The Stalinist Model of Romania’s Sovietisation* · Web viewIoan Chiper Florin Constantiniu “The Communist Party Does not Have the Intention to Assume Power in Romania” Once

The Stalinist Model of Romania’s Sovietisation

Ioan Chiper Florin Constantiniu

“The Communist Party Does not Have the Intention to Assume Power in Romania”

Once it became a government party, the Romanian Communist Party (PCR) was in a difficult position, generated by the existence of the two centres – one in Romania (the communists in Romania) and one in Moscow (the communists that had emigrated to the USSR) – and by the necessity to adapt their strategy and tactics to the political demands of the Kremlin, who were still interested in the maintaining of the “great coalition”.

In the absence of other documents regarding the relationship of PCR with the crypto-communist structures maintained after the “dissolution of Comintern, it seems that the arrival of L. Patrascanu in Moscow, as the leader of the Romanian delegation that was going to sign the armistice, was the first personal contact between a representative of PCR living in Romania and the Soviet authorities and the communist emigrants from Romania.

In an interview with Al. Vyshinsky, on September 1, 1944, L. Patrascanu explained why PCR had entered the political coalition represented by BND, and his own presence in Moscow as a member of the delegation. He said that PCR wanted to “paralyse the influence of Maniu and Bratianu, who were hostile to the Soviet Union and were trying everything to prevent the signing of the armistice with the Soviet Government”. The two leaders, continued Patrascanu, “do not agree that Bessarabia should be handed over to the Soviet Union”, and that “in all their actions the Anglo-American influence can be strongly felt”. As for the objectives of PCR, Patrascanu said that the fundamental aim was the mobilisation of the “popular forces” in the war against Germany and the securing of the “peaceful collaboration” with the USSR. He considered that

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THE STALINIST MODEL OF ROMANIA’S SOVIETISATION

PNT (the National Peasant Party) and PNL (the National Liberal Party) had agreed to collaborate with PCR with the intention of using it as a cat’s paw, but that was not going to happen, because the Communist Party had its own duties and its own road. “Our aims and those of the Romanian bourgeoisie are completely different”. He also said that “We understand very well that Romania bears the responsibility for the war and has to pay for it”1. Patrascanu renewed the request he had made the day before to Molotov2, to be helped to meet Ana Pauker and other members of PCR living in Moscow (he had named Luca László in the meeting with Molotov).

We have only indirect testimonies of the talks between Patrascanu and Ana Pauker and the other members of the emigration in Moscow. Patrascanu spoke to C. Visoianu who told about it much later to D. Danielopol. According to Visoianu, Patrascanu assured him that “the Communist Party had no intention to assume power in Romania, as it was completely unprepared to govern. “We are not a government party yet”, he said, “and, therefore, we shall fully collaborate with the democratic elements of Romania, such as Maniu and the National Peasant Party”3. A few days later Patrascanu informed Visoianu in private that he had received orders from Ana Pauker and the Romanian communists trained in Moscow that any collaboration was impossible. Maniu and the democratic to be attacked from then on by the communist propaganda, treated as “fascist” etc.4

The discussion told by Visoianu is very plausible and it illustrates two political views within PCR, without being able to tell, at least for the time being, the importance of each of them. The first of them, coming from the realistic evaluation of the political force of PCR, favoured the collaboration with the democratic parties, the way it had formed within BND. The second one followed the doctrine and was decided to start the struggle for assuming power. Doctrine versus realism? The confrontation could have continued like this had it not been for Moscow’s intervention in the actions of PCR. But PCR was not in control of tactics and strategy, but was forced to follow the Soviet directions.

The adepts of the collaboration with the democratic parties considered BND a means to improve the audience of PCR in Romania and to gain government experience. As long as the alliance between USSR, the USA and Great Britain was maintained, it was natural for the alliance between PCR and the democratic parties to be maintained.

The opponents of the collaboration with PNT and PNL also started their analysis from the political debility of PCR. Convinced of the considerable disproportion between programme and means, they considered

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the August 23rd act to be an error, and would have preferred instead the “liberation” of the country by the Red Army in a situation of political vacuum that, in their view, could have been filled only by the communists. In their opinion, the constitution of BND, the collaboration with the king and the army, their participation in the Sanatescu government were all mistakes, because they secured the continuation of the “bourgeois-landed regime”. Ana Pauker’s criticism of the behaviour of the communists in Romania was on these lines.

As there are no documents to attest it directly, the position of the Soviet leadership with regard to the two political views within PCR can only be hypothetically reconstructed.

Stalin and the Communists of Romania

The weakness of PCR was well known in Moscow. The inefficiency of the party had become apparent in an especially sensitive field for the So-viets, who were preoccupied with weakening the force of the German army: in Romania sabotage acts had been few, and a partisan movement could not be organised5. In Moscow it was also known that PCR had no mass popularity, and that it could not play an important political role by itself.

Stalin’s distrust of Romanian communists explains why the Soviets paradoxically offered better armistice terms to the government than the opposition at the Stockholm Soviet-Romanian negotiations6.

Stalin’s attitude may be explained by three reasons: a) he was interested in the fastest advance possible of the Red Army in south-western Europe, and pragmatically preferred to sign the armistice with the man in power – Antonescu – which was going to offer the Soviet army logistic elements essential to their progress; b) compromised by the collaboration with the Reich, Antonescu was an expendable partner, whose elimination would have not produced any objection; c) Stalin preferred Antonescu to Maniu who, he thought, enjoyed the support of the Anglo-Americans and would have been a more difficult negotiation partner7.

Because of Stalin’s preference for Antonescu, his supposition that Maniu enjoyed the support of the Western Allies and that he should therefore be avoided should be kept in mind8. The political co-operation within the BND even after August 23rd, intended by some communist leaders in Bucharest, such as L. Patrascanu, signifies the consolidation of the authority of the National Peasant leader, who would have appeared as a

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Pater Patriae, under whose protection the communists would have learned the art of governance.

At the time of the August 23rd 1944 act, the Soviet Union had acquired – only for three months though – the decision power with regard to Romanian affairs. Starting on October 9, Romania was going to enter under the influence of Soviet Union in proportion of 90%. Democratic parties, and PNT in particular were regarded in Moscow as the “Trojan Horse” of the West, which could become troublesome as the sovietisation process was advancing. Faced with the political inconsistency of the Romanian communists – PCR was the weakest communist party in the future Soviet sphere of influence – the Kremlin understood that it had to assume almost entirely the creation of the new structures of power.

The Moscow group was fully conscious of the fact that the sovietisation of Romania and the emergence of PCR as a political force was going to depend upon the presence of the Red Army in Romania. Characteristic for this is the dialogue between Ana Pauker and Rica Georgescu (Under-secretary of State in the Ministry of Finance and Economy and one of the main agents of the British espionage in Romania). Expressing her regret that he had sided with Maniu, while the communists were going to assume power, Ana Pauker was asked: “With a party of only eight hundred members?” she answered: “Yes, with a party of eight hundred members which will grow by the thousand and by tens of thousands while the Red Army is recovering in Romania”9.

In the autumn of 1944 the Soviet Union had Bulgaria and Romania under its total control. In these territories the Soviet Union was admitted to have an influence of 90% and 80% respectively (for Romania Churchill had proposed at first 75%, but the Soviet Union had obtained 80% in subsequent negotiations)10. Moscow had practically total freedom of action in these two countries. The difference between them was that in Bulgaria the Communist Party was a strong political entity, having an old fighting tradition (the revolt of 1923), active in a Slav country, where the public opinion was favourable to USSR (let us remind the reader that Bulgaria had not declared war to USSR in June 1941).

An information given by Belu Zilber, and which is confirmed only from oral sources, points to the intention of some of the leaders of PCR to eliminate the most important political adversaries in a “St Bartholomew”’s night”. Immediately after Ana Pauker arrived from Moscow (September 16, 1944), the leadership of PCR, formed of 24 members according to Zilber, was faced with the problem: “Should the bourgeoisie and anticommunist elements be liquidated in a huge massacre, or should they be left to die a

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slow death?” The proposal of the immediate liquidation was rejected with 22 votes against and 2 for, because “the West would be shocked if something like that would have happened, because, at that moment the coup in Romania (August 23rd – ed. note) was still vivid in people’s minds”11.

For the time being we do not know if the episode happened the way B. Zilber told it, and, more importantly, we have no clue as to the identity of the participants of this meeting (Zilber claims that this debate took place in the Political Bureau, which is obviously wrong). But it is certain that the debate reflected –although maybe not so clearly – the two currents present in Moscow when Patrascanu was there to sign the armistice.

The moderate position of the majority of the PCR leadership may be explained not so much by their worry for not shocking the West (although this obviously was one of the reasons), but especially by the orders received from Moscow.

Between Moscow and Yalta

During the period between the percentage accord and the Yalta conference, Stalin avoided spectacular actions for the consolidation of the dominance of USSR in Eastern Europe, probably taking into account the criticism voiced in the USA against president Roosevelt, especially after he revealed, on December 19, 1944, that he and Churchill had not signed the Atlantic Charter12. The policy of spheres of influence was accepted and practised by the three great powers, who were more and more inclined to put security before self-determination13.

Because the Soviet control over Romania was accepted both by Great Britain and the USA, the first move of Moscow was taking PCR out of the coalition with democratic parties and ending its collaboration with these parties. PNT was considered the most dangerous from the standpoint of the resistance of the country to communisation.

On September 24, 1944, the Central Committee (CC) of PCR published the Platform Project of the National Democratic Front of Romania, offered to “all the democratic forces”. The Platform contained objectives that followed from the armistice convention (the support of the military effort for the liberation of the country from the German and Hungarian troops, the punishment of those responsible for the disaster of the country, the abrogation of the laws of the dictatorial regimes) and general democratic demands: “the complete equality of all the citizens of the country, irrespective of nationality, religion or sex”, the freedom of speech,

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of the press, of meetings, of organisation, but also economic and social demands aimed at giving PCR access to the masses, such as: the land reform by the “expropriation of land holdings greater than 50 hectares and giving this land to peasants with little or no land… Buying agricultural tools for these peasants with money from the great landowners and the state; deleting peasants” debts to banks and the state, securing good work conditions for workers, clerks, scholars; guarantee of a minimal salary depending on prices[…]; protection of women’s and young people’s work; securing good work conditions for agricultural workers […]; granting of long term low interest loans to poor calamity victims for the rebuilding of their homes; freedom of trade and commerce […]; granting pensions and allowances to war invalids, widows and orphans”, etc. The only demands that went beyond this general democratic framework were the “nationalisation of the National Bank and the 18 great banks” and the “control of all cartels and the nationalisation of those in the basic industries”. The document also deman-ded the drafting of a new constitution that would “establish the principles of the political life of the country, on the basis of the parliamentary democracy, in accordance with the interests of the Romanian people”14, a vague phrase that could have been accepted by any democratic group.

In the end it was underlined that “this programme may be achieved only by a government representing all the national and democratic forces and enjoying the active support of wide sections of the Romanian people”15. By this phrase PCR meant to replace the military government of General Sanatescu, about which Maniu had said even at the end of August that “This government is not a party government, but one whose aim is to see to current business, to maintain order, to apply the armistice, to prepare the peace conference and then the peace itself. Therefore, this government cannot be subject to politic and party conditions”16. (ed. underline)

PCR was therefore totally opposed to PNT. While I. Maniu hoped to block the political advance of PCR through the formation of the military government, whose existence he hoped to maintain until the signing of the peace treaty, PCR wanted a political government that would take political decisions and in which it would be better represented.

CC of PCR invited all parties to join the FND platform and to make a government on its basis. In fact, the communists knew that neither PNT nor PNL would not adhere to a programme that, behind the democratic rhetoric, intended their progressive subordination to PCR.

PSD (the Social Democratic Party), afraid of being left behind by the left and accused of a plot with the “bourgeois parties”, rose to the bait of the communists. The social-democrats agreed to the widening of the

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collaboration with those “popular mass organisations […] that are today outside the National Democratic Bloc”, in fact, crypto-communist organisations (such as the Patriots Union) or satellites and “fellow travellers” of PCR (Plough Workers” Front; the Socialist Peasant Party). PSD went even farther than PCR in the agrarian problem, declaring that “expropriation cannot stop at 50 hectares, but must include all properties worked under lease, share cropping or any other form of work exploitation. From now on agriculture must be organised on a socialist basis”17. (ed. underline)

The favourable answer of the social-democrats was followed by a meeting between the representatives of PSD and PCR on October 2nd, whereby the co-operation of the two parties was renewed and realised in the Workers’ Single Front. After some modifications of the FND Platform, PSD and PCR adopted a resolution demanding a government that would represent the FND programme18. PSD thus deepened the collaboration with PCR, which was going to prove fatal19.

The government crisis, wanted by communists and accepted by social-democrats, was started by the resigning of L. Patrascanu and C. Titel Petrescu from the government. It is to be noted that it occurred immediately after October 9, when Churchill had written the famous “naughty document” – the percentage accord – whereby the Soviet influence was established at 90%. Stalin intended to use this percentage.

During the night of October 14 to 15, Prime Minister Sanatescu was summoned before the Allied Control Commission, where he was ordered to forbid a demonstration of PNT under the pretext that at a student demonstration on October 13 pro-Legionnaire and anti-Soviet slogans were shouted. Coming two days after the suspension of the Universul newspaper, (because it had published a social announcement of Marshal Antonescu), the Soviet demand looked like an “interference of the Russians in our internal affairs”20.

The intention of a government resigning – supported by Maniu, Sanatescu, Gr. Niculescu-Buzesti and General Aldea – as a protest to this Soviet interference was abandoned21. The government crisis, which began on October 18 with the resigning of L. Patrascanu and C. Titel Petrescu22, ended only on November 4, 1944. One episode during the talks for the formation of the new cabinet is significant for the system of political action of the communists. “Last night I was called by General Vinogradov”, writes General Sanatescu on November 4, “to be asked what is the situation of the government. I told him I still had a difficulty with the Ministry of Agriculture (demanded by PCR – ed. note), which I think should go to

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National Peasants. General Vinogradov told me to be reassured and go to sleep, because everything will be as I say. Indeed, the next day Patrascanu and Gheorghiu-Dej came to tell me that they gave up the Ministry of Agriculture; they probably received orders from General Vinogradov to give up. This is how I was able to make up the second government that I led”23.

In the new cabinet the proportion of communists was greater (Gheorghiu-Dej became Minister of Communication) as well as that of their allies (P. Groza was appointed Vice-president of the Council of Ministers), but they could not obtain the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The leaders of democratic parties, I. Maniu and C.I.C. Bratianu, refused to be in the government, hoping that the international political context would become clearer. It should be pointed out that the Foreign Office – where the position of Great Britain on Romania, of abandoning it to USSR, was well known, unlike the British Diplomatic Mission – judged severely Maniu’s decision: “If the government fails, no one will be more responsible than Maniu, with his endless intrigues and delays”24.

The Penetration of the State and the Army

In fact, the mechanism was blocked not by Maniu, but by the communists, who demanded the Ministries of Internal Affairs and of War on November 30. The co-ordination of the actions of PCR and the Soviets is revealed by the “advice” given by General Vinogradov on November 6 to Sanatescu, to give the Ministry of War to General C. Vasiliu-Rascanu, as he was “too occupied with the chairmanship”25. The Prime Minister knew that the mentioned general was “very close to communists”; in fact, he had become a pawn of PCR.

The second government crisis was the result of the insistence of PCR to obtain control over the two ministries, and the criticism addressed by the leaders of PNT and PNL to General Sanatescu, who were reproaching him the concessions he had made to communists, the passivity with regard to the elimination of the Romanian administration in Northern Transylvania and the acceptance of the Soviet accusations that Romania was not fulfilling its obligations assumed by the Armistice Convention26.

The new crisis took place while in Bucharest was A.I. Vyshinsky, who had come to demand of the Romanian Government to fulfil the terms of the armistice27. Its evolution and its end have many obscure points, which may be cleared once the Soviet documents regarding the missions of A.I.

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Vyshinsky in Romania28 are published. The surprising aspect of this crisis is the offensive spirit of the communists in the beginning and their yielding in the end.

As it was mentioned before, the demand regarding the take-over of the Ministry of War by General C. Vasiliu Rascanu, was made by PCR and given as a piece of advice to Sanatescu by General Vinogradov, suggesting an agreement between the actual leader of the Allied Control Commission and the communists. The fact that, at the formation of the Radescu government, PCR did not obtain either the Ministry of Internal Affairs (led by the Prime Minister, but having Teohari Georgescu as sub-Secretary of State) or the Ministry of War (given to General Negulescu) could be a clue that Moscow was the cause of the sudden moderation of PCR29.

One document in the Soviet archives shows that differences and hesitations appeared among the leaders of PCR because of this crisis. In the talks of L. Patrascanu and Vasile Luca with V. Morev, the correspondent of TASS agency (December 26-27, 1944) the former said that the second government crisis was a mistake of FND which put it in the defensive. In his opinion “the mission of the party consists of penetrating the state institutions, the army and in the rural areas, and gaining the command positions there”. If Morev reproduced exactly what Patrascanu had said, then he considered that “the Front (FND – ed. note) should unite with the liberals to isolate Maniu”, these liberals being, we suppose, the group of Gh. Tatarescu, because the fraction led by Bratianu could not have broken their collaboration with PNT. Speaking about the government crisis, Patrascanu said that “it has been unfavourable to FND from the very beginning”, as much of the population was alarmed by the great manifestations organised by FND, so that the ones alarmed by this advance of the left, “jumped to the right, in Maniu’s arms”. The British intervention in Greece30 had also favoured Maniu’s position, thought Patrascanu. While General Radescu had not managed to make a government of technicians without the participation of FND, FND had lost the Ministry of War, where they wanted General Rascanu. The Prime Minister’s job had gone to Radescu, described by Patrascanu as an “energetic and not at all foolish reactionary”. “If before we had a premier that FND held in its pocket, now we got a Prime minister that sits in someone else’s pocket”, continued he, and then explained: “Behind Radescu are the internal and external hostile forces” (he was referring to the English). Patrascanu thought that Maniu’s position was further consolidated because N. Penescu, now replaced at the Ministry of Internal Affairs, had the intention of encouraging a split within PNT by the separation of a fraction led by Ion Mihalache31.

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Patrascanu’s view was not shared by Vasile Luca, who promptly denounced it. In his opinion “the second crisis did not mean a defeat of FND”. He thought that the “reactionary character” of Rădescu was compen-sated by his intelligence and energy, qualities that encouraged the expecta-tion that he would fulfil his promises, particularly in the situation in which, in Luca’s opinion, “Radescu is discontent with Maniu’s wish to force upon the government his political dictatorship”, and almost resigned because of Maniu’s strong opposition to arresting the war criminals and to the land reform.

It is of a particular importance the clarification made by Vasile Luca with regard to the nationalisation of banks mentioned in the FND platform. He pointed out that the nationalisation “will not be accompanied by the confiscation of the shares or the deposits, but it will merely mean the state control over credit distribution”, a position which, he claimed, had restored the sympathy of the small deposit owners and shareholders32.

Was Vyshinsky’s visit “a defeat of the extremist plans of the rival “Muscovite” group (as opposed too the “national” group – ed. note) a restoration of the Romanian leaders to the dominant role they had lost when Pauker and Luca had returned from their Muscovite exile?”33 This conclusion starts from the image of a dichotomy within the leadership of PCR: the internal, national group and the external, Muscovite group. The former was cautious and favoured the continued co-operation with the democratic parties, the latter set on “burning the stages” to secure the control of power. At the present stage of the research, this separation seems much too clear-cut compared with the reality. First of all, the “national” group was itself divided by petty rivalries, of personal prestige (Gheorghiu -Dej felt overshadowed by Patrascanu, while the latter felt it was his right to become no. 1 of PCR)34. Secondly, until he was appointed by Stalin as the Secretary General of PCR, Gheorghiu-Dej was too insecure to spell out his own tactics and strategy35.

The moderation forced by Vyshinsky seems the expression of the hesitations of Kremlin with regard to the interference degree of USSR in Romania, as well as in the other East European countries because of the approaching Yalta Conference.

A clue to this is considered by L. Saiu to be the new “impetus” of the communists, stopped at the end of January 194536.

Gh. Gheorghiu-Dej in Moscow

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During that month Gheorghiu-Dej made a trip to Moscow, during which he was appointed Secretary General of PCR by Stalin, thus ending the ambiguity in the leadership of PCR. Stalin’s preference for Dej instead of Ana Pauker was motivated like this: “Ana is a good, trustworthy, comrade but, you see (Stalin was speaking to Molotov – ed. note) she is a Jew of bourgeois extraction, and the party in Romania needs a leader from among the working class, a true Romanian”37.

1Notes

?. Архив Министерства Иностранных дел Российской Федерации (MID) fund 06, list 6, folder 43, file 580, p. 6. Continuing the discussion, Patrascanu referred to the armistice conditions (he considered them more difficult than those given to Antonescu, which was contested by Vyshinsky) and declared that Ghita Pop, described as “the creature of Maniu”, said that “the armistice should not be signed, and the delegation should return,” ibid., p. 7.

2. Ibid., folder 44, file 585, p. 7.3. Ibid., file 580, p. 7.4.Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace Archives, Stanford, California,

Dumitru Danielopol Fund, Box no. 20, Romania at the Paris Peace Conference, 1946, p.26, marginal note of the author (“Should be rewritten after the talk with Visoianu”).

5. According to the testimony of an illegality communist, the conflict between Stefan Foris and Petre Gheorghe was generated by the refusal of the former to involve party members in sabotage acts, to avoid exposing them to arrests and executions, which would have diminished even further the thin ranks of the party.

6. The reserve of the Soviet side towards the opposition (represented by G.I. Duca) is also attested by the telegram sent on August 8, 1944, to Duca: “Please inform Mrs. Kollontay that the absence of any answer to such a precise collaboration plan as was presented six weeks ago (reference to the planned coup against the Antonescu regime – ed. note) confuses the factors favourable to the allies in Romania, who find it impossible to have a minimum of evaluation elements to establish the ways of action. Similarly, the fact that the Russians have not given us the benefit of improved armistice conditions, which were admitted for the Antonescu regime, is a further discouragement.” G.I. Duca, Cronica unui român în veacul XX, vol. 3, Munich, 1985, pp. 97-98.

7. P. Quinlan, Clash over Romania, British and American Policies towards Romania: 1938-1947, Los Angeles, 1977, p. 95.

8. It should be mentioned that some British diplomats, too – for instance Christopher Steel – considered that it was not in the interest of Great Britain to assume obligations towards Maniu, who was described as “an old and weak man” who could have created difficulties in the English-Russian relations. ASB microfilms England, roll 406, frames 585-586.

9. I. Porter, Operatiunea Autonomous (Operation Autonomous), Bucharest, 1991, p.290.

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The return of Gheorghiu-Dej from Moscow meant the start of a new offensive of PCR for assuming power, where the orders from Moscow and the local initiative are difficult to distinguish, at least for the time being.

It is clear that PCR wanted a government under its total control, but which would preserve the appearance of a coalition with “bourgeois” parties. The position of PCR was clearly expressed by Vasile Luca at the meetings of January 24 and 31, 1945 of the FND Council: “In Bulgaria the Bulgarian government that has done all the revolutionary work, by the fact that the power of the Patriotic Front is dominant, as the power of FND

10. A. Resis, The Churchill-Stalin Secret “Percentages” Agreement on the Balkans, October 1944 , in “The American Historical Review”, vol. 83 (1978), no. 2, pp. 368-387.

11. D. Danielopol, op. cit., (manuscript with uncounted pages) see also Fl. Constantiniu, Al. Dutu, M. Retegan, România în razboi, 1941-1945 (Romania during the War, 1941-1945), Bucharest, 1995, p. 280. B. Zilber told the episode to Danielopol during the Paris Peace Conference.

12. John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of Cold War, 1941-1947, New York, 1972, p. 155.

13. A very good analysis of the options of the USA diplomacy, ibid., pp. 133 & foll.

14. “Scânteia” (The Spark), no. 6, September 26, 1944.15. Ibid.16. “Universul” (The Universe), no. 240, September 1, 1944.17. “Scânteia”, no. 12, October 2, 1944.18. “Scânteia”, no. 16, October 7, 1944.19. “Titel Petrescu – the head of social-democrats – is undecided and intimidated

by communists, although he is a force; if he does not assert himself, he will be swallowed by communists”, noted on October 9 General Sanatescu, Jurnal (Journal), Bucharest, 1993, p.174.

20. Ibid. p.17.21, Ibid., p.176; see also I. Chiper, Fl. Constantiniu, A. Pop, Sovietizarea României,

Perceptii anglo-americane ( hereafter shortened to SR – Romanian’s Sovietisation, Anglo-American Perceptions), Bucharest, 1993, pp. 90-92. Gr. Niculescu-Buzesti did not exclude the possibility of the formation of a communist government and the inclusion of Romania in USSR, like the Baltic states in 1940.

22. “I am sorry for Titel Petrescu, for he goes with the communists”. C. Sanatescu, Jurnal, p. 176.

23. Ibid., p. 177.24. Liliana Saiu, The Great Powers and Romania, 1944-1946, Boulder, 1992, p. 41.25. C. Sanatescu, op. cit., pp. 178,181.26. Liliana Saiu, op. cit., p. 68.27. Ibidem, pp. 63 & foll.28. A bilingual Romanian and Russian edition of these documents for the years

1944-1946 will be printed by the National Institute for the Study of Totalitarianism (Bucharest) and the Slavic and Balkan Studies Institute (Moscow).

29. This was also the opinion of democratic parties, see Liliana Saiu, op. cit., p. 69.

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should be here, has put at the head of the government a man (he was speaking about Kimon Gheorghiev – ed. note) who until some time ago was a fascist. Therefore, we should be a little diplomatic, too (ed. underline), and put some colour in the government we are making. This does not mean that we shall give up any of our struggle principles or of our goals. We want to go along with the law. We cannot put now forward the fact that we do not recognise the constitutional factor (the king – ed. note), actions of forceful deposing”38.

The declarations of Vasile Luca reveal the existence of a Bulgarian model as a guiding principle of the strategy and tactics of PCR. It can be resumed by the expression “bogus coalition”, to use the expression of Hugh Seton Watson39, that is, a government controlled by the communists, but with the formal recognition of the royal prerogatives and with the participa-tion of representatives of democratic parties – Gh. Tatarescu or N. Lupu – completely controlled by PCR40. Their presence in the government was intended not only for reassuring London and Washington, but also had internal motivations, clearly formulated by Vasile Luca; speaking about the

30. The attempt of Greek communists to assume power by a coup failed because of the British military intervention, Churchill having the tacit approval of Stalin, which was not known at the time in Bucharest.

31. MID, fund 0125, list 33, file 6, folder 127, pp. 28-30. Patrascanu claimed that Titel Petrescu “works directly with the English against the Communist Party, and wants to scuttle FND”.

32. Ibidem, pp. 33-34. V. Luca was very harsh with Patrascanu, whose views “do not always reflect the standpoint of the Communist Party. Patrascanu is not even a member of the CC, has entered history by chance and has led the events. He is not a consistent communist”.

33. Liliana Saiu, op. cit., p. 70.34. S. Brucan, Generatia irosita. Memorii (The Wasted Generation. Memoirs),

Bucharest, 1992, p. 71. 35. Ibid., p. 57.36. Liliana Saiu, op. cit., p. 7637. Ibid., p. 59. Molotov supported the dictatorship of Ana Pauker, maybe because

his wife, Polina Jemchujina, was a Jew (she was subsequently arrested during the anti-Semite campaign started by Stalin in 1950).

38. România. Viata politica în documente, 1945 (Romania. The Political Life in Documents, 1945 – edited by Ioan Scurtu), Bucharest, 1994 (hereafter quoted as 1945.Documente), p. 106.

39. Ibid., p. 112.40. For the evaluation of the two political personalities we should mention the

declarations of Gheorghiu-Dej and V. Luca at the mentioned meeting of the FND Council. “Lupu, that old pig, is still there and proves once again that his place is in the graveyard” (Dej). “Tomorrow we can also fight Tatarescu. We can arrest him even if he tries to dance somewhere else” (Luca), 1945. Documente, pp. 105, 107.

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advantages of co-operating with Gh. Tatarescu, the communist leader said that it would “give immediate reassurance not to the National Peasant Party or the National Liberal Party, but to the manufacturers, the economic forces of the country. These forces will think that if Tatarescu is there will be no confiscation of property and so they will have more courage in co-operating with us”41.

But Vasile Luca insisted that “this does not mean that if we shall not solve this problem we shall not start the action. We start the action and then see whom we shall conquer”42.

Ana Pauker was even more direct in affirming the ambition of PCR to have the control of power when she expressed her total disagreement with the king’s affirmation – that all the parties that have influence in the country should be represented in the government. “In other words, he has not expressed his wish to have us in the country”. Ana Pauker was very explicit: “It is a very bad argument for them, for we shall overrun them. We have no time to sit around and wait (ed. underline)”43.

When they started a new government crisis, the communists had the help of social democrats. During the same meeting, Lotar Radaceanu suggested as a pretext the agrarian or the food problems (“This would be a favourable theme both in the countryside, where peasants want land, and in cities, where people are afraid they will starve”.44). The Social-Democrat leader insisted on the necessity that, based on the experience of the two preceding crises, the third should force a FND government45.

This standpoint was entirely endorsed by Vasile Luca: “When the cri-sis starts, we have to have some certitude that we shall be the next ones”46.

In the field of foreign policy the FND government had to eliminate any ambiguity with regard to the decisive role of USSR in Romania’s relations, or, as Vasile Luca put it: “We must show that Romania must take its proper place, not looking for the neighbourhood of England or America, but for a friendship policy with USSR and an alliance with it”47.

41. Ibid., p. 107.42. Ibid., p. 108.43. Ibid., p .110.V. Luca recalled the example of Kimon Georgiev for Bulgaria and

of Teleki for Hungary, and Ana Pauker insisted on the latter: “This guy has no value, but he has a value both for those outside and for the bourgeoisie inside, who are cautious. And Tatarescu is more than Teleki”, ibid., p. 112.

44. Ibid., p. 87.45. Ibid.: “But now let us avoid starting a crisis from which a government of ours

would not come out”.46. Ibid., p. 88.

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The staging of the crisis in Moscow is revealed by the certitude of Gheorghiu-Dej regarding the re-installation of the Romanian administration in Northern Transylvania, as soon as a FND government would take power: “Immediately after the constitution of a National Democratic Front government, Northern Transylvania will come back in to the national territory, it will effectively be under Romanian administration”48. Such reassurance could not be made unless Gheorghiu-Dej had been himself reassured by his Soviet hosts during his Moscow visit.

The governance programme of FND, published on January 29, 1945 was practically a war declaration against the democratic parties, accused among other things of having been at the origin of the elimination of the Romanian administration in Northern Transylvania49.

The debate in the FND Council held on January 24 and 31 contradict the opinion of Liliana Saiu, according to which “At the very moment the communists had firmly set out conquering power (the end of January – ed. note), Pauker’s enthusiasm cooled off, the government crisis did not appear, and of January 31 Gheorghiu-Dej went as far as declaring publicly that FND was going to co-operate loyally with the Crown for the reconstruction of the country. He recognised for the first time the importance of King Michael’s role in the events of August 23,1944”50.

In fact, as the declarations of Vasile Luca attest, PCR had decided to bet on the recognition of the royal prerogatives in the new political crisis, precisely to give the FND government every appearance of legality. Far from meaning a stoppage of the communist offensive, Gheorghiu-Dej’s declarations were one of its components.

But L. Saiu is right in finding a connection between the events in Romania and the nearing Yalta Conference.

Wishing to create an as favourable as possible climate for the meeting of the three great, Stalin avoided confronting his Western partners before the accomplished fact of a government controlled by communists in Bucharest, so much so as one of the most delicate subjects to be broached

47. Ibid., p. 90. The foreign policy of Romania seemed to the communist leader as if “going in two boats, because of which the place of Romania in the future is not clearly established”.

48. Ibid., p. 81.49. The words used were extremely violent: “Because of the racist, chauvinistic

policy and the criminal acts of the Fascist guards in Northern Transylvania, because of the lack of loyal fulfilment of the armistice conditions, Northern Transylvania is still separated from the rest of the country”.

50. Liliana Saiu, op. cit.,p. 76. The author formulates several hypotheses about Moscow’s attitude regarding the efforts of PCR to assume power, ibid., pp.77-81.

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was the situation in Poland, where Moscow had installed a puppet government, the Lublin Committee51.

In spite of the widely spread opinion, at the meeting of the three in Crimea a “division of the world” into influence spheres was not what was decided. From this point of view, the percentage accord of October 1944 was tacitly accepted. “The Declaration regarding Liberated Europe”52, a text proposed by the American delegation was at that time “nothing else than a declaration of intentions, without great importance, intended especially to reassure the Western public opinion”, as American historian Arthur Funk pointed out53.

The declaration included the two provisions that opened the way for Soviet intervention in the internal affairs of East European countries.

Firstly, the three leaders expressed their decision to destroy the re-mnants of Nazism and Fascism, and it is known that Soviets were prompt in labelling the opponents of communisation in the East European countries as Fascists, their elimination being presented as the application of the Declaration54.

Secondly, the three leaders declared their intention of helping together the peoples of the liberated and former satellite countries to install democratic regimes, which allowed the Soviet Union to interfere in the East European countries under the pretext of helping democratic forces, in fact communists and their allies55.

It is no wonder then that when King Michael invoked the Yalta Declaration before Vyshinsky, he declared cynically “I am Yalta”.

In the immediate context of the Yalta Conference there were many people who believed in the generous principles affirmed by the three

51. There is also the hypothesis that Stalin stopped the Soviet offensive towards Berlin (the Red Army was 80-100 km from the German capital) to avoid worrying the Anglo-Americans about the Soviet advance in Central Europe. Liliana Saiu, op.cit., p. 80. See also Arthur Funk, De Yalta a Potsdam, Brussels, 1987, pp. 34-35. The possibility of occupying Berlin in February 1945 became the object of argument in USSR between, among others, marshals Chuikov and Jukov. See the argument in G.K. Jukov, Amintiri si reflectii (Memories and Reflections), Bucharest, 1970, pp. 680 & fol.

52. See the text in The Teheran, The Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam Conferences. Documents, Moscow, 1969, pp.136-137.

53. A. Funk, op. cit., p. 63.54. Ibid., p. 64.55. Ibid. Secretary of state J. Byrnes admitted that the Declaration had been

necessary to Roosevelt for the American public opinion, hostile to the policy of influence spheres. The American president gave it no practical importance, which is proved by the fact that it provided no application mechanisms (John Lewis Gaddis, op. cit., pp. 163-164).

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leaders56. On the very day of the conclusion of the Conference, General Radescu delivered a speech in the Aro Hall, whereby he defended his policy from the criticism of FND. Among other things, he pointed out that neither the return of the Romanian administration in Northern Transylvania nor the co-belligerence status should have been presented as depending on the composition of the government57. That was an attempt to counter two of the arguments that could have brought them a larger audience than those sectors of the public opinion that were receptive to a radical popular programme.

Two weeks after the Yalta Conference the began final assault against the R(descu government. The scenario, which was obviously engineered in Moscow, had an internal and, if necessary, an external component.

The first one consisted of the destabilisation of the internal situation by demonstrations, occupying prefect’s offices and city halls, dividing landed properties, in short, the creation of a state of anarchy that would justify the direct and open intervention of USSR (the external component) if FND should have been incapable to assume power by itself.

The events have been too often told in recent years to be necessary to tell them again58. Suffice it to say that the beginning of the crisis was the demonstration in the Royal Palace Square, organised by FND on February 24, during which shots were fired at the participants from the nearby buildings, killing two and wounding 26 people59. It was a provocation intended to compromise General R(descu and to offer – as explained before – a pretext for Vyshinsky’s coming to Bucharest60.

The very firm reaction of the Prime Minister, who denounced the plotting of the communists (“Those without nation and God, as the people called them, have set out to put the country on fire and drown it in blood. A handful of people, led by two aliens, Ana Pauker and Hungarian Luca, want to enslave the nation through terror. They will be crushed”.) could be inter-preted both in Kremlin and by its instruments in Romania as the expression of the will to resist the communist assault: “The army and I shall do our

56. For enthusiastic evaluations, see A. Funk, op. cit., pp.82-84.57. 1945, Documente, p. 143.58. M. Ciobanu, Convorbiri cu Mihai I al României (Interviews with Michael I of

Romania), Bucharest, 1991, pp. 40 & fol.; Liliana Saiu, op. cit., pp. 83 & fol.59. See reports by military magistrates, published by Dinu C. Giurescu, Din

documentele guvernarii generalului Radescu (From the Documents of General Radescu’s Government), in AT, II (1994), no. 1-2, pp. 196 & fol. During the exile, General Radescu pointed out that at the autopsy of the killed ones it was found that death had been provoked by Soviet-made bullets.

60. Ibid.

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duty until the end. You go and man your stations”, said the Prime Minister at the end of his radio address broadcast in the evening of February 2461.

On the same day, the ministers of FND demanded from the king the dismissal of the Radescu government, alluding to the discontent of USSR: “After 6 months in which Romania had to have a truly democratic regime, as the great allied nations want, too (ed. underline)…”62.

The coalition led by PCR could not force by themselves upon the sovereign the change of government they wanted. Only when A.I. Vyshinsky came (February 27) and put extreme pressure upon the king could the government led by Dr. Petru Groza be installed on March 6, a government controlled in fact by the communists.

The Petru Groza Government and the “Fellow Travellers”

The king’s decision to accept the Petru Groza government (during the crisis the king had intended to abdicate, but he was dissuaded by Dinu Bratianu)63 is explainable by the combination of threats and promises used by Vyshinsky and Groza. Threats: the Soviet emissary told the king that if he did not accept the Petru Groza government until the next afternoon, he would not guarantee the continuity of Romania as an independent state64. Promises: P. Groza informed the king that once his government would be installed, the Romanian administration would be re-established in Northern Transylvania, and the application of the armistice conditions would be done “with greater tolerance”65.

The new cabinet presented itself as “a government of wide democratic concentration”; in fact it represented the transition from the “real coalition” to the “fictitious coalition”, as Hugh Seton Watson put it.

Apparently, the Groza government was a coalition: 4 ministers were the representatives of PCR, 3 were from PSD, 3 from the Plough Workers” Front, 3 from the liberal faction of Gh. Tatarescu, 1 from the General Workers” Confederarion, 1 from the Patriots” Union, 1 from the national-peasant group of Anton Alexandrescu, 1 from the Union of Democrat

61. 1945. Documente, p. 149.62. Ibid., p. 148.63. SR, p. 132.64. Ibid., p. 131.65. Ibid., see also T.M. Islamov and T.A. Pokivailova, Трансильвания - яблоко

раздора между Венгрией и Румынией, în vol. Очяги тревоги в Восточной Европе, Moscow, 1994, pp.106-107.

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Priests, 1 from the army66. The president of the government was Petru Groza (the Plough Workers” Front), the vice-president and Foreign minister was Gheorghe Tatarescu; the communists had a key ministry, that of Internal Affairs, which allowed them to control practically the entire country.

The one who was supposed to give the appearance of “wide democratic concentration” to this government of “fictitious coalition” was Gh. Tatarescu.

Because of his political past – a former PNL leader, prime minister in 1934-1937 and 1939-1940 – he was the representative of the old political elite, leaving the impression of a political continuity.

The position of “fellow traveller” of the communists was the result of the combination of his own political conception with the tactics of PCR of using the politicians of the “old regime” to hide the political turning point, represented by the de facto installation of the communist regime.

Gh. Tatarescu was the only member of the old political class who understood correctly even during the war that USSR would have the decisive role in deciding the status of the East European countries: “The peace”, he told R. Bossy on September 5, 1943, “will be concluded on Russian victories. The Soviets will demand as their zone of influence both Central Europe and the Balkans. Anglo-Americans will oppose the Soviets with great difficulty, who will first of all demand the borders of “41”67. Being therefore convinced that the Romanian society will evolve under the dominance of the Soviet Union, he decided to base his policy on the orientation towards USSR68, as he declared to Soviet diplomat S. Dangulov on January 12, 1945. It is supposed, and we agree, that Gh. Tatarescu tried to break the monopoly of PCR on privileged relations with the Soviet Union.69 Being aware of his political importance in the context of the year 1945 and the necessity, felt both in Moscow and in Bucharest, for an operation of political cosmetics aimed at giving the appearance of a real coalition to the Groza government, Gh Tatarescu constantly affirmed his preference for a special relationship between Romania and USSR. On Sep-

66. Aron Petric (editor), Istoria României 1918-1981, Bucharest, 1981, pp. 252-253.

67. Hoover Archives, Raoul Bossy, Jurnal (Journal), microfilm copy, note on September 5, 1943. It is to be kept in mind that Tatarescu was against deposing Antonescu at that moment, because he was afraid that the German reaction would mean “a finishing blow to the Romanian bougeoisie”.

68. T.V. Volokitina, G.P. Murashko, A.F. Noskova, Народная демократия. Миф или реальность ?, Moscow, 1993 (hereafter quoted as Nd), p. 168.

69. Ibid.

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tember 24, 1945, he declared to Finogenov, the Soviet commercial representative in Bucharest: “When the war with the Soviet Union was over, and the problem of Romania’s political orientation was posed in my presence, three variants appeared in my mind: either work with England, or the United States, or the Soviet Union. Thinking about it I reached the conclusion that England has a temporary interest in Romania and that it is six thousand (sic!) kilometres away. America is twice as far as that. The only trustworthy ally for the subsequent political and economic development of Romania could be only the Soviet Union. I stand on this platform firmly and irreversibly, and I have tied my name and my destiny to it. To my mind, the Soviet Union is a strong political and economic factor for Romania, which can protect Romania in the future from those injustices of fate it had suffered before”70.

The fidelity declarations of Gh. Tatarescu to USSR consolidated Moscow’s conviction that the former prime minister must be used in the new government formula. Being realists, the Soviets saw in Gh. Tatarescu first of all a man easy to blackmail with his past, so much so as I. Maniu had demanded his recording on the list of those to be arrested as responsible for the disaster of the country. Being caught “between the government bench and the accused bench”, he could become an obedient instrument of the communists and the masters in Moscow71.

The Groza government perfectly illustrates the concept of “fictitious coalition” because, while formally including several parties and political and social and professional groups, in fact it had a single centre, PCR, with several satellites and a party (PSD) about to become one.

From the Real Coalition to the Fictitious Coalition in Eastern Europe

The political events of Eastern Europe during the 1944-1947 period were outlined by Hugh Seton Watson in the well-known paradigm of real coalition, fictitious coalition, monolithic regime.72 George Schöpflin added a new stage to this schema, which comes before the three found by Seton

70. T.A. Pokivailova, I. Chiper, Fl. Constantiniu, Instaurarea regimului comunist în România(The Installation of the Communist Regime in Romania), in AT II (1994), no. 4, p. 92.

71. About Gh. Tatarescu in the 1944-1947 period, see the thematic issue of the Dilema (Dilemma) magazine, II (1994), no. 84.

72. Hugh Seton Watson, The East European Revolution, 3rd edition, New York, 1956, pp. 167-171.

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Watson. He thinks that during the war “a kind of revolution” took place in Eastern Europe, which meant “the destruction of the old elite, in fact of the whole ancien régime”73. We shall hereafter demonstrate that, in spite of Schöpflin’s opinion that this stage is “the fundamental prerequisite for the communist take-over”74, it did not exist in the sense he considered it, in all the East European countries.

The problem of the communist take-over in the countries included in the sphere of influence of the Soviet Union is closely linked to the political and strategic vision of the Kremlin with regard to its “security belt”.

As it has been mentioned before, ever since 1941 the Soviet Union demanded that the allies recognise the dominance over the territories annexed through the treaty with Hitler, and, as the contribution of the Red Army to the defeat of Germany proved essential, Stalin demanded, and Roosevelt and Churchill admitted that USSR should have at its western border (the direction from where the German attack had come) “friendly” governments, that is, that would fit the security interests of the Soviet Uni-on. At the present stage of the research it is not possible to tell when Stalin considered that “friendly governments” meant governments controlled by communists.

V.K. Volkov is right when he says that the dissolution of Comintern was not only a propaganda movement, “but also the first organisational move for the concrete formation of the post-war settlement plans. A capital role was given in these plans to the concept regarding the apparition of several states where the power was held by communists”75.

The policy of the Soviet Union of building the strategic glacis was led in two directions in this period: concluding alliance treaties with the power structures of some East European countries and the encouraging of the formation of “patriotic fronts”, that is, coalitions of anti-Fascist and anti-German parties, where the communists were to collaborate with any political group or personality (including the former adversaries), on the basis of a single criterion: the position with regard to Hitler’s Germany and the regimes installed by it or allied to it.

The first treaty concluded by USSR with a country from the future zone of influence was with Czechoslovakia, on December 12, 194376. The

73. George Schöpflin, The Pattern of Political Takeovers, in “Encounter”, vol. LXIV (1985), no. 2, p. 66.

74. Ibid.75. V.K.Volkov, Некоторые концептуальные проблемы возникновения мировой

социалистической системы и первые шаги по ее осуществлению, in Советская внешняя политка в ретроспективе 1917- 1991 гг, Moscow, 1993, p. 97.

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Czechoslovak government in exile, led by Eduard Beneš, could not forget that in September 1938, France and Great Britain had abandoned Czechos-lovakia in the confrontation with Germany. The post-war security of Czechoslovakia could not – after the bitter experience of Munich – be based on the two Western powers (so much so as France had lost the status of great power after the defeat of 1940). Beneš was convinced that the future of his country depended upon a close collaboration with the Soviet Union, both countries being crucially interested in preventing the rebirth of the German power.

The common interests of Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union served the Central European interests of Moscow. The Kremlin was intent upon creating a security system in the heart of Europe that would shield USSR from a new German aggression. According to the well-known expression of Bismarck, he who owns the Bohemian rectangle owns Europe (Central Europe, in fact). Stalin realised that a Czechoslovak government more or less dependent upon Moscow offered the Soviet Union the strategic and political dominance in Central Europe.

The integration of Czechoslovakia in the strategic glacis of USSR required a Polish complement. The Soviet leadership had no illusions about the feelings of the Poles for the Soviet “liberators”. The famous expression of Joseph Beck, “With the Germans we lose our independence, with the Russians we lose our soul”, expressed a quasi-general feeling. Russo-fobia was a component of the collective conscience of the Polish nation, generated by the experience of the Polish-Russian and the Polish-Soviet relations. The government in exile in London had dampened their conflict with USSR, generated by the annexation of the Polish territories after the invasion by the Red Army on September 17, 1939. The discovery of the Katyn massacre led to the breaking of relations between the Polish government in exile and Moscow on April 25, 1943, and one month later to the creation of the “T. Kosciuszko” infantry division on the territory of USSR. “Constantly repeating the thesis of the interest of USSR in a friendly Poland, I.V. Stalin envisaged not only (and not especially) future good neighbourly relations, but especially the modification of the political spectrum represented in the Polish government, by removing from power the irrevocably anti-Soviet and extreme right personalities, and the access of communists to the government”77.

76. Ibid., p. 99. The treaty was followed by an agreement between the Soviet High Command and the Czechoslovak administration (May 1944) which regulated the situations created by the entrance of the Red Army on the Czechoslovak territory.

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The elimination of all the power structures loyal to London on the Polish territory controlled by the Soviets was done by NKVD in a systematic and violent manner78. As the presence of Wehrmacht was eliminated, the liberated areas came under the control of the Polish National Liberation Committee, which was installed by the Soviets in Lublin (July 21, 1944) and controlled by the communists. The annexation policy of the Polish territories by the Soviets deprived the Lublin Committee of any popular support. The presence of some leftist socialists (such as the chairman of the Committee, E. Osubka-Moravsky) and of some dissidents of the Peasant and the Democrat Parties could only give an insubstantial appearance of democratic coalition79.

The crushing of the Warsaw insurrection, which was initiated and led by the representatives of the London government (August 1-September 28), favoured the Soviet actions of installing the new authorities subordinated to Moscow (the passivity of the Red Army, stationed near Warsaw has been the object of intense controversy: did the Soviets deliberately leave the Wehrmacht to repress the insurrection, or did the Soviet army lack the necessary materials to help the insurgents?)80.

The Lublin Committee had launched a manifesto on July 21, 1944, in which a moderate governance programme was put forth, based on “the restoration of the parliamentary republic and the provisions of the Constitution of 1921” and on “the rather limited intervention of the state in the ownership right and property system”81. This manifesto, made up by the Soviets, was intended to calm the fear of a communisation of Poland and not to make things difficult for the Western Allies who had accepted the maintaining of the Soviet-Polish border which had resulted from the annexations made by USSR in September 193982. (The moderation of the

77 НКВД и польское подполье (По “Особым папкам“ И.В.Сталина) , edited by A.F. Noskova, Moscow, 1994, p. 7.

78. Ibid. passim; Nd, p. 153.79. F. Fertjö, Histoire des démocraties populaires, vol. I, Paris, 1972, p. 42.80. Jacques de Launay, Les grandes controverses du temps présent, 1914/1945, vol.

I, Verviers, 1967, pp. 357 & fol.81. Nd, p. 151.82. Churchill spoke to Mikolajczyk, the leader of the Peasant Party and the

chairman of the exile government, in October 1944. Referring to the hope of General Anders that, after the victory over Germany, Anglo-Americans will beat the Russians, he said: “You want the starting of a war that would cost 25 million lives… You are not a government, you are a nation without reason who wants to wreck Europe… to destroy the agreements between allies by your liberum veto”, F. Fetjö, op. cit., p. 44.

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Lublin manifesto was going to be used as a model – as we shall see – by the Hungarian government, installed by the Soviets in Debrecen).

After the Yalta Conference, the reorganisation of the Polish government was decided (on December 31, 1944, the Lublin Committee became the provisional government of Poland), by the inclusion of representatives of the exile government (from London or from Poland); on June 28, 1945, a provisional government of national unity was formed, in which Mikolajczyk was vice-premier.

Thus, in Poland we can see a different evolution from that proposed by Hugh Seton Watson in the 1944-1945 period: on the Polish territory there was first a fictitious coalition (the Lublin Committee), followed after almost a year by a real coalition (the national unity government), which was not viable though, because the communists were able to easily manipulate the cabinet, by using the presence of the Red Army, and divide the parties: “When Mikolajczyk came back to Warsaw, in Poland there already existed two socialist parties having the same name, two peasant parties, to democrat parties, each of them claiming to be the true one and of which some accepted to co-operate with the communists, while others refused or demanded a high price for their collaboration”. Due to these differences, the communists took control of 14 of the 21 portfolios83.

In Hungary, the communists followed the Soviet orders to create a coalition government. The Kremlin’s orders are known from the notes taken by Ernö Gerö during the talks in Moscow, which took place between December 1 and December 5, 1944 (Stalin was also present in some of them). “It was decided that the manifesto must necessarily contain the problem of the land reform. The great landed properties must be given to peasants. It is not possible not to give land to the peasants in Hungary, while in the neighbouring countries the land reform is being done. The Soviet leaders mentioned in this respect the land reform in Poland. Those changed (the communists transferred to the Soviet Union in 1940) shall not be put in the government. They would be considered the puppets of Moscow. This is another matter, but let us leave the people choose them”. The Horthy’s generals were asked to participate in the government in the following manner: “Tell them that if they will not participate in the government, others will take their place and the government will be even more leftist”. On December 5, Stalin told the representatives of the Communist Party that “our programme […] was good in principle, but that, in his opinion, we should have pointed out more the protection of private property and the

83. Ibid., p. 45.

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preservation and development of private initiative. More flexible formulae. In particular, declare clearly that private property remains. The same as in the Polish manifesto. Nothing should be frightening. Formulate sections about the private property more similar with the Polish manifesto. More flexibility in the land problem. Do not mention spreading. Here too use the Polish model. Speak more clearly about private property. Speak more flexibly about the purging of the administration… Be generous with words. The government should make the armistice their first task. Mobilise as many people as possible to help them”84.

Stalin’s orders were followed so faithfully that on December 5, 1944, when the communist delegation led by Ernö Gerö discussed with Horthy’s generals who had come to Moscow, the latter said that the manifesto contained exactly what they had said all the time85.

Under these circumstances, on December 22, 1944, the government led by Colonel Miklos Béla was formed, having as its political basis the Hungarian National Independence Front, a coalition that included several parties: the Small Agrarians, the Communists, the Social-Democrats, the National-Peasants and the Liberal-Democrats. In Hungary the authentic coalition did not appear spontaneously during the struggle against Hitler’s Germany, but was installed by Moscow, as a means of reassuring the apprehension generated by the advance of the Red Army towards Central Europe. But, as it will be shown hereafter, in this coalition the communists could not assume the leading role, as the Small Agrarian Party proved to have a remarkable political force in 1945 and 194686.

In the Balkans, the communist parties were much more vigorous. In Yugoslavia, the power structures of the future regime were implanted during the partisan war led by communist Iosif Broz Tito. On December 29, 1943, the National Liberation Committee was formed, which had all the attributes of a provisional government, a decision that upset Moscow87, preoccupied as it was to diminish the enthusiasm of the communists which might have proved counterproductive for the Kremlin’s efforts to prove that it did not intend to communise the continent. Under the Soviet pressure,

84. W. McCagg, Stalin Embattled, 1943-1948, Detroit,1978, pp. 315-316.85. Ibid., p. 316.86. A good presentation of the Hungarian parties may be found in György Litvan,

Les partis politiques hongrois entre 1945 et 1947. Ruptures et continuités (Communication presented at the International Conference on “Internal Factors Facilitating the Sovietization of Central and East European States”, 1944-1948, Opocno, September 9-11, 1993).

87. F. Fetjö, op. cit., p. 63, note 11.

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Tito accepted to collaborate with the Yugoslav government in exile in London, led by Dr. I. Šubašic (November 2, 1944). In the Churchill-Stalin percentage accord, Yugoslavia had a 50%-50% status, which shows that Stalin had decided not to leave the Yugoslav communists to also assume de jure the monopoly of power. Tito’s success, based on his own efforts, boded ill for the relations with Moscow. In Yugoslavia, too, the real coalition (Tito-Šubašic) was imposed by the Soviets, like in Hungary, but it had no real existence.

A somewhat similar experience took place in Albania. On October 24, 1944, the Anti-Fascist Committee of National Liberation was transformed into a provisional government, led by communist Enver Hodja. The communists, helped by their Yugoslav comrades, took advantage of the political created by the successive Italian and German occupations and assumed exclusive political leadership88.

A real coalition was set up in Bulgaria, where the Communist Party, which had been in communication with Moscow throughout the war, proposed the creation of a wide anti-Fascist coalition called the Patriotic Front, whose programme was broadcast by the Hristo Botev radio station in Moscow. “The demands of the programme were so formulated that they reflected the interests of all the democratic and patriotic forces. At the same time, the Bulgarian communist party, in organising the strategy and tactics of the Patriotic Front, had no intention to give up its final aim, the socialist revolution”89.

The distrust of communists limited the audience of this programme, but when the Red Army entered Bulgaria the communists organised a small coup90, which gave the power to the Patriotic Front, controlled by them. The head of the government was appointed Kimon Georgiev, a politician who had established diplomatic relations with USSR (July 29, 1934) when he had been Prime Minister (1934-1935) and who had entered the Patriotic Front in 194291. In September 1944 the Patriotic front included the communists (the Bulgarian Workers Party), the Bulgarian Agrarian Popular

88. D. Analis, Les Balkans 1945-1960. La prise du pouvoir, Paris, 1978, pp. 80-81. The detailed presentation of the take-over of power from Yalina Valeva, The CPSU – The Comintern – The BCP: Strategy and Tactic in the Years of World War II (communication presented at the International Conference on “The Establishment of Communist Regimes in Eastern Europe, 1945-1950”, Moscow, March 29-31, 1994, hereafter quoted as The Establishment).

89. E.L. Valeva, Стратегия Коминтерна в Болгарии и деятельность болгарских коммунистов (1941-1943), in “Славяноведение”, 1994, no. 6, p. 17.

90. D. Analis, op. cit., p. 63.91.Советская Историческая Энциклопедия, vol. 4, Moscow, 1963, col. 226.

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Union, the Zveno movement, the Social Democrat Party and the Radical Party (from September 20). Their collaboration was based on the programme adopted on September 17, 1944.

The coalition was undermined from the very beginning by the conflict between communists and agrarians, the latter considering that “because Bulgaria is a country of peasants, the Agrarian Party should have the leading role among the other parties in the leadership of the economic, political and cultural life of the country”92. Communists not only had no intention to give up their role to agrarians, but also intended to secure the monopoly of power by any means, including violent ones. In January 1945 one of the leaders of the Zveno group, T. Harizanov was complaining to the Soviet representative in the Allied Control Commission that the Bulgarian Workers Party intended to install its own dictatorship under the cover of the Patriotic Front93.

Using tactics similar to the Polish communists, the Bulgarian ones encouraged differences inside the Agrarian Union, whose anticommunist leader, G.M. Dimitrov, was forced to go into exile. His successor, N. Petkov, remained anticommunist, but other leaders (M. Ghenovski, S Toncev, G. Traikov) favoured collaboration with communists94.

Compared with the other countries occupied by the Red Army, Romania had an authentic coalition – the National Democratic Bloc – created before the occupation of the country by the Soviet troops. Even if, under these circumstances, the communists acted under orders from Moscow, democratic parties, the king and the army collaborated with PCR being convinced that they served the national interest.

Immediately after August 23, 1944, PCR acted after the “Bulgarian model” to transform the authentic coalition into a fictitious coalition, an objective achieved on March 6, 1945, but only with the help of Vyshinsky and in the presence of the Soviet army. Had PCR acted alone, it could have not gained control over the government.

What made the Soviet Union act so brutally on Romania95? At the present stage of the research it has been concluded that in the autumn of 1944 USSR had established the USSR-Yugoslavia-Bulgaria triangle96, and

92. Nd, p. 136.93. Ibid.94. Ibid., pp. 138-139

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Romania could not have been left out. This triangle was to be the territorial basis of the Soviet presence in South Eastern Europe and Eastern Mediterranean, a traditional zone of interest for Moscow97.

Did Stalin intend to impose his model in the Soviet sphere of influence? It is known that in Hungary communists thought that the abolition of capitalism would be take 8-10 years98, but in April 1945 Stalin declared to the Yugoslav delegation: “This war is not like those in the past. Any territory requires its own social criterion. Each of them requires its own social system, the extent to which its army advances”99.

It was clear that in all the countries occupied by the Red Army the socialist regime was going to be installed, but, at that time, Stalin considered that the new socialist countries could take their own ways, under the supervision of their “big brother” in Moscow.

From Taking the Power to the Stalinist Pattern

The morning after the Groza Cabinet was installed, a team of emissaries arrived from Moscow to deliver to Ana Pauker, Constantin Parvulescu and Constantin Doncea, senior officials of the Romanian Communist Party, a plan, which unidentified sources in the O.S.S. (The Office of Strategic Services of the United States) dubbed as one poised to communize Romania. The plan was phased in three years and two more were to follow, five years each. To this day, we have knowledge only of the content of the first plan, as it has been preserved in the U.S. archives.

The document has an exceptional value for the understanding of both how the Stalinist pattern was imposed on Romania and the stages of the Stalinization process in Eastern Europe. Following below is the content of this document, along with the motives of its publication herein:

95. See the discussion in McCagg, op. cit., p. 168. The author thinks that the coup in Romania “was the beginning of the deliberate testing by the Soviets of the political response of the Allies… The new aspect in this new Soviet mode of testing the force of the Allies consisted in its obvious lack of caution”.

96. V.K. Volkov, op. cit., pp. 100-101. On October 9, 1944, Stalin demanded, during the dialogue with Churchill regarding the percentage agreement, that USSR should have in Bulgaria 90%, see V. Volkov, The Soviet Leadership and Certain Problems of South Eastern Europe in the Closing Year of War (1944-1945), p. 12, The Establishment.

97. Cf. also Mihaly Fülöp, L’ocupation soviétique en Europe centrale et orientale, in “Relations Internationales”, 1994, no. 79, pp. 344-345.

98. Vida István, Communist Takeover In Hungary 1945-1948, p. 3, The Establishment.

99. Milovan Djilas, Wartime, New York, London, 1977, p. 437.

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“A. The achievement of the agrarian reform by confiscating the big land lots and ruining the landlords.

“B. The abolition of the army in its present form and the establishment of a new army made of the “Tudor Vladimirescu” and “Avram Iancu” divisions (the latter is still stationed in Russia), as well as of all the officers activating now on the Soviet territory.

C. The liquidation of all the banks by mounting attacks on the National Liberal Party, whose members own most of these banks.

D. The small farms must be abolished to destitute the small landlord peasants of their land and cattle. This will make way for their absorption in the collectivized agricultural system.

E. The King’s abdication and the bundling of the royal family into exile.

F. Phasing out the import-export companies conducting businesses with the United States and Great Britain, and channeling the Romanian exports to the Soviet Union and the Soviet-dominated states.

G. Abolition of historical parties by arresting, killing and abducting their members.

H. Establishment of a police organization, built based on the N.K.V.D.-like “popular militia”.

I. Sending the rural population flock to the industry. Development of industrial enterprises in Romania.

J. No foreign citizen shall be allowed to enter Romania, except for those coming from the states under the Soviet influence100.

Before setting off to review the content of this document, we must say we do not avail of the plan’s text but only of an account given by the agent “from his memory”101. Fortunately, the eventual omissions or alterations in the relaying of the text do not change the basic content: the plan provides for turning Romania from a constitutional monarchy, with a democratic parliamentary regime based on several parties, into a state of “popular democracy” (this term is not employed in the text but could be found in the “blueprint” of the plan), a republic which, by brushing aside any kind of

100. Ioan Chiper, Florin Constantiniu, Adrian Pop, Sovietization of Romania. Anglo-American perceptions, Bucharest, 1993, p.136 (to be continued SR). For attempts to identify the agent who spirited the plan over to Romania, see Fl. Constantiniu, Mihail E. Ionescu, Plan for communizing Romania in “Historic magazine”, vol. IV (1993), issue 7-8, p. 65-66; for OSS’ reserve to the text’s authenticity, SR, P. 137-138.

101. Ibidem, p.136.

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opposition (the democratic parties, the monarchy), stays under the communist party’s control, which avails of two powerful levers for imposing its will: a political police patterned on Soviets’ N.K.V.D., and an army indoctrinated and politically led by the party. On the economic level, the plan casts the future structures of the Stalinist pattern, based on industrialization and farming collectivization. The achievement of the agrarian reform entailed the liquidation of the landlords as a class; by exerting pressure on the peasants’ class, the small landlords would have been forced into the newly-emerged Kolkhozes. The PCR was to take the banking system into its grip, to preserve the essential lever of steering the economic life, including the industrial sector, where the private property, if allowed to survive, was to be put under a close and strict watch. The plan of March 7th, 1945 addressed only a first stage within the communizing process. It seemed that the structural mutations, expected to take place in the up-coming stages (two more plans, five years each, were expected to be assigned to Ana Pauker a month later) would have turned Romania into a Stalinist pattern of socialism.

In the spring of 1945, when Moscow entrusted the PCR with a plan of measures due to be adopted in the upcoming three years, when the communist party in Bulgaria and Yugoslavia held approximately the same degree of control of the power, and in Poland, by ostensibly accepting the representatives of the government bundled into exile to London, it wielded its authority unimpeded, the Soviet leadership had already earned some background in the implementation of the Soviet variant of socialism in a foreign territory.

The first attempt had been in Outer Mongolia, which subsequently became the People’s Republic of Mongolia. An independent state since 1911, the Outer Mongolia joined the orbit of the Soviet Russia, and on July 10, 1921, with the backing of the Red Army, local communists seized the power and, three years later, at Russia’s orders, proclaimed the “People’s Republic”. Many months on, the Soviet leaders maintained the image of an independent Mongolia, with a regime non-conformable to the USSR, although the whole economic, political and cultural life was steered from as far as Moscow (for instance, barely had Stalin suggested to Choybalsan to massively rise the livestock quota, that the 10th Congress of the party passed a decision entrusting “the Central Committee with turning into life, in a Stalinistic manner, the indication voiced by the great Stalin as to increasing the livestock quota from 26 million to as high as 200 million”102. The communist party itself always preserved the name of People’s Revolutionary Party of Mongolia. The next movements - land

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nationalization (1921-1924), expropriation of big property (1927), subordination of foreign trade to the state monopoly (1930), liquidation of the big ecclesiastic property (1938) - pointed at the direction taken by Mongolia after changes occurred in a semi-nomadic society, with feudal structures and a quasi-theocratic regime. But the Mongolian experience could not be enforced in Europe.

The Baltic Scenario

Unlike in Mongolia, in the Baltic states Soviets had set a precedent by having gradually installed their authority, at first by signing treaties of mutual assistance, followed by stationing troops in the fall of 1939, and ulti-mately, in early August, 1940, by incorporating these countries into the USSR.

But in this case, the political and strategic context had been different from the Eastern Europe’s conditions in 1944-1945. The annexation of the Baltic countries had been made by virtue of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact and the German-Soviet friendship and border treaty (September 28, 1939), in which Germany had agreed to the annexation of these states by the USSR, while France and Great Britain, overwhelmed with the war’s drudgery could in no way intervene on their behalf (there is evidence, however, that during the British-French-Soviet talks held in mid 1939, Paris and London had showed willingness to recognize that Soviets’ sphere of influence reached into Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania).

On June 17, 1940, Stalin’s emissaries arrived in the Baltic countries: V.G. Dekanozov in Lithuania, A.I. Vyshinsky in Latvia and A.A.Zhdanov in Estonia, whose mission - as V.M. Molotov informed the German ambassador, count von der Schulenburg - was to hold talks ahead of forming new governments103. Along with the emissaries, massive Soviet troops were stationed in these countries. The three emissaries imposed new and popular front-oriented governments, headed by apolitical figures, who could be easily handled: in Latvia, for instance, Vyshinsky asked President Ulmanis to appoint August Kirchenstein as Prime Minister, a well-known specialist in microbiology104. Under the purely formal authority of these

102. V.S. Lelchuk’s intervention at the roundtable “Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries: evolution and collapse of political regimes (mid ‘40s - early ‘80s), in history of SSSR”, 1991, no. 1, p.10.

103. Oglasenou podlejit, SSR-Ghermanija 1939-1941, Moscow, 1991, p. 193.104. For the Latvian episode of Vyshinsky’s biography, see Arkadi Vaksberg,

Vychinsky, Stalin’s prosecutor, Paris, 1991, p.207 and following.

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governments, but with the direct supervision of the three “proconsuls” (A.A. Zhdanov had been named to the supervising office), elections took place and the Baltic states were proclaimed Soviet republics, which later asked to be incorporated into the USSR (August 3-6, 1940).

Some elements of the “Baltic scenario” will also be found in the Eastern European countries, and Vyshinsky’s behavior in Bucharest will be noticeably similar to his acts in Riga.

Soviets’ strategic freeze built up in Eastern Europe had an Asiatic “pendant” in the so-called “Eastern Turkistan Republic” (Vostocno-Turkestankaja Respublika), encompassing the Chinese Chinshien landmass, “self-liquidated” in 1945 following an Soviet-Sino accord105. Furthermore, there was an abortive attempt of sovietizing the Iranian Azerbaijan, occupied by the Soviet troops (after an accord struck with the Great Britain), on August 25, 1941, but the Soviets abandoned the plan on March 25, 1946, shortly after the first crises of the cold war. As it had already done on several occasions, the communist party took on democratic clothes, in the wake of a so-called “national uprising”, the party leader Pikewari proclaimed a self-autonomous republic (November 20-21, 1945)106. It is known today that the master-minder of the Democratic Party was D.M. Bagyrov, one of Stalin’s emissaries, who was executed in 1956107.

An Enduring Peace and Popular Democracy

The events unfolded in Spain in the ‘30s are worth remembering not necessarily because there may be some analogy between the measures taken by the republican government in Madrid and the ones in the Eastern-European countries in the ‘40s but mostly because the name of “popular democracy” - which was to become successful in the “socialist camp” and the international communist movement (The Cominform Body was called “For an enduring peace, for popular democracy !”) - had appeared once with the developments in Spain 1931 through 1939. “Its content related to the emerging of a “new type of parliamentary republic”, standing for a particular form of state, in which the power will have been passed into the hands of an anti-fascist forces coalition, including the “bourgeoisie’s left-

105. V.S.Lelchuk’ intervention, p. 9.106. See Andre Fontaine, History of the cold war, vol I, Paris, 1965, p. 332 and

following.107 V.L. Lelchuk, p.9, see Bagyrov’s biography in “Izvestija TK KPSS”, 1990, no.

7, p.85.

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wing”, accepted into the Popular front and fatefully influential on the society”108.

We will see that this definition includes many of the basic elements of the “popular democracy” concept, as it was achieved in the Eastern European countries in the ‘40s. There is some indication that, at Stalin’s behest, Gh. Dimitrov set the difference between the Soviet regime and the democratic-popular one: “the Soviet system and the system of the popular democracy are two sides of the same power pattern: the power of the working class, which is allied with the working masses from the cities and villages, and leads the masses. There are two forms of the proletarian dictatorship”109. We won’t go over a particular analysis now, otherwise meticulous in itself, but only remind that, as the theoretic features of the Stalinist pattern in Eastern Europe were drawn, it was determined that the popular democracy would be a form of proletarian dictatorship the moment it became mature, and yet, that at the beginning, its content was represented by the “revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry”110. The Marxist scholastic had used the same terms to actually express the transition from what in Hugh Seton-Waston’s view of an on-a-step-basis development meant to shift from a fictitious coalition (“the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry”) to the monolithic regime (“proletarian dictatorship”).

Chalmer Johnson said that the commitment of the PCR, in 1945, to the achievement of what would become a popular democracy between 1945 and 1948, had been done under the conditions of a “deviated communist regime”. The American political analyst made a distinction between the communist regimes, originating in popular movements and led by communists, on the one hand, and the regimes imposed by a foreign might, on the other hand. The first vacillate between losing popularity as the dictatorial structures are implemented, and being forced to cushion ideological strains in order to keep their faithful in place; the latter, imposed from outside, have nothing to be afraid of in this regard and can run their ruling program without caring much about the popular attention111.

108. T.V. Volokitina, G.P. Murashko, Narodnaja demokratija. Mif ili real’nost?, Moscow, 1993, p.3.

109. Gh. Dimitrov, Speech at the Fifth Congress of the Bulgarian Communist Party, cited by Wlodzmierz Brus, Stalinism and the “People’s Democracies” in Stalinism, Robert C. Tucker, New York, London, 1977, p. 244.

110. Sovetskaia istoriceskaja enticlopedija, vol. 9, Moscow, 1996, column 915.111. Chalmers Johnson, Comparing Communist Nations in Change in Communism

Systems, Chalmers Johnson, 1970, p. 31-32 at Robert King, History of the Romanian Communist Party, Standford, 1980, p.39.

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The PCR belonged to the second category, as it could not ascend to power without foreign help, namely the help from the USSR. In spite of the strenuous efforts mounted by the PCR leaders in view of winning allegiance among certain segments of the Romanian society - undoubtedly the program of the National Democratic Front contained provisions in line with the claims and aspirations of certain social-professional groups and even some social classes -, they could not hide the image of the “foreign party”, more exactly, of the “foreign occupant”.

The agrarian reform, the measures meant to improve the material living conditions of the workers and employees failed to earn the PCR the expected gain in popularity.

Barely had the PCR taken control of the government that the new regime was faced with a crisis that delayed the implementation of the program of communizing the country: the royal strike. The strike broke out given the international political context created by the Conferences in Potsdam (July 17 through August 2nd, 1945), where US President Truman had showed more firmness to his Soviet ally than his predecessor112. Both the United States and the Great Britain stated they would not negotiate peace treaties with Germany’s ex-satellite states unless they availed of “recognized democratic governments”113, a condition unmet by the Groza Cabinet, one that London and Washington officials refused to recognize. It was one way to put into question the legality of the governments installed in Sofia and Bucharest.

Consequences of the Potsdam Conference

Before the Potsdam Conference took place, the National Peasant Party and the National Liberal Party, silent for a few weeks after Groza’s ascent to the head of the Government, came up with a draft of a new ruling program114. The results of Soviets’ attempts to alleviate tension in Romania by awarding king Michael the “Victoria” order, the highest Soviet medal pinned on the chest of those who contributed fatefully to Germany’s defeat, fell short of expectation. Shortly after the publication of the communique by the Potsdam Allied summit, the democratic forces in Romania launched a “counter-offensive” aimed to overthrow the Groza Cabinet. An impetus had

112. A. Funk, From Yalta to Potsdam, Brussels, 1987, p. 127 and following.113. The Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam Conferences, Moscow, 1969, p. 371.114. Liliana Saiu, The Great Powers and Romania, 1944-1946, Boulder, 1992, p.

125.

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come from the United States. On August 18, the State Department instructed the American mission to Bucharest “to communicate to the Romanian political leaders that the US Government hopes to see a representative government in Romania, formed by the efforts of the Romanians themselves, or, if necessary, with the Allies’ assistance, as agreed by the Crimea accords”115.

The turns of the “royal strike” are well-known: after Petru Groza denied to step down and make way for a representative government, as the king had requested, the sovereign refused to sign the decrees tabled by the Government, which sparked a constitutional crisis”116.

The PCR, backed by Moscow, moved quickly to strengthen its positions won on the 6th of March, 1945. In a meeting with the Soviet trade representative Finogenov on September 24,Tatarascu said: “Should the king refuse to get in touch with the Government and secure normal activity of the Cabinet, the Council of Ministers will take over the country’s rule de facto”. The Vice-Prime Minister did not rule out the eventuality of assuming the governance de jure117.

Some documents indicate that after the Soviets had intended to bring former king Carol II back to the throne in late August - early September, who seemed prone to show much bowing and scraping to Muscovite authorities118, a three-phase plan was at hand to tuck all the power into the PCR’s bag. In the first phase, a Regency was to be formed, embodied by Michael’s aunt and ex-Greece’s queen, Elisabeth, Patriarch Nicodim and the President of the Cassation Court; the second phase provided for the elimination of the PNT and PNL, under charges of fascist activity, while the third phase would have marked the abolition of the Commission for the truce enforcement and would have depleted the British and US representatives of any means of monitoring the fulfillment by Romania of its obligations undertaken through the truce convention119. Information over who initiated the plan (either the Soviets or the PCR) is not available. Neither is that regarding Moscow’s stand over the elimination, in that moment, of the king, in case the plan had come from the PCR. The plan set

115. Ibidem, p. 128. Great Britain has been very reserved throughout the crisis in Romania, as the Labor Cabinet was busy with the situation in Greece, Ibidem, p.130-131. For the British policy of this time, see Elisabeth Barker, The British between the Superpowers 1945-1950, London, 1983, p. 31 and following.

116. See the king’s account at M. Ciobanu, op. cit., p. 51-52.117. T. A. Pokiavailova, I.Chiper, Fl. Constantiniu, Installation of the communist

regime in Romania, in “Totalitarianism’s archives”, no. 2/1994, p. 90.118. Liliana Saiu, op. cit., p.133.119. Ibidem, p. 179-74.

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to communize Romania and conveyed to the communist leaders in Bucharest provided for the abolition of the monarchy, indeed, but we must recall that it was to be phased in a three-year time. To this point, it should be said that the scenario of stifling the “royal strike” kept, even though fictitiously, intactness of the kingdom notion, as long as the plan was aimed to set a Regency Council, not to proclaim the republic120.

A series of factors, which cannot be analyzed here121, made the United States to substantively soften their stand taken in August, and, after a discussion held by Secretary of State J. Byrnes and Stalin, agree to a compromise: naming a representative of the PNT and one from the PNL to the Groza Cabinet (Stalin had insisted that Maniu, Bratianu and doctor Lupu in particular be barred from joining the Government), which was only a mere revamp that would in no way unbalance the PCR’s lever. The US historian Paul Quinlan gives a fair account of the facts, as he writes that: “The Accord in Moscow marked a final step in Soviets’ winning recognition of their domination of Romania. It was the Accord in Moscow, not the elections held in fall, a year later, as some would put it, that shattered Westerners’ hopes to build up a democratic Romania”122.

As the two officials of the democratic parties, PNT and PNL, joined the Government, namely Emil Hatieganu and Mihai Romniceanu, respectively, Romania apparently returned to a genuine formula of the ruling coalition (Hugh Seton-Watson’s paradigm), with governmental representation of both a PCR-led group and the democratic parties. In theory, the PCR had been forced a step backward, as it had let in officials from two parties that had been chased from the Government on the 6 th of March, 1945. But in reality things were utterly different. Without a portfolio, the two ministers were powerless in influencing the policy conducted by Groza, whom they had helped to earn Britons’ and Americans’ recognition simply by joining his Cabinet.

120. Some evidence indicates that the PCR also intended to the proclaim as a king the minor Stephen of Habsburg, one of king Michael’s cousins (son of archduchess Ileana, the sovereign’s aunt).

121. See discussion at Liliana Saiu, op. cit., p. 159 and following.122. P. Quinlan, Clash over Romania. British and American Policies towards

Romania: 1938-1947, Los Angeles, 1977, p. 151. Aware of the importance of the Soviet-American understanding, the members of the US mission to Bucharest threatened to resign in bloc (ibidem). Drafting a long report about his visit to Romania with the tripartite commission (December 1945 through January 1946), Sir Archibald Clark-Kerr concluded: “When I left Bucharest, I experienced a feeling of sadness and I thanked the Lord I had not been born in Romania” (SR, p. 178).

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Though both London and Washington officially indicated the up-coming elections as momentous for Romania’s fate, politicians in the two capitals seemed to be resigned with an impending vast-scale rigging of the votes. The US ambassador to Moscow, A. Harrriman, said that “it is hard to believe that free elections will be allowed in Romania, in spite of the formal vows made by Vyshinsky and Groza. Genuinely free ballots, said the ambassador, could result in an anti-Russian government, but given the circumstances, such elections could not be organized. Vyshinsky himself beamed trust in the fairness of the elections as he told Harriman that the Groza’s FND would win 70% of the votes, the Peasant party, 20%, and the national-liberal, 10%123.

The memoirs of the US ambassador (written at third person) say it all with regard to Westerners’ perception of the Moscow accords and the recognition of the Groza Government: the so-called representation earned by the Cabinet in Bucharest marked, in actual fact, Romania’s total drowning in the Soviet domination sphere. The elections on November 19, 1946, were nothing but the epilogue of a decision, whose impact on the introduction of the Stalinist pattern in Romania is often neglected.

Resistance to Sovietization from Within the PCR

As socialism endured, the discrepancy between the communist ideals and the USSR’s behavior caused frustration among numerous communists worldwide. Romania was no exception to this rule. The unmerciful occupation, the exploitation of the country’s economic resources, Moscow’s uninterrupted mingling with Romania’s internal affairs prompted national reflexes in the minds of some communists, who began to move against Romania’s sovietization.

On December 21st, 1944, Swiss minister to Bucharest, Rene de Weck, sent the head of the Federal Political Department (Foreign Ministry) a document headlined “Observations of a communist (Jew) on the USSR’s intentions about Romania”. “This note, Weck says, is a brief account of a discussion held by one of my informers with a member of the steering committee of the Communist Party of Romania”124.

123. W. Averell Harriman, Elie Abel, Special Envoy to Churchill and Stalin, 1941-1946, New York, 1975, p. 528.

124. Text published by Andrei Siperco in “Historic magazine”, XXVII (1993), no. 4, p.4.

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Highlighting USSR’s intention to strip Romania of all means of opposing it politically, economically and “morally” (ideologically maybe) or of being used of a third power against it, the communist interlocutor, showing a strong grasp of reality, said that the Russians intended to pass the state power in Romania into the hands of the communist party, no matter the number of its supporters and in spite of the will shown by the majority of the Romanian bourgeoisie; they will proceed with threats (denouncing of the truce Convention etc.), terror (street rallies), charging the whole people and its leaders, and thus spreading a feeling of guilt among them, by shrewdness, by persuasiveness, by purge…and even by resorting to force”. The Swiss minister went on to say that industrial nationalization, agricultural collectivization and a gradual rise in Romania’s economic dependence on the USSR would follow until Romania would become a component of the Soviet state de facto. He also warned that the Anglo-Americans would not enter a conflict with the USSR on Romania’s behalf. To this point, he concluded: “Though more bourgeois than the neighboring countries, Romania cannot be influenced by Bulgaria, Hungary and Yugoslavia, which undoubtedly will yield to the Bolshevik-oriented transformations more rapidly125. Weck’s report gives no clue as to who this communist was but, as we shall see below, it is almost certain this man was the economist Belu Zilber.

Thanks to Eduard Marks’ research, conducted on the archives of the American secret services, we know now that between October 21, 1944 and at least in early 1946, the US agents (Louis E, Madison, Henry L. Roberts, Thomas) stayed in contact with Belu Zilber and L. Patrascanu, who gave them lavish information about the USSR’s policy with Romania126. For the Americans, “Zilbert and Patrascanu were the only trustworthy information sources inside the Romanian communist circles”127.

In his discussions with Henry Roberts, Patrascanu sounded convinced that Romania was witnessing the first moves toward coagulation of the working class, and that its inner force was “potential, rather than real”; so much for him to believe that a “true coalition government” was badly nee-ded, on the background of a large-scale campaign of ideological education driven by the communists among the masses. In his opinion, during the cou-

125. Ibidem.126. See Eduard Mark, The O.S.S. in Romania, 1944-1945. An intelligence

operation of the Early Cold War, in Intelligence and National Security”, vol. 9 (1994), no. 2, p. 320 and following.

127. Ibidem, p. p.333; for B. Zilber’s evaluation, ibidem, p. 342-343, minute 82.

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ntry’s reconstruction works, communists could act as a “loyal opposition”, and the ascent to power would be made “by sympathy, not by force”128.

Patrascanu’s and Zilbert’s attitude, and their talks with the American agents too, caused much awareness about how pernicious the Soviet domination was for Romania’s national interests. It was not by far a matter of betrayal or benefiting from kind (in 1944-1946 Belu was the sole who accepted a package of cigarette as a gift). Eduard Mark is so accurate when he wrote that “like many other Romanians as well, they started to take Washington for a counter-weight against the Soviet influence. Both of them sincerely believed in Marxism, but they rejected the Stalinist-like communism”. Zilbert even said that “Stalinism was a genuine form of socialism” and that a new theory ought to be sought to settle the problem129.

To this date, documentary researches are very indicative of the fact that a first challenge of the Stalinist pattern, now being imposed on the East Europe, had come from within the PCR. However, this challenge was not direct but involved attempts to convince the Unites States it was necessary that it intervene to stop the process, especially in Romania. “Zilbert became the lobbyist of a firm American resistance policy in front of the Soviets in Romania. The SI reports (Secret Intelligence) give a bizarre account of a prominent communist asking the United States to help in a free trade, free elections and a free press in East Europe”130.

A British source confirms the SI reports: in early 1946, Eddie Boxhall, who was Barbu Stirbei’s son-in-law and colonel in the British Intelligence, found out, as he traveled across Romania, that facts were similar to what the US agents had transmitted. “A few dedicated Romanian communists realized the danger placed by blindly yielding to these diktats (the Russians’), which could eventually ruin Romania, especially on the economic level, many decades on. They set off to discuss about the forming of a new “national” communist party, which, apart from pursuing the communist doctrine, would have seen that Romania did not lose everything”. Boxhall feared these “laudable attempts” would not be achieved so long as Ana Pauker remained at the steer of the party, and Emil Botnaras, at the head of the secret police131.

Pieced together, the SI reports and Boxhall’s letter, unveil the existence of a stream of “national communism” (it must be noted that Boxhall uses of the term “national communist” party), within the PCR that announces Tito’s orientation beginning 1948. We are not trying to discover

128. Ibidem.129. Ibidem.130. Ibidem.

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priorities notwithstanding the facts. We only say that, to our knowledge, the most elaborate resistance to the Staninist pattern in the Eastern European countries was mounted by B. Zilber and L. Patrascanu. However, details remain patchy on the operation technicalities of this “national” communist party, which, given the Soviets’ strict control over Romania, could not come out to the open and commit publicly with its views. If not eliminated, the Soviet interference with Romania’s internal affairs, to say the least, would have been conditional upon existence of this party.

Present at the Peace Conferences in Paris, B. Zilber and L. Patrascanu did not spare their efforts trying to convince the Western officials of the disastrous consequences Soviet domination could have over Romania. According to D. Danielopol’s notes, “”Zilber informs the Americans and other people that in the event they leave us “en tete a tete” with the Russians, Romania will be doomed to perish. “I am both a Jew and communist”, Zilber says. “Do not hand us over to the Russian completely. If you do, not only that we will wholly disappear as a nation but in the end, this will be to your detriment, as well”. He explained to Australia’s delegate A.G.B. Fisher “a few secret plans of Soviet expansion”, but the foreign diplomat, though impressed, did not dare more than several promises, pretty vague in fact, and difficult to honor.

Information about Patrascanu’s contacts and statements made in Paris is not available. According to D. Danielopol’s notes, Patrascanu intended to defect to the United States, but he subsequently relinquished his plan for the mere reason that “the Americans are crazy. They give up more than the Russians pretend and expect. If I go to them, they could deliver me to the Russians. I would rather go home”132.

The actual returns of the 1946 elections showed that Patrascanu had made an accurate evaluation of the situation in Romania.

Opponents from among the party leaders (Patrascanu’s statements do not indicate his stand at the time) believed he had been mistrustful of the “forces and possibilities of the working class of driving the country’s economic and political life” and had allegedly denied “the leading role of the working class133, which reveals, also indirectly, he was loyal to his opi-

131. Hoover Archives, R. Bossy’s diary, note of February 15, 1946 (Bossy had received a letter from Boxhall and re-written the cited excerpt). Hoover Archives, D. Danielopol, op. cit, (unpaginated manuscript). Zilber’s wife, a die-hard communist, was apparently aware of her husband’s demarches and indirectly threatened to denounce him, ibidem.

132. Ibidem.133. Nd, p. 177.

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nions voiced during the talks with the Americans in the fall of 1944. As long as the large majority of voters had not shown confidence in the Popular Democratic Bloc, Patrascanu could not agree to go on in an already wrong direction; he was a partisan of the collaboration with the peasantry and the bourgeoisie134.

That no one attacked him in that moment was maybe a result of the grave differences between Gheorghiu-Dej’s cronies, on the one hand, and Ana Pauker’s and Vasile Luca’s group, on the other hand, with regard to the economic policy. Gheorghiu-Dej, with substantive backing chiefly coming from I.G. Maurer, was hostile to a massive weighing of the state in the economic and financial sphere, whereas the Pauker-Luca group, leaning on the Soviets, would plead for “concentrating the economic power in the communists’ hands”135.

Poor results of the elections and the wrangling inside the PCR’s leadership, the unrest within the B.D.P. , the soaring rate of the inflation, the aftermath of the drought and the people’s unhappiness led to what an editor of the Timpul newspaper, Gheorghe Tinu, said to several Russian diplomats in April, 1947, that “never the economic situation has been so bad and the government’s popularity so scarce”136. As the Groza Government was faced with great difficulties, the international scene and, consequently, the East Europe were witnessing facts that would mark a new turn of the Soviet policy in Moscow’s domination sphere.

Switching to the Unique Pattern

The doctrine of the “national way to socialism” was scrapped in 1947, following a string of radical twists in the relations between the Soviet Union and its former Western allies.

After the talks held with Stalin on April 15, 1946, George Marshall, a successor of Secretary of State James Bayrnes, head of the US diplomacy, understood that the Soviet leader intended to take advantage of the plunging

134. Ibidem. In his self-criticism in answer to the reproaches voiced by Teohari Georgescu at the First Congress of the Romanian Workers’ Party, Patrascanu “admitted” he had been wrong when, in late 1945, “I pleaded for limiting the price control only for a few commodities, and thus for the free movement of the other goods; however, I sought a stronger supervision of the production and the rising in tax on the industrial capital, to the benefit of the latter in a great measure”, Archives of the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party, 81/1948, f. 4-5 (text released on March 20, 1948).

135. Nd, p. 177-178.136. Ibidem, p. 178.

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economy in Western Europe in order to use the communist parties in antagonizing the public mind and, finally, undermining the Americans’ influence, by consolidating the Soviets’ in exchange137. According to the latest research, the celebrated Marshall Plan originated in this prospect, as it was aimed to improve the battered economy and stop the communist parties in Western Europe from climbing to power.

When the Marshall Plan jump-started, Stalin took the US initiative as an attempt to emasculate the Soviet Union’s position in its sphere of influence. “The economic reintegration (of the Eastern European states) with Western Europe would have prompted political effects too; it would have given more muscle to the resistance of some elements in the Eastern European states, which hoped to dodge imposition of Soviet hegemony. All these potential developments would have sapped, in a great measure, the Soviet influence in the Eastern states of the continent. Once its mechanisms in motion, the Marshall Plan appeared as an endeavor to resort to the US economic power to heighten the newly-traced buffer zone in Eastern Europe. If the Soviets’ lever of influence in the East had sagged, Westerners’ gains in the region might have proved irreversible”138.

Aware of the danger, Stalin drew the conclusion he should freeze all cooperative relations with the United States and the Great Britain, and that the USSR must strengthen the control over its zone of influence and the communist parties therein. Thus, imposing the unique Stalinist pattern on Eastern Europe’s satellite-states became Stalin’s top priority. Meanwhile, the Soviet leader set himself a second goal, namely the creation of the infor-mative Bureau of the communist parties and workers’ parties (Cominform).

The Soviets kick-started a careful inspection of the “orthodoxy” of the communist parties fallen into Moscow’s influential zone139. The foreign policy Section of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (b) of the USSR launched an investigation. Meanwhile, in a letter addressed to the French Communist Party (M. Thorez), A.A. Zhdanov asked for details on how Thorez had been expelled from the party, a decision that Moscow had branded a grave mistake on part of French communists140.

For the Soviet leaders, the letter was a test to check over the stance of the Eastern European communist parties. A copy of this letter was relayed to Romania by Norovkov, a Soviet activist, whose report is still available and very much enlightening with regard to the relations and reactions of Gheorghiu-Dej: “I arrived in Bucharest on the 10th of June, this year. Thirty

137. Scott D. Parrish, Soviet-American Relations, the Marshall Plan and the Division of Europe, 1947 (The establishment), p. 15.

138. Ibidem.

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minutes later I handed over the package to the USSR ambassador, comrade Kavtaradze. G. Dej was then in Belgrade. On June 11, early in the morning, G. Dej came over to the embassy (Dej went to see the ambassador, ed’s note) and read the document I had delivered. I was not in his presence as he read. An hour later, I could speak with him for 45 minutes. To myself, he seemed somewhat tense, and on two occasions he referred to the document he had read while with Kavataradze. At first, he said: “We should not allow to happen in Romania what happened in France”. Afterwards, as we approached the situation in the party, he returned to the document, as if had something new to say: “The party is getting stronger, and what happened in other places will not happen here”. As I had not been mandated to discuss this matter, I did not intervene in either cases. The written comments by G.-Dej were put forward to you on June 13”141.

While the activists of the foreign policy Section of the Soviet Central Committee “spotted” and condemned any sign of “national way” in the activity of the Eastern European communist parties, the fight for power within the PCR was increasingly sharper.

In a sitting of the Political Bureau, held on November 29, 1961, Gheorghiu-Dej said that in January 1947, A.I. Vyshinsky had suggested him to rid Ana Pauker, who continued to ignore him as a secretary-general of the party, by making decisions on her own. Shortly afterwards, when he and Ana Pauker went to Moscow, Stalin said: “according to our information, reports from your country indicate trends of turning the party from a class party into a race one142. In another meeting he said: “You addressed the issue of removing Ana Pauker and Luca Laszlo”143. After having recalled Trotzky (a Jew), he said: “but if they stay in your way, force them out”144.

139. Russian historian G.P. Murashko, A.F. Noskova, T.V. Volokitina contributed the most to this matter, on the basis of a lavish archive material, Das Zentralkomitee der WKP (B) und das Ende der “nationalen Wege zum Sozialismus” in “Jahrbuch for Historische Kommunismusforschung”, 1994, p. 10 and following (Jahrbuch further excerpt).

140. Ibidem, p. 12-13. Zhdanov said that : The working people in the Soviet Union are asking us to tell them what happened in France (…). Given the shallowness of the information available, we cannot give them an accurate answer”.

141. Ibidem, p. 13.142. Archives of the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party,

Shorthand report of the Political Bureau’s sitting on Nov. 29, 1961, f. 14.143. Ibidem.144. Ibidem.

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Soviets accuse Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej

On the 10th of June, 1947, general Susaykov (who had forged tight relations with Ana Pauker), sent to M.A. Suslov a vast report drafted by E. Botnaras, which brought grave accusations to Gheorghiu-Dej. According to the report, Gheorghiu-Dej and his cronies I.G. Maurer, Gh. Gaston Marin and Simion Zeiger, would get closer to the Ango-Americans officials in Bucharest by estranging from the Soviets. The eight points of the text drafted by Botnaras included the most telling aspects of the anti-Soviet attitude developed by Gheorghiu-Dej and Maurer (stern rebuke administered to the Red Army’s presence in Romanian territory, the Sovroms etc.). Botnaras’ accusations were so serious that Susaykov felt obliged to add some comments in order to alleviate their gravity (he recommended relegation of Maurer to diplomacy)145. V.I. Lesakov, an activist from the foreign policy Section, was ordered to Bucharest. In a discussion with him, Ana Pauker said: “They, “the national communists”, are believed to care for the country’s economy, while the “Muscovite group” cares more about the Soviet Union”146.

For his part, Vasile Luca told Lesakov that “We (he and Ana Pauker - ed’s note) would like the country and the ministries (including communist ministers) to be led by the party, instead of leading it as it does now here”147.

Accusations brought by Ana Pauker and Vasile Luca can be resumed in two basic charges: national communism and denying the leading role of the party, both very grave in Moscow’s eyes.

Details are patchy, however, about why Patrascanu was moving out of the spotlight; the exponent of a genuine trend of national communism would scarcely show up on the stage (Luca said to Sesaakov that the Ministry of Justice “swarms with old-fashioned servants, who undermine the Ministry’s activity”, and “so far, G. Dej has done nothing against Patrascanu”148.

According to the documents available until now, the confrontation between Gheorghiu-Dej’s and Pauker-Luca’s group cannot not be

145. “Jahrbuch”, p. 16-17.146. Ibidem, p. 19. Ana Pauker believed that Gheorghiu-Dej’s mistakes sprang from

the “deep gulf between his knowledge and the tasks he must fulfill today. Overburdened with his ministerial chores, he can no longer mind the party’s activity and has ceased improving the level of his ideological and political knowledge”.

147. Ibidem, p. 18.148. Ibidem.

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considered as a battle waged between the “national communism” and the trend of total submission to Moscow. Between the Gheorghiu-Dej’s group and Patrascanu there were no affinities whatsoever149; it may be assumed that since the fall of 1946 (after the two discussions with Dej), Patrascanu had strictly followed the party line and relinquished - even in his private conversations - all heretical beliefs (it is of notice that Patrascanu’s “counter-revolutionary” activity had not been denounced at the Cominform’s first Conference, held in 1947, but at the second, in 1948). Notwithstanding the frustration that ripped Dej before the Patrascanu’s qualities and rhetorical excellence , it can be said the two had different visions on the developments in the country and the role played by the USSR: Patrascanu realized the disaster that threatened Romania given the Soviet domination, while Dej was a humble servant who executed orders coming from the “Big Brothers”. The accusation Ana Pauker had brought to Dej and his group in a talk with Lesakov was meant to get Dej out of Moscow’s graces, at a time when Stalin launched an offensive against the tenet, which he himself had previously sustained, of the “own way to socialism”.

I.Gh. Maurer was one of Dej’s cronies, whose opinions matched Patrascanu’s and Zilber’s views of the pernicious role played by the USSR. Batnaras’ denouncing report, cited above, points at Maurer as an exponent of the anti-Soviet trend, who is close to Dej, “an unstable politician, of bourgeois extraction”150. But Maurer was pragmatic: the Soviets’ presence is an inexorable reality, and Romania has to fit in, but this reality must be seen as it is. Maurer, having lunch with D.D. Danielopol in a restaurant, tells the latter that “he (Maurer) is not a betrayer, loves his country as much as we do, but he can do nothing about it. Russians are in, while Americans are so far away. “We must live like the Russians. That’s a fact”. It’s easy for you to criticize me and point at me ! You have not been in the country for long and you will not get back. What would you like those who remain home to do about it?”151.

149. In his self-criticism, Patrascanu writes: “Torn by my personal problems as I was, I had two long discussions with comrade Gheorghiu-Dej: one in Paris, during the Peace Conference, another after we came back to Romania. These discussions and the Gheorghiu-Dej’s comradely attitude caused a fateful turn in my life and behavior as a member of the party - and a complete change of my state of mind as well” (Archives of the central Committee of the PCR, doc. cit., f. 6). Patrascanu’s unhappiness originated in Gh. Apostol’s criticism voiced out at the National Conference of the PCR on his activity at the Ministry of Justice. The discussion with Dej restored his trust in the party; they did not discuss anything about Patrascanu’s views regarding the Stalinist pattern.

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The reserve on the USSR, reported among Dej’s cronies, and even among Pauker-Luka’s group, stemmed from the belief that the absorption of the Soviet pattern, now a mandatory task, was unwholesome for Romania. If the Robert Levy’s conclusions are correct, after 1949, when the agricultural collectivization started, Ana Pauker, who knew the disastrous results obtained in the USSR, might have tried, several times, to slow down the pace of the collectivization152. Thus, in brief, this was not a matter of national reaction against a foreign ruining and oppressing domination but of the fear that the application of the Soviet pattern, whose grave flaws were no longer a secret, would antagonize the country and weaken the regime.

“The Soviet Union Must not be an Inviolable Pattern”

M. Dijlas states that, as he traveled to Moscow, at the head of a Yugoslav delegation, in late December 1947, he made a stopover in Romania’s capital. “In Bucharest, he wrote, we realized we were not the only ones who believed that the Soviet Union should not become an inviolable pattern in the “socialist construction”. At a dinner held by our ambassador, Golubovic, a Romanian leader agreed with us, another uncon-vincingly opposed, while Golubivoc himself and Ana Pauker, the acting foreign minister at the time, would listen carefully. I felt the inconvenience such discussions could pose. In Bucharest, and later in Moscow, I was sure that the Soviet intelligence would tape and, possibly, distort each uttered word, but now this could not be avoided: the Romanians had plenty of reasons to be unhappy and seemed restless about this matter, while our delegation, especially Vukmanovic, could no longer be kept at bay”153.

However, Djilas’ statement misses accuracy, and the Romanian leader who challenged the value of the Soviet pattern for Romania cannot be identified. Nor can anyone know “the reasons for unhappiness” of the Ro-manian side. It must be noted, though, that such critics of the Soviet pattern continued even after the creation of the Cominform, and that Ana Pauker did not oppose what was now becoming a dangerous crisis for Moscow.

Comments on the inadequacy of the Soviet pattern for the Eastern-European realities were also reported among communists leaders in other

150. “Jahrbuch”, p. 17.151. Hoover Archives, D. Danielopol, op. cit., (unpaginated manuscript).152. Robert Levy, Ana Pauker and the Right Wing-Deviation (in manuscript).153. M. Djilas, op. cit., p. 151.

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countries. The same Djilas gives an account of the opinions Clement Gottwald had voiced in a discussion in 1946: “We then approached the use of the Soviet experience. Just like all those who were close to Tito, perhaps more instinctively, rather than consciously though I already had a sense of the Soviet arbitrariness and espionage, I still believed that the patterns and Soviet experience were priceless in the “socialist construction”. But Gottward’s mind was different on this matter: “The Soviet Union is still undeveloped. We are developed, we have strong democratic traditions and we’ll have another kind of socialism here”. Obviously, like most of the leaders of the Czech party, Gottwald did not have a bias for copying Soviet patterns or showing Moscow unconditional obedience. Czechoslovakia, nonetheless, unlike Yugoslavia, had not undergone a Revolution and had little independent power to make a fresh switch”154. Ironically, Djila, a fervent communist at that time, was surprised when the “Congress (of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia) itself placed more emphasis on the national than on the international aspect, favoring democracy to the dictatorship. I understood that their approaches were a result of the present domestic and foreign relations, so I withheld all comments. Stands and views of this kind did not actually appeal to me very much”155.

In the eventful year of 1947, when the Marshall Pland was winding up in Western Europe, Stalin considered that the United States and its allies threatened the Soviet control on Moscow’s domination zone, the reluctance and hesitations in implementing the Soviet pattern could no longer be tolerated, especially when in Poland, Wladislaw Gomulka showed tangible signs of “national communism”, and self-relying senior officials in Yugos-lavia, in a vast majority, were not willing to behave as a docile satellite.

Basically the creation of the Cominform in September, 1947, was targeted at strengthening the control over the satellite-countries and the communist parties here and in France and Italy (strongest communist parties in Western Europe). The tenet of the two camps - “imperialist and anti-democratic” and “anti-imperialist and democratic” - Zhdanov156, made an enduring career in the Soviet-communist policy and ideology.

The Manichaeism of Moscow’s vision of the international developments somewhat resembled the one that preceded the creation of the Comintern: on that particular occasion, the world revolution, shouldered by the Soviet Union, filled the agenda of the day; now, plots run inside the

154. Ibidem, p. 123.155. Ibidem, p. 125.156. The Cominform Minutes of the Three Conferences 1947/1948/1949, Milano,

1994.

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imperialist camp against the anti-imperialist camp, shouldered by the same Soviet Union, filled the agenda of the work; before the Comintern was created, and as preparation for the world revolution was under way, the proletarian detachements - the communist parties - had to show a perfect discipline; now, as the two camps became a subject to confrontation, the communist parties should once again line up impeccably at the USSR’s orders, a pattern of the infallible socialism.

To impose discipline in the Soviet sphere of influence, in early 1948 Stalin pleaded for more boost to Moscow’s control on its European satellites by federalization, and eventually by including the imposed federations into the USSR.

Ironically, the USSR, one to have always been hostile to any kind of federalization in the South-Eastern Europe, had now initiated itself a project whose double goal was a de facto split among the Eastern-European states, on the one hand, and a tighter Soviet grip on these countries.

During the talks with the Yugoslav and the Bulgarian delegations in February, 1948, Stalin gave an outline of the planned federation. “First of all, a federation of Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, then one of the two states together with Alabania. We think a similar federation should be made of Romania and Hungary, and of Poland and Czechoslovakia as well”.

“Stalin, Djilas goes on to say, did not develop the issue of the federations. Judging after a series of tips coming from Soviet top circles, Soviet leaders played with the idea of organizing the USSR by incorporating Poland and Czechoslovakia in Belarus, Romania and Bulgaria (wrong indication of Hungary - ed’s note) in Ukraine, the Baltic states in Russia. A grandiose, foolish, federal-imperialist vision”157.

The “binomial” engineered by the Soviets associated countries embroiled in conflict: Yugoslavia and Bulgaria squabbled over the Macedonia, Albania harbored hostile feelings about the Yugoslav tutelage, Romania’s relations with Hungary had been bedeviled by long disputes about the historic province of Transylvania, Poland and Czechoslovakia were at loggerheads about the Teschen land. Such differences would have debilitated the partners under conflict, which would have certainly appealed to the USSR to mediate their litigation. Ultimately, the popular democracies were to become Soviet union republics.

But the conflict emerged between Tito and Stalin, and the fear that the image of the USSR could be dented by the “additions” - annexations, made the Soviets kill these plans.

157. M. Djilas, op. cit., p. 166.

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