History, language and monuments
The king was compelled to abdicate and appointed general Ion Antonescu as the new Prime-Minister with full powers
in ruling the state by royal decree. Romania was prompted to join the Axis military campaign. Thereafter, southern
Dobruja was ceded to Bulgaria, while Hungary received Northern Transylvania as result of an Axis powers' arbitration. Romanian contribution to Operation Barbarossa was enormous, with the Romanian Army of over 1.2 million
men in the summer of 1944, fighting in numbers second only to Nazi Germany. Romania was the main source of oil
for the Third Reich, and thus became the target of intense bombing by the Allies. Growing discontent among the
population eventually peaked in August 1944 with King Michael's Coup, and the country switched sides to join the
Allies. It is estimated that the coup shortened the war by as much as six months. Even though the Romanian Army had
suffered 170,000 casualties after switching sides, Romania's role in the defeat of Nazi Germany was not recognized by
the Paris Peace Conference of 1947, as the Soviet Union annexed Bessarabia and other territories corresponding
roughly to present-day Republic of Moldova.
In 1948, the state began to nationalize private firms and to collectivize agriculture. Until the early 1960s, the government severely curtailed political liberties and vigorously suppressed any dissent with the help of the Secret Services.
During this period the regime launched several campaigns of purges in which numerous "enemies of the state" and
"parasite elements" (among them many Jewish zionist activists) were targeted for different forms of punishment, such
as deportation, internal exile and internment in forced labour camps and prisons, sometimes for life, as well as extrajudicial killing. Nevertheless, anti-communist resistance was one of the most long-lasting in the Eastern Bloc.
In 1965, Nicolae Ceaușescu came to power and started to conduct the foreign policy more independently from the
Soviet Union. Thus, communist Romania was the only Warsaw Pact country who refused to participate at the Sovietled 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia (Ceaușescu even publicly condemned the action as "a big mistake, [and] a serious danger to peace in Europe and to the fate of communism in the world"); it was also the only communist state to
maintain diplomatic relations with Israel after the 1967 Six-Day War; and established diplomatic relations with West
Germany the same year.
As Romania's foreign debt sharply increased between 1977 and 1981 (from US$3 billion to $10 billion), the influence
of international financial organizations (such as the IMF and the World Bank) grew, gradually conflicting with
Ceaușescu's autocratic rule. The latter eventually initiated a policy of total reimbursement of the foreign debt by imposing austerity steps that impoverished the population and exhausted the economy. At the same time, Ceaușescu
greatly extended the authority of the Secret Services and imposed a severe cult of personality, which led to a dramatic
decrease in the dictator's popularity and culminated in his overthrow and eventual execution, together with his wife, in
the violent Romanian Revolution of December 1989.
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During the Soviet occupation of Romania, the Communist-dominated government called for new elections in 1946,
which were fraudulently won, with a fabricated 70% majority of the vote. Thus, they rapidly established themselves as
the dominant political force. Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, a communist party leader imprisoned in 1933, escaped in 1944
to become Romania's first communist leader. In 1947 he and others forced King Michael I to abdicate and leave the
country, and proclaimed Romania a people's republic. Romania remained under the direct military occupation and
economic control of the USSR until the late 1950s. During this period, Romania's vast natural resources were continuously drained by mixed Soviet-Romanian companies (SovRoms) set up for unilateral exploitative purposes.
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