The four decades of Communist rule stand out as a distinct era in Romanian history. In certain ways they represent a break in the general course of modern Romania’s development, modeled as it was after Western Europe’s political and economic institutions and inspired by its intellectual and cultural values. Those who set Romania on a different course after the Second World War – the Soviet Communist Party and its Romanian Communist clients – imposed other models and other values, which drew their substance from experiences at odds with the Western European tradition. In some sense, the new Romanian elite continued the work of modernization, but the means they used and the ultimate goals they pursued separated the Romania of the later twentieth century from the Romania that had come before. Even though they occasionally made concessions to the population, they disdained genuine consultations with the citizenry and never relinquished their authority. Their consistency in applying the Stalinist model for four decades was remarkable. But it was their very inflexibility that, in the end, proved fatal to their project.

The new elite

The proclamation of the People’s Republic of Romania by the Communist elite at the end of 1947 brought to a culmination the more than three years of their unrelenting drive for power begun in the fall of 1944. This new elite was a diverse group. The majority were of working-class origins, of modest formal education, and ethnically Romanian. Most of them had joined the party as young men and had spent their careers as activists in Romania and often in prison. But others had bourgeois family backgrounds and were intellectuals and belonged to ethnic minorities, notably Jews and Hungarians. Some had spent much of their party lives in Moscow, where they contracted strong links to Soviet central party organs and the international Communist movement. The differences between the groups and between individuals were to be constant sources of tension within the elite during its first decade in power. But dependence on the Soviet Union and the sacrifice of national distinctiveness were not, at first, overt causes of friction. For all of them the Soviet Union of Joseph Stalin could not but be the object of emulation.