Romania under Communism

Paradox and Degeneration

Dennis Deletant

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351781893
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

Communism has cast a long shadow over Romania. The passage of little over a quarter of a century since the overthrow in December 1989 of Romania's last Communist leader, Nicolae Ceau?escu, offers a symbolic standpoint from which to penetrate that shadow and to throw light upon the entire period of Communist rule in the country. An appropriate point of departure is the observation that Romania's trajectory as a Communist state within the Soviet bloc was unlike that of any other. That trajectory has its origins in the social structures, attitudes and policies in the pre-Communist period. The course of that trajectory is the subject of this inquiry.

41 The early years of the Romanian Communist Party (1921–1944)

The Romania in which the Communist Party operated was radically different from the Romania in which socialism first appeared. As a result of its participation in the First World War, the country more than doubled in area and increased in population from 7.5 million to more than 17 million. The enlarged Romania included areas formerly ruled by Russia, Hungary and Bulgaria—which left it with two neighbours unwilling to accept their losses and bent on revision of the treaties which legalized them; and one, the Soviet Union, refusing to recognize the loss of Bessarabia. By these additions of territory, the new Romania had minorities amounting to 29% of the population, which the centralizing policies of governments in the 1920s did little or nothing to reconcile to their new status. Both before and after the war, there were the Jews, largely concentrated in Moldavia, whose arrival, often under duress, from Russia and the Ukraine, nevertheless made them widely regarded, especially among peasants, as ‘Russians’. Sephardic immigrants from the south, largely settled in Wallachia, were not so much resented, and indeed were much more integrated, especially in finance and industry.

Industrial development was confined to an east-west axis from Timişoara to Braşov in Transylvania, and a north-south axis from Sighişoara in Transylvania to Ploieşti and Bucharest in Wallachia. This left the country a prominently agricultural one, with great discrepancies between town and country. According to the 1930 census, 80% of the population of 18 million lived on the land in villages that were poorly served by transport and communications while according to one source there were 819,422 people employed in industry.¹ Few villages had piped water or electricity, health services were primitive, especially in the more backward regions of Moldavia and Bessarabia, and in such conditions it is hardly surprising that infant mortality was amongst the highest levels in Eastern Europe.

These problems were of a complexity which would have taxed the most farsighted government and the most thoroughgoing cadres of administration. In the interwar period, Romania had neither. The greatest discrepancy, from a Western point of view, lay in the gulf between word and deed. Behind the facade of political institutions copied from the West the practice of government was subject to patronage and to narrow sectional interests. Under the constitution of 1923 the king had the power to dissolve parliament and to appoint a new government. That government was charged with seeking a popular mandate by organizing elections 5whose conduct was entrusted to the county prefects. Invariably the new government appointed new prefects to secure the desired result. By general consensus the only elections deemed to have been relatively free of such gerrymandering were those of 1928. Institutionalized corruption was matched by a personal variety. The exploitative rule of foreign princes in Wallachia and Moldavia in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century had helped to create a culture amongst the dominant élite in which rapacity was regarded as proof of dexterity and cunning, and therefore corruption of principles had become widespread. This culture had been assimilated by the small, bureaucratic middle class who expected to rely on unofficial remuneration in the form of bribes to supplement their meagre salaries. There was no native economic middle class to act as a check upon the élite since commerce had fallen mostly into the hands of the largely disenfranchised Jews who were barred from public service.

Idealism was scorned and those who searched for it, the young, were driven to the sole parties which seemed to have any on offer, those of the Right. Although a radical land reform was introduced soon after the war, many peasants were unable to afford the loans necessary to buy agricultural machinery. The economic recession of the 1930s ushered in a decade of instability in which the xenophobia of the impoverished peasantry was exploited by right-wing movements, principally by the Iron Guard, and directed against the Jews.² Disillusion with the failure of parliamentary government to solve economic problems fuelled support for the Guard, with its promise of spiritual regeneration and its programme of combatting ‘Jewish Bolshevism’.

Until the end of the Second World War, the Romanian Communist Party was on the fringes of Romanian politics. The Party’s identification with the doctrines of Communism, and the threat posed by the Soviet Union as a hostile neighbour, deprived it of any popular support.³ The interventions of the Moscow-based Communist International (Comintern) in the Party’s affairs were invariably disastrous and further marginalized the Party since it was considered subservient to Soviet interests. Two Comintern policies gave particular offence: the demand for the return of Bessarabia to the Soviet Union, and for self-determination for the minorities in Romania. This view of the Party as ‘alien’ and as a tool of the Soviet Union led the Romanian government to ban it on 11 April 1924. The ban remained for 20 years and crippled the Party’s activity. The faithful were obliged to work clandestinely and they were liable to be caught by the Siguranţa, the secret police. Jail was therefore a common experience of party activists in the interwar period. Prison crystallized their beliefs and convinced many of them of the righteousness of their cause. In these circumstances, the Party became more like a sect, its members deprived of any check on their convictions which overt participation in politics might promote.

Some of the problems which the Party faced were not unique. The parties of the left in general exerted little influence on political life in the interwar years. Romania, being a predominantly agricultural country, lacked a powerful indigenous working class upon which these parties might have formed a base, whilst the electoral strength of the National Peasant Party (formed in 1926 from the union 6of the Peasant Party and the National Party of Transylvania) demonstrated its attractiveness to the peasantry with its programme of peasant control of the means of production in agriculture, and of devolution of government administration in the village. In the 1926 general elections, the NPP won 727,000 votes (28% of the votes cast), in 1928, 2,209,000 (78%), in 1932, 1,204,000 (40%), and in 1937, 627,000 (20%).

The Social Democratic Party (SDP), the principal democratic party of the left, had been rent by dissension during the First World War and emerged from it split into two factions dubbed ‘maximalists’ and ‘minimalists’. The former paralleled the Bolsheviks by advocating the immediate dictatorship of the proletariat through revolution and was led by Alexandru Dobrogeanu-Gherea, Boris Ştefanov and Alecu Constantinescu. Among the younger members of this group were Marcel Pauker and his future wife, Ana Rabinsohn.⁴ Their differences with the minimalists were more of emphasis rather than substance, with the minimalists taking a more cautious line on the need for violent change. Further fragmentation occurred with the emergence of a third faction, the ‘centrists’, who supported affiliation to the Comintern, provided that it did not vitiate Romania’s independence.

The creation of the Comintern in March 1919 profoundly changed the course of the socialist movement in Romania for it exerted an irresistible attraction to those in the SDP who sought change by revolution. The maximalists argued for immediate affiliation with the Comintern but were thwarted by the minimalists who, at a SDP congress held in May, persuaded the participants to adopt a programme of democratic socialism; the transfer of all means of production from the private sector to state control but within the existing political system. The conflict between the two factions was brought out into the open again in November 1920, when a six-member delegation of maximalists and minimalists was sent to Moscow to negotiate Comintern affiliation. When Bukharin and Zinoviev criticized the SDP for its unwillingness to adopt a revolutionary programme, the minimalists responded by complaining about Comintern interference with the composition of the SDP’s leadership.

Upon the delegation’s return from Moscow in January 1921, its members put a motion to the party’s general council recommending affiliation. The vote highlighted the divisions within the party, with the proposal receiving the endorsement of the maximalists and the centrists, who together formed a majority. The minimalists, who opposed affiliation, decided to leave the party. The council decided to convene a party congress in May where the principal item on the agenda was to be affiliation to the Comintern. This became what is regarded as the first congress of the Romanian Communist Party which opened in Bucharest on 8 May 1921. It was scheduled to run for five days, but police raids and arrests forced the abandonment of the congress on 12 May, the day after it voted to declare affiliation to the Comintern. According to C. Titel Petrescu, a leading socialist in the interwar period, three of the most fervent advocates of affiliation were police agents who aimed thereby to provide justification for the arrests.⁵ The unfinished business, which included the adoption of a programme and the election of senior officials, was continued at a second congress, held in Ploieşti on 3–4 October 1922, when 7those participating took the name of the ‘Communist Party of Romania, section of the Communist International’. This is indeed how the Party is styled in the records of the Comintern. Gheorghe Cristescu was elected general secretary.⁶

Membership of the Comintern gave the kiss of death to the fortunes of the Romanian Communists during the interwar period. By the time of the second congress of the Party, held in Ploieşti in 1922, the impact of affiliation to the Comintern had become clear. At the insistence of Moscow the ‘centrists’ were expelled in early 1922; Comintern sources indicated that whereas the SDP had over 45,000 members before the split, the Romanian Communist Party retained only 2,000 members in 1922.⁷ On 11 April 1924, shortly after negotiations for resuming diplomatic relations between Romania and the Soviet Union collapsed over the Russian refusal to accept any formula which might be interpreted as an acknowledgement of Romanian sovereignty over Bessarabia, the Romanian government issued an order banning the RCP.

Henceforth, the Party was forced to conduct its activities underground or through surrogate organizations. Both means were impediments to recruitment and to the exercise of the democratic conduct of Party affairs. Even though it was reduced to a marginalized heap, the Party was required to behave by the Comintern as a ‘proper’ Communist Party by holding congresses and implementing a party line. Congresses were duly held, but in secret and outside Romania—the third in Vienna (August, 1924), the fourth in Kharkov (1928), and the fifth and final pre-war congress in Moscow (1931).

Most damaging to the RCP’s hopes of winning new recruits were Comintern directives which constituted an attack on Romania’s national integrity. These were diametrically opposed to the sentiments of the vast majority of Romanians, including those in the industrial working class. The directives also provoked divisions within the RCP. Cristescu, a Romanian by birth, recognized that the adoption of such a policy by the Party could lead to proscription, while the Transylvanian Hungarians Elek Köblös and Sandor Kőrősi-Krizsán were in favour. To resolve the conflict, Alexandru Dobrogeanu-Gherea proposed the despatch of an RCP delegation to Moscow to discuss the issue with the Comintern executive. The visit in September 1923 resulted in defeat for Cristescu.

Typical of the directives was the call from the fifth Comintern congress, held in June and July 1924, for “the political separation of oppressed peoples from Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Greece”, the demand that Bessarabia, northern Bukovina and the Western Ukraine be united with the Soviet Union, and that Transylvania and the Dobrogea be made independent states. With the RCP now outlawed, there was nothing to be lost by adopting this position and, as if to emphasize its an...