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Romanian Communist Party

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The Romanian Communist Party (Romanian: Partidul Comunist Român) was a Communist political party in Romania until 1989.

History

Early history

The party was founded in 1921 when the Communist faction won control of Romania's Social-Democratic party and renamed it the Communist Party of Romania. At the end of World War II it had only around 1,000 members and had been an underground party after it was banned in 1924 by the Romanian government. Most of the party leadership and a large percentage of the membership were either arrested and imprisoned during the 1930s or went into exile.

The early Communist Party had little influence in Romania due to the country's lack of industrial development which resulted in a relatively small working class and a large peasant population, the lack of Marxist roots among Romanian intellectuals, the success of state repression in driving the party underground and limiting its activities, the party's "anti-national" policy before the war which called for the breakup of the Romanian state which was regarded as a colonial entity which "occupied illegally" Transylvania, Dobruja, Bessarabia and Bukovina. Its "foreign" image was due to the fact that ethnic Romanians were a minority in the party until after the end of World War II: between 1924 and 1944 none of the General Secretaries was of Romanian ethnicity. Interwar Romania had a minority population of 30% and it was largely from them that the party drew its membership.

Communists who had evaded arrest and avoided exile became known later as the "Secretariat faction" with their most notable figure being Lucreţiu Pătrăşcanu. In June 1943, the Communists proposed to other opposition parties such as the National Peasants, National Liberals and Social Democrats that they form the Blocul Naţional Democrat (National Democratic Bloc) in order to arrange for Romania to withdraw from its alliance with Nazi Germany.

On August 23, King Michael, a number of army officers, and armed Communist-led civilians supported by the National Democratic Bloc locked dictator Ion Antonescu into a safe and seized control of the government. King Michael then proclaimed the old 1923 Constitution in force and ordered the Romanian Army to enter a cease fire with the Red Army on the Moldovan front and withdrew Romania from its alliance with the Nazis.

There is debate on how large a role Communists played in the coup with western historians claiming they played only a supportive role while the party itself later claimed that its role was decisive.

The King named General Constantin Sănătescu as Prime Minister of a coalition government which was dominated by the National Peasant Party and National Liberal Party but included Pătrăşcanu as Minister of Justice, the first Communist to hold high office in Romania.

The Red Army entered Bucharest on August 31 1944 and thereafter played a crucial role in supporting the Communist Party's rise to power as the Soviet military command virtually ruled the city and the country.

Gaining power

After having been underground for two decades the Communists enjoyed little popular support at first compared to the other opposition parties. The National Liberals had been discredited by their association with King Carol II and their support for Antonescu and had little influence.

The Communist Party engaged in a recruitment campaign and was able to attract numbers of workers and intellectuals as well as former members of the fascist Iron Guard. The party was highly disorganised and factionalised but it benefitted from Soviet backing.

In October 1944, the Communists, Social Democrats and Ploughmen's Front fromed the Frontul National Democrat which campaigned for power against the Sănătescu government, demanding the appointment of more Communist officials and sympathizers. Sănătescu resigned in November but was persuaded by King Michael to form a second government which collapsed within weeks. General Nicolae Rădescu was asked to form a government and appointed Teohari Georgescu to the Ministry of the Interior, which allowed for the introduction of Communists into the security forces.

The Communist Party launched a campaign against the Rădescu government culminating in a February 13 1945 demonstration outside the royal palace and followed a week later by street fighting between Communists and supporters of the National Peasants' Party in Bucharest.

In a period of escalating chaos, Rădescu called elections. The Soviet deputy foreign minister went to Bucharest to demand to the King that he appoint Communist sympathizer Petru Groza as Prime Minister offering that Romania would be given sovereignty over Transylvania if the King agreed and intimating a Soviet takeover of the country if he did not.

The King, under pressure from Soviet troops who were disarming the Romanian military and occupying key installations, agreed and dismissed Rădescu, who fled the country.

On 6 March 1945, Groza became leader of a Communist-dominated government and named Communists to lead the army and the ministries of the interior, justice, propaganda and finance. While there were several non-Communist ministers from the National Peasant and National Liberal parties, these were not selected by their parties but were dissident members.

The Groza government prosecuted Ion Antonescu, Mihai Antonescu and several generals as war criminals in May and June 1945 resulting in their execution.

As a result of the Potsdam Conference, where Western governments refused to recognize Groza's administration, King Michael called on Groza to resign. When he refused, the King went to his summer home and refused to sign any government decrees or bills.

The Communist Party held its first open conference in October 1945 and agreed to a joint leadership with Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej as general secretary and Ana Pauker and Vasile Luca as main leaders.

From fewer than 1,000 members in 1944, the party grew to 717,490 by 1946 and 800,000 by 1947.

The Communist Party won the Romanian elections of 19 November 1946 though there is evidence of electoral fraud. The Communist government banned all other political parties in 1947.

On 30 December 1947, the Communist Party's power was consolidated when King Michael of Romania was forced to abdicate and a "People's Republic" was proclaimed.

The Communist Party of Romania merged with one wing of the Romanian Social Democratic Party (which had been founded following the demise of the original Social-Democrats in 1921) in 1948 to form the Romanian Workers' Party which remained the ruling party's official name until 1965 when it became the Romanian Communist Party. However, the social democrats were excluded from most party posts and were forced to support Communist policies due to democratic centralism.

The party was heavily factionalised with a "Muscovite wing" led by Ana Pauker and Vasile Luca, consisting largely of those who had lived in exile in the Soviet Union during the war, a "prison wing" led by Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, which consisted largely of party leaders who had been imprisoned in Romania in the 1930s and 1940s (particularly in Doftana Prison), and a "Secretariat wing" led by Lucreţiu Pătrăşcanu which had made it through the Ion Antonescu dictatorship by hiding within Romania and had participated in the broad governments immediately after King Michael's 1944 coup.

Prior to 1945, a large percentage of the party's membership had been ethnic minorities such as Jews, Hungarians and Bulgarians. Romania is and was a state with a large number of minorities and these populations had been severely discriminated against and had been most attracted to revolutionary ideas as a result. Also, as Romania was a largely peasant country with a small working class, it lacked the proletarian population that other European countries had, a population which provided the base for most Communist Parties in Europe.

After World War II a massive recruitment campaign of new members, particularly ethnic Romanian members, began, and these new members provided a base of support for Gheorghiu-Dej, who consolidated his power first in 1949 by purging Pătrăşcanu and 192,000 members of the party on the charge of being "national deviationist" and then in 1952 by purging his chief rival, Ana Pauker (who had been Romania's foreign minister and the unofficial leader of the party after the war), Luca and their supporters from the party. Out of a membership of approximately one million, up to 465,000 members, almost half of the party, was removed in this latter purge.

Gheorghiu-Dej took the position of premier (allowing him to hold the dual roles of party and government leader) while moving Groza to the Presidency.

Stalinism

The purge of Pauker and the "Muscovites" echoed the purge under Stalinism of Jews, in particular, from other Communist Parties in the Soviet bloc, notably the anti-"Cosmopolite" campaign in which Stalin targeted Jews in the Soviet Union and the Prague Trials in Czechoslovakia which removed Jews from leading positions in that country's Communist government.

Gheorghiu-Dej was a hard core Stalinist who had supported intensified forced collectivization in agriculture, which Pauker had generally opposed.

He was uncomfortable and possibly threatened by the reformist positions adopted by Stalin's successor, Nikita Khrushchev, and in the late 1950s began to steer Romania towards a more "independent" path while remaining within the Soviet orbit.

Following the Twentieth Party Congress in which Khurshchev initiated destalinization, Gheorghiu-Dej issued propaganda accusing Pauker, Luca and Teohari Georgescu of having been an arch-Stalinists responsible for the party's excesses in the late 1940s and early 1950s despite the fact that they had actually opposed a number of measures which had in fact been supported by Gheorghiu-Dej.

At a party meeting in March 1956 two members of the Politburo who were supporters of Khruschevite reforms, Miron Constantinescu and Iosif Chisinevschi, criticized Gheorghiu-Dej's leadership. They were purged in 1957, accused of being Stalinists and of having been plotting with Pauker.

In 1957, with the support of the Chinese Communist Party, Gheroghiu-Dej persuaded Moscow to withdraw its remaining troops from Romanian soil. This gave Romania greater freedom in pursuing the "national communist" path which Gheroghiu-Dej had been committed to since 1954, a path which allowed Romania to defy changes in the reforms in the Soviet bloc and maintain a Stalinist path in all but name. During the Sino-Soviet Split, the Romanian media was alone among Warsaw Pact countries to report Chinese criticism of the Soviet leadership. Gheorghiu-Dej ordered a program of "de-Russification" and "Romanianization" in order to bolster his efforts at independence. This program was coupled with increasing repression of minorities in Romania such as the Hungarians.

Ceauşescu Era

Gheorghiu-Dej died in March 1965 and was succeeded by a collective leadership made up of Nicolae Ceauşescu as general secretary, Chivu Stoica as President and Ion Gheorghe Maurer as Premier. Ceauşescu removed rivals such as Alexandru Drăghici from the government and ultimately the party and began accumulating posts for himself. By 1969 he was in complete control of the Central Committee.

Ceauşescu, in 1965, declared that Romania was no longer a People's Democracy but a Socialist Republic and changed the name of the party to the Romanian Communist Party. He continued Romanianization and de-Russification efforts by altering national propaganda so that the Soviet Union was no longer referred to as having "liberated" Romania from fascism.

He developed a cult of personality around himself after visiting North Korea and seeing the cult around Kim Il-sung and also launched his own version of China's Cultural Revolution. Ceauşescu's government opposed the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and even sought an alliance with Tito.

Beginning in 1971, he intensified political repression in the country until he and the party were overthrown in 1989. Ceauşescu was executed and the party banned at that time.

Membership

During its underground years the membership of the party was quite small, less than 1,000 people. Members were largely drawn from ethnic minorities in Romania who were the most repressed elements of the population in the first part of the twentieth century and thus the most attracted to revolutionary ideas. In 1933, 26.58% of party members were from Romania's Hungarian minority, 22.65% were ethnic Romanians and 18.12% were Jewish. Others were Russians and Ukrainians from Bessarabia, Bulgarians from the south of Romania, Poles from the north, Romanians of German descent and Roma and Sinti people. 36% of party members lived in Transylvania. In all the party membership was largely derived from regions which had recently been added to Romania, where Romania was more likely to be seen as an occupying and colonial power—a view that pervaded party manifestos in the 1920s and 1930s, further contributing to the party's "anti-national" image. The perception of the party as a "foreigners" party likely limited its appeal among ethnic Romanians along with the fact that the largely agrarian economy meant that peasants were the largest element of the population, with the working class being very small.

The party grew rapidly after the war and had more than one million members by 1948. This changed the ethnic composition of the party and, along with officially sanctioned anti-Semitism by Moscow and pre-existing chauvinism in the country, led to minorities and particularly Jews being sidelined, particularly after 1952 when Ana Pauker was purged along with almost half of the party who were either seen as her supporters or former social democrats. Many of the party's ethinic minority members (particularly Hungarians and Jews who were predominant in the "Muscovite faction") were removed during the purge.

In 1950 the party claimed that 64% of its leadership positions were held by members of the working class. A 1962 relaxation of the conditions required for admission to the party led to a 22% rise in membership, to 1,100,000.

When the Romanian Workers' Party became the Romanian Communist Party in 1965 it was reported that the party had 1,450,000 members or 8% of the population with 44% of the members being workers, 34% peasants, 10% intellectuals and 12% in other categories. By 1988 the percentage of workers had grown to 55% and the percentage of peasants had fallen to 15%.

By 1971 the party had 2.1 million members and this grew to 3 million by the party's 12th Party Congress in 1979. In 1988 an estimate of 3.7 million members was given, meaning 23% of Romanian adults were party members.

In 1984 the party composition was announced as being 90% ethnic Romanian, 7% Hungarian, less than 1% German and the remaining 2% other nationalities. (roughly proportional with the ethnic groups of Romania)

Organization

Officially, as with other Communist parties, the supreme body of the Romanian Communist Party and its predecessors was the party congress held once every five years with one delegate for every 1,000 party members. The Party Congress elected a Central Committee and the general secretary and adopted the party's program and other documents.

The Central Committee would be the main party body between Congresses. In 1984, the Central Committee consisted of 265 full members and 181 candidate members. The body was responsible for implementing the decisions of the party congress and the direction of party activities. The body was supposed to meet at least four times a year.

In 1974 the Presidium of the Central Committee (in effect the Politburo), which had been elected by the Central Committee, was replaced by a new body, the Political Executive Committee Permanent Bureau, which, though nominally elected by the Central Committee was, in practice, appointed by the general secretary as was the other leading body of the party, the Secretariat (both of which generally had the same members).

In practice as well there was little differentiation between the party and the government.

The Permanent Bureau was the highest body in the party and had five members when it was created in 1974 and expanded to fifteen in 1979. In 1984 it was reduced to eight members with both Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu sitting on the body. This shrank to seven members in 1988, essentially the Ceauşescus and their close allies. The Political Executive Committee which it reported to was essentially a rubber stamp acting when the Central Committee was not in session. The Secretariat was the administrative body of the party and also, in practice, took direction from the Permanent Bureau.

The basic unit of the party was local party clubs in factories, cooperatives, military and police units and other workplaces. There were 64,200 of these units existing in 1980, ranging in size from a handful of people to several hundred.

These bodies reported to town or municipal party committees which had their own first secretaries, vice-chairmen and other officials and reported and, in theory, elected delegates to higher regional bodies and then the national bodies of the party. The party had direct control over the nation's economic life through national and local party commissions.

In the 1980s, the party's ideology changed somewhat, with the party no longer seen as the vanguard of the working class but as the "centre" of the nation and the embodiment of the national interest.

General Secretaries

Other notable communists

See also

External links

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