Radio România Internațional

Tag: history show

  • The Communist Party, banned

    The Communist Party, banned

     

    The end of WW1, far from clearing the air, fuelled new anger and obsessions, and extreme solutions were considered the most appropriate. Thus, left-wing and right-wing extremism, communism and fascism, monstrous creations of the war, came to dominate the minds of many people. A particularity of the Great War was that neither the victors could enjoy their victory nor the losers could give up thoughts of revenge. It took WW2 for the destructive energies to be consumed.

     

    The new states resulting after 1918 took measures against extremism and for securing their borders. The Kingdom of Greater Romania, also a creation of the Versailles system, took harsh measures to liquidate extremist behaviours that endangered its existence and functioning.

     

    On February 6, 1924, more than 100 years ago, the Liberal government headed by Ion I. C. Brătianu passed the law on legal entities, which made extremist organizations illegal. The two main organizations targeted were the far-right National Christian Defense League, founded in 1923, and the far-left Romanian Communist Party, founded in 1921. The architect of the law, from which the document took its name, was the Minister of Justice Gheorghe Gh. Mârzescu, a law expert and mayor of the city of Iași during the war years.

     

    If the far right reinvented itself in 1927 under the form of the Legionary Movement and was able to operate legally and successfully in public in the late 1930s, the far left, an agent of Moscow in Romania, remained banned until 1944. At the end of WW2, after the Soviet Union occupied Romania and brought the Romanian Communist Party (PCR) to power, the few members of the party made a title of glory out of the fact that they had been members of a banned organization. They were called “illegals” and among them were both those who were in prison and those who, not in prison but out of sight, followed instructions from Moscow.

     

    One of the ‘illegals’ was Ion Bică. The archive of the Oral History Center of the Romanian Radio Broadcasting Corporation has an interview with him from 1971 in which he explained how from the camp in Târgu Jiu, where some of the communist militants were detained, they escaped in April 1944 with the help of some people from the administration: “The party had managed to establish a close connection between the militants outside and the militants in prisons and camps. It was going to face a difficult situation. As Hitler’s armies were receiving blow after blow, the party’s activity intensified in the country. The connection between the communists inside and those outside was made through simple people who performed certain jobs in the administrative system of the camp. For example, there were women who, with the dissolution of the camp, left for various localities in the country and to Bucharest. There were women who enjoyed the trust of the communists, they carried notes, correspondence between the communists outside and those inside.”

     

    Anton Moisescu was also an ‘illegal’ and in 1995 he explained what his activity consisted of before the war and during it: “I was still doing the party activity illegally before, but working in a factory and with my real name, known to everyone, but unknown as a party activist or activist with the Union of the Communist Youth (UTC) . This time, however, I had to change my name and not show myself anywhere, so that none of the agents would spot, or they would have arrested me immediately. And then, I lived in a secret house, I carried out my activity at night, I went out to meetings and sessions only at night. I was searched for, but I was not found anywhere by the Security.”

     

    Anton Moisescu also referred to the means of subsistence that an ‘illegals’ had: “We lived off the aid of the group in the Capital. People would collect some money for us because there were only a few of us. There were not many in this situation. The other party members and sympathizers collected for the political prisoners, I also took care of that, with the Red Aid: clothing, food, provisions, money. I would give them what we collected through their relatives, I would send them to prisons. They would also collect for us. We had a secret house where we could live, usually we had nothing to rent, we didn’t have any house in our name. It was the house of a sympathizer where we would stay for a period of time. When something seemed suspicious to us, we would go to another house of another sympathizer and so on. All the time we were in secret houses unknown to the Securitate, to people who were not known as activists either, but only as sympathizers.”

     

    The period of illegality when the Romanian Communist party operated, between 1924 and 1944, was one in which the Romanian state consolidated in terms of legislation administration and economy. The Mârzescu Law was the instrument through which extremism, both right-wing and left-wing, was prevented from hijacking the development of a state that had paid with heavy sacrifice for what it had achieved.

  • Nicolae Titulescu and the Romanian diplomacy in Europe in the 1930s

    Nicolae Titulescu and the Romanian diplomacy in Europe in the 1930s

     

    The diplomacies of countries that gravitate around the powerful ones, always have the mission of being one step ahead of events. They must decipher trends and intentions, if possible even before they occur. Diplomacies of the satellite countries are present in the capital cities and in all the places where important decisions are made. Some of them, even reach privileged positions. That was also the case of the Romanian diplomacy in the interwar period, under the leadership of Nicolae Titulescu (1882-1941).

    The end of  WWI had left behind a tense context and complicated European relations, marked by resentment. The defeated countries from the bloc of Central Powers led by Germany did not come to terms with the provisions of the peace treaties generically called the “Versailles system”. That would have meant legalizing their territorial losses and paying war damages. The emergence of the League of Nations in 1919, that would later be today’s UN, was an attempt to bring representatives of all nations together, at one table, and discuss de-escalation. Romania was a defender of the Versailles System and the League of Nations, through which the status quo would be maintained. One of the most active diplomats for that was Nicolae Titulescu.

    A lawyer by training, Titulescu was born in Craiova, in southern Romania. He was part of the Conservative Party and a supporter of Romania’s entry into  WWI alongside France. After the war, he was minister plenipotentiary in Britain, and between 1928-1936 he served as foreign minister in several governments. As of 1921, he was Romania’s permanent delegate at the League of Nations, being elected twice, in 1930 and 1931, as its president.

    Iosif Igiroșianu was a diplomat discovered by Nicolae Titulescu. In 1997, the Radio Romania Oral History Center interviewed Igiroșianu, who explained why Romania enjoyed a privileged position at the League of Nations and the role Nicolae Titulescu played in obtaining it: “Romania was the only country in the world that had a legation with the League of Nations. That was accepted by the Swiss government to please Titulescu. Titulescu had done many things for the Swiss, he organized most of the gatherings and conferences in Switzerland because he was interested in them as well. And then, of course, all these things were of interest to the Swiss because he suddenly put Geneva in an extraordinary light.”

    Thus, in the structure of Romanian diplomacy, the representative in Geneva, with the League of nations, became even more relevant than the minister in Bern. Titulescu was regarded as a negotiator with important countries, while the one in Bern was considered only an official with ties to the country by which he was sent. Titulescu was the one expected to make friends from among the most important politicians and the most influential diplomats and to create connections that would benefit Romania.

    Titulescu himself was more than a permanent representative of Romania in Geneva. At one point, he was requested to mediate a reconciliation between the French and British governments. A friend of the French Prime Minister Pierre Laval, he was considered a very nice man, with a lot of distinction and a lot of tact.

    The dispute between the French and British governments emerged over how Germany should be treated. France and Britain had generally gone hand in hand on security guarantees in Europe after WWI. The two had forced the signing of the Treaty of Locarno in 1925 which guaranteed France’s eastern borders. But at the beginning of the 1930s, Britain had proposed France a taming of the policy towards Germany, a proposal that France did not take kindly to due to the fear of the revival of German militarism. British suspicions went further, to the idea that France was trying to dominate Europe more than Germany was capable of. In that context, Titulescu was asked to come in. His role is explained by Iosif Igiroșianu: “The high profile diplomats, out of vanity, did not want to request meetings with the other side. Contacts were not being made through ministries, they were made through the heads of governments or major political figures. So they needed Titulescu. He had been a minister in England for a long time, he had many friends, and then the French did not want to ask the English to meet, and the English did not want to ask the French to meet. They wanted everything to be arranged through a third person who would probe the mentalities, the attitudes, and discuss with every party.”

    In 1936, Titulescu was removed from public office in Romania because of he was against fascism and went into exile to Switzerland and then to France. He died in Cannes in 1941, disappointed by the course that history had taken.

  • Planned economy and its institutions

    Planned economy and its institutions

    According to the Marxist economic model, planned or command economy could predict and prevent the crises of capitalism. After the installation of the first communist government in Romania on March 6, 1945, the Romanian Communist Party began to implement this model. The pace of transition from a free market economy to a centralised and planned economy lasted for a few years, but its objectives were well-defined and were eventually carried through.



    In practice, however, planned economy not only failed to achieve what it had set out to do, but it also restricted its freedom and made it more rigid, before eventually becoming bankrupt. It all started with the nationalisation or confiscation of the means of production, followed by the adoption of Marxist economy theory and the arrival of Soviet advisors. The fundamental institution was the State Planning Commission, whose president enjoyed the position of minister. Anton Moisescu was the president of the State Planning Commission in the 1950s.



    He gave an interview in 1995 in which he recounted a number of measures meant to improve command economy: “My activity at the State Planning Commission focused on rebalancing the development of the country’s economic sectors that had fallen behind, in particular because of the building of the Danube-Black Sea Canal which was consuming so many of our resources. Its construction was unjustified economically speaking, but everybody knew it was only justified in strategic terms, going back to Stalin’s time. So we were given the task to carry out a comprehensive study and come up with proposals to rebalance the national economy. The result was that a number of enterprises and investments that were not urgently necessary at that time were put on hold. There was also a discussion about the Giurgiu bridge between Romania and Bulgaria which we didn’t need all that much. It was much more useful to Bulgaria and the Soviet Union because it provided a direct connection between Bulgaria and the Soviet Union and between Bulgaria and the rest of Europe. Economically speaking, the bridge was not very useful to us and we put a lot of money into it. We were unable to put an end to the building works, which were in their final stage and very little work still remained to be done. We did, however, halted works on the Danube-Black Sea Canal, which was still very important to the Soviets, despite the fact that Stalin had died.”



    Economically unrealistic but politically important projects such as the Danube-Black Sea Canal were a burden on the planned economy. Anton Moisescu explains: “Based on the study we made, a discussion started in which the Soviet representatives intervened. At the time, in Romania there still were Soviet advisors and Red army representatives, unfortunately. They still had a heavy say here in Romania. They sent a central commission in order to make an analysis, but, instead, they undertook an investigation. Eventually, they wanted to put the blame on us, claiming that we were incompetent when we made that study. The then party and government did not accept their conclusion and the construction of the canal was ceased because, according to our calculations, the canal was not going to be useful for Romania, under those circumstances, not even in the 30 years after its completion. Today the canal has more importance and in time it will begin to be more profitable, because even now it is not being used at its full capacity. The Danube now provides a link with the entire European continent, but that was not so at that time. The then Romanian leaders did not give up their decision, but they had to make concessions to the Soviet commission and to replace the entire board of the Planning Commission. At first, they replaced all the vice presidents and then the president, Miron Constantinescu.”



    Economist and professor Costin Kiriţescu was interviewed by the Center for Oral History of the Romanian Radio Broadcasting Corporation in 1994. According to him, in the context of an authoritarian political regime, a planned and coordinated economy needed an institution such as the State Planning Commission.



    Costin Kiriţescu: “The State Planning Commission was a necessary body for a planned, centralized economy, as was the Romanian economy. Such a centralized system could not operate without a plan, and the State Planning Commission was created to elaborate this plan. But the economic life of a country is too complex, there are so many unknown aspects, which even the best planners fail to grasp. Therefore, state planning is one thing, and economic activity proper is another thing. Hence the conflicts that emerged and which turned into political conflicts, because the mentality was that the plan could not be implemented because of the class enemy that was opposed to the fulfillment of the plan. As a conclusion, the State Planning Commission was an organization inherent to a given economic system. All in all, the results were worse and worse, until the economy reached the state it had before the December 1989 revolution. The discrepancy between planning and the reality on the ground was so big that a crisis emerged. And then came the Revolution”.



    The experiment of planned economy in Romania came to an end in 1989. Although between 1945 and 1989 the development of several economic sectors was boosted, development could have been achieved with lower costs than those set as part of the planned economy.