Catholic Church was abolished in 1948, and many priests and bishops were imprisoned for their faith.

The political repression was terrible. Between 1945 and 1964 hundreds of thousands of people were arrested, and tens of thousands died in prisons and camps. Among the places of detention were Sighet (where former dignitaries died, among them Iuliu Maniu and Gheorghe I. Brătianu), Gherla, Aiud, Pitești (the “re-education” experiment), the Danube–Black Sea Canal and Periprava. In the 1950s the armed anti-Communist resistance in the mountainous regions was crushed. Today the Memorial of the Victims of Communism and of the Resistance at Sighet preserves the memory of these sufferings.

The party leader, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, eliminated his rivals (Ana Pauker, Vasile Luca, Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu) and, after Stalin’s death, began a policy of relative autonomy from Moscow. Soviet troops withdrew from Romania in 1958, and in April 1964 the “Declaration on the Position of the Romanian Workers’ Party” affirmed the right of each party to choose its own path. In 1964 the regime released the political prisoners. Gheorghiu-Dej died in March 1965, and his successor, Nicolae Ceaușescu, began a new stage, one of apparent liberalization.