With Soviet troops on its territory, Romania stepped into the communist age. On Decembre 30, 1947 King Mihai I was forced to abdicate and the People's Republic was proclaimed. Political parties were outlawed while the Communist Party (f. 1921) which, in previous years had a membership of barely 1,000 and which had identified itself the Soviet interests, promoting an anti-Romanian policy, grabbed the entire power by force. It exercised it, the name of an ideology which was alien to Romanian history, with the help of an all-powerful and ubiquitous repression apparatus (organised in 1948 with support from and on the model of the feared Soviet secret police). The "building of socialism" started, which meant nationalisation of industrial, banking and transportation companies (1948), forced collectivisation of agriculture (1949-1962), planned, command economy with stress on Stalinist-type industrialisation. In the '50s the entire Romanian political and cultural elite had practically been eliminated from public life (its members were arrested and many of them died in prisons or were persecuted). The Soviet model was introduced in all fields of the society. Romania became a member of CMEA (1949-1991) and of the Warsaw Treaty (1955-1991), and in 1955 of UN.

On the death of Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej (1965), the party leadership, which after 1967 was cumulated with the state leadership, was monopolised by Nicolae Ceausescu. Political distancing from the USSR (proclaimed already by his predecessor in 1964) and the promotion of his own domestic and foreign policy line (establishmed of diplomatic relations with Federal Republic of Germany, the maintenance of ties with Israel also after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and, particularly, the condemnation of Czechoslovakia's invasion in 1968 by the Warsaw Treaty countries) did not affect the structures specific to the communist society, which were used for the gradual consolidation of his own almighty power within the party and the state. That was the moment that heralded the nationalist stage of Romanian communism and the promotion of an Asian-type cult of personality; the dictator and his wite Elena Ceausescu were turned into embodiments of all the Romanian historical values. History was practically rewritten after Ceausescu's own instructions, taste and whims. The same critera governed decision-marking in every area. In 1989 Romanian economy was characterised by generalised "socialist" (state and co-operative) ownership, excessive centralisation, rigid planning, low efficiency, imbalance between the productive branches and sub-branches, the existence of energy-intensive giant enterprises, all that without any correlation with country's raw material resources, etc.

The exaggerated cutbacks in imports and the forced promotion of exports, by ignoring any efficiency criteria, with a view to paying off the country's foreign debt, which took place at the beginning of 1989 (between 1975 and 1989 Romania repaid more than 21 billion dollars), all that caused a deep crisis of the economy. While the other Central and East European communist states were timidly trying to reform their economic and social life, Romania, under the leadership of Ceausescu, was following a different course, towards a Neo-Stalinist regim which ultimately paralysed all the mechanisms of social life. The last years of Ceausescu's rule, during which the country's resources was used for building mammoth projects, to satisfy the dictator's megalomania, brought about a decline in the population's living standard down to the bearable limit and the country's isolation from the rest of Europe and even from the "sister" comunist countries. This, too, is an explanation of the violence which characterised the collapse of communism in Romania, following the people's revolt of December 1989.

Last update: 1999, August 18
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