Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (60 page)

The subjugation of the press was even easier to achieve; indeed, it was already under way. From the very early days after the August coup the Soviets had regularly suspended the publication of newspapers that they deemed to be hostile, or closed them down altogether. For example, the largest National Peasant Party newspaper, Curierul, was closed down on 10 January 1945 and part of its office space given instead to the Communist paper,
Scînteia.
Similarly the Liberal paper,
Democratul,
was suppressed because of its articles revealing that many of the areas of Romania allegedly conquered by the Red Army had in fact been taken by the Romanians themselves. Most ridiculously, the official Liberal newspaper,
Viitorul,
was suspended during the night of 17-18 February because the Soviets thought it was printing coded messages. These messages turned out to be the ‘suspicious’ abbreviations at the end of the name of the British military representative, Air Vice-Marshal Donald Stevenson, OBE, DSO, MC.
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After a year of Groza’s government the democratic press had all but ceased to exist. On 7 June 1946 the US Department of State reported that, out of a total of twenty-six newspapers published in Romania, the National Peasant Party and the National Liberal Party were able to publish only one daily newspaper each. The government, by contrast, had ten daily papers and nine weekly or bi-monthly papers in Bucharest alone. The Independent Social Democrat Party was not allowed to publish a newspaper at all. Despite numerous requests to the Ministry of Information, they were fobbed off with the excuse that there was not enough newsprint available.
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The Groza government was only ever supposed to be a caretaker government, pending elections. However, the NDF was unwilling to allow elections until it could make sure of victory – Groza therefore procrastinated continually while the Communist forces behind the scenes continued to undermine all opposition. During its twenty months of rule it systematically terrorized Liberals, Peasants, Independent Socialists and anyone else who opposed them. In August 1945 the government discovered two ‘terrorist’ plots that conveniently involved members of the National Peasant Party. On 15 March 1946 the former Prime Minister R
descu was beaten up by a group of men armed with clubs, an event that convinced him that it would be sensible to flee the country. In May 1946 General Aurel Aldea, the Interior Minister during the first S
n
tescu government, was arrested for ‘plotting to destroy the Romanian state’. He was tried alongside fifty-five ‘accomplices’, and on 18 November 1946 – the day before the elections were to take place – sentenced to hard labour for life
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In the run-up to the elections, the Communists and their collaborators made it as difficult as possible for the opposition parties. The National Peasant Party repeatedly complained to the international community about the sort of political conditions they were obliged to endure:

Meetings are not free. With the knowledge and tolerance of the government, notably of the Ministry of the Interior, armed bands have been organized. These bands attack public meetings and the heads of opposition parties; they kill, maim, and manhandle the adversaries of the regime. They possess automatic weapons. They make use of iron bars, knives and clubs; they are paid; most of the participants are convicted criminals. They not only enjoy complete immunity for any brutalities that they commit, including even murder, but they act under protection from the police and gendarmerie.
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One must remember when reading reports like this that they were written by people with a particular political agenda, in an atmosphere fraught with allegations and counter-allegations – nevertheless there is evidence from more neutral sources to suggest that such descriptions are not that far off the mark. An official Note of Protest from the British government claimed that ‘gangs of roughs’ had prevented opposition campaigning and broken up opposition meetings. There were also complaints by both the British and the Americans about the withholding of press and radio facilities to opposition parties, and the widespread falsification of electoral lists. When it came to the election itself, according to an editorial in the
New York Times,
‘the terrorization of the electorate, the suppression of the opposition, and the falsification of the election results were even more glaring than in Bulgaria, and approached Marshal Tito’s standards in Yugoslavia’.
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The Communists stood in the 1946 elections on a single ticket with several other left-leaning parties that they had convinced to join them in what they called the ‘Blocul partidelor democrate’ (‘Bloc of Democratic Parties’). When the votes were counted the Bloc officially received about 70 per cent of the vote, and 84 per cent of the seats in the new assembly. The National Peasant Party, by contrast, received only 12.7 per cent of the votes and 7.7 per cent of the seats; the rest went to other small parties.
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However, independent sources at the time, as well as more recent research in the Communist Party’s own archives, suggest that the true result was exactly the opposite: it was the National Peasant Party that had received the majority of the vote. The election had quite simply been rigged. In Some
, for example, the National Peasants had been credited with just 11 per cent of the vote when they had actually won more than 51 per cent. By falsifying the election results in this way the Communists had taken another huge step towards a monopoly of power.
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It was becoming obvious by now that, in the absence of any concerted pressure from the West, there was nothing that anyone could do to challenge absolute Communist rule in Romania. Unfortunately for Romanian democracy, the reaction of the West was indignant but completely ineffectual. During the two years that preceded the election, Britain and America had submitted several formal Notes of Protest, but there was never even a hint that they would back them up with serious action. The brazen way in which the Romanian Communist Party falsified the election results is a testimony to how confident they had grown that the West would remain apathetic – and indeed, while the British and Americans stated openly that they regarded the elections as invalid, neither country was bold enough to withdraw official recognition of the Romanian government. The Soviets understood their complaints as mere bluster, and history quickly proved them right. Ten weeks later, on 10 February 1947, the Allies signed a formal peace treaty with Romania, after which time the West effectively washed its hands of responsibility for the country.
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With both the election and the formalities of the peace treaty behind them, the Communists now launched a final round of arrests, this time with the intention of destroying the opposition once and for all. On 20 March, 315 members of the opposition parties were arrested on trumped-up charges. On the night of 4 May another 600 were arrested. On 2 June, the police in Cluj arrested 260 workers who had opposed the Communist Party. According to one, a member of one of the National Peasant youth organizations, they were taken to the local military barracks and later loaded onto trains heading in the direction of the USSR, before some of them escaped by tearing up one of the planks in the floor of their railway wagon. Many of those arrested were never formally charged. The majority were released after six months, presumably because by that time the authorities had made their point.
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Soon the security forces began to target the leadership of the opposition. On 14 July the former Interior Minister for the National Peasant Party, Nicolae Penescu, was arrested along with about a hundred other members of his party, including the Vice President Ion Mihalache, and the editor of the National Peasant newspaper
Dreptatea.
The premises of both the party and the newspaper were occupied by police, and the newspaper suppressed.

On 25 July the leader of the National Peasants himself, Iuliu Maniu, was also arrested. In a show trial that autumn he and the rest of the Peasant Party leadership were accused of conspiring with Britain and America, attempting to leave the country in order to set up an alternative government abroad, and otherwise plotting to undermine the Romanian government. In his defence Maniu quite reasonably claimed that the ‘transgressions’ he was being accused of were simply the normal democratic functions of any politician. It made no difference; he and Mihalache were sentenced to hard labour for life. Their co-defendants received sentences of hard labour or imprisonment that ranged from two years to life.
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The final major force of opposition, the king himself, was neutralized a couple of months later. At the very end of the year, under duress, he was forced to sign an act of abdication, and a few days later he fled the country. He did not return until after the fall of communism, in 1992.

Stalinism Unbound

With the last vestiges of opposition finally removed, the Communists were free to embark on their true agenda: Stalinization of the whole country. An assault on individual thought and expression saw a purge of teachers, the closing down of all foreign or religious schools, the banning of non-Communist textbooks and the enforced teaching of Stalin’s interpretation of Marxist-Leninist precepts. Bourgeois children were denied education in favour of workers’ children, and some students were thrown out of polytechnic schools on the grounds that their grandparents had once owned houses. Libraries were purged of any books that did not agree with a Stalinist world view. Poets and novelists were attacked in the Communist Party newspaper
Scînteia,
and their works either heavily censored or banned.
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Religion was especially targeted. Churches were stripped of their assets and their schools taken over by the state. The authorities placed bans on baptisms, church weddings and the public celebration of Christmas and Easter, and Communist Party members were instructed not to attend any church services at all. The Catholic Church was put under the control of a new ‘Catholic Committee for Action’, and those who did not endorse the Committee’s decrees were arrested. The Orthodox Church was purged, and its hierarchy filled with Communist Party members and others sympathetic to the regime. The Uniate Church, which had some 1.5 million members, was forced to merge with the Orthodox Church under state control. When Uniate priests refused to recognize this hijacking of their religious beliefs, they were arrested en masse. In November 1948 some 600 Uniate clergymen were under arrest. Several priests and bishops from all three religions were either killed or died under torture.
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