Румыниядағы кеңес оккупациясы кезеңі (1944-1958)

Period of Romania under the Soviet occupation

The Soviet occupation of Romania refers to the period from 1944 to August 1958, during which the Soviet Union maintained a significant military presence in Romania. The fate of the territories held by Romania after 1918 that were incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1940 is treated separately in the article on Soviet occupation of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina. During the Eastern Front offensive of 1944, the Soviet Army occupied the northwestern part of Moldavia as a result of armed combat that took place between the months of April and August of that year, while Romania was still an ally of Nazi Germany. The rest of the territory was occupied after Romania changed sides in World War II, as a result of the royal coup launched by King Michael I on August 23, 1944. On that date, the king announced that Romania had unilaterally ceased all military actions against the Allies, accepted the Allied armistice offer, and joined the war against the Axis powers. As no formal armistice offer had been extended yet, the Red Army occupied most of Romania as enemy territory prior to the signing of the Moscow Armistice of September 12, 1944. The armistice convention and eventually the Paris Peace Treaties of 1947 provided a legal basis for the Soviet military presence in Romania, which lasted until 1958, reaching a peak of some 615,000 personnel in 1946. The Soviets and the Romanian communists referred to the events of August 1944 as the "liberation of Romania by the glorious Soviet Army" in the 1952 Constitution of Romania, and August 23 (the day of 1944 coup) was celebrated as Liberation from Fascist Day. On the other hand, most Western and Romanian anti communist sources use the term "Soviet occupation of Romania," some applying it to the whole period from 1944 to 1958.

After having withdrawn its troops from Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina in response to the June 1940 Soviet Ultimatum, Romania entered an alliance with Nazi Germany and declared war on the Soviet Union. Romanian troops entered World War II in June 1941 as part of Operation Barbarossa, under the German High Command. Following the recapturing of the territory annexed by the Soviet Union in June 1940, Romanian troops occupied Southern Ukraine all the way to the Southern Bug. However, Romania's eastern campaign ended in disaster, notably at the Battle of Stalingrad. By the end of 1943, the Red Army had regained control over most of the Soviet territory, and was advancing westward beyond the borders of USSR to defeat Nazi Germany and its allies. It was in this context that the Soviet forces crossed into Romania and occupied Northern and Eastern Moldavia. On August 23, 1944, King Michael, supported by all major parties, launched a coup d'état, thereby overthrowing the pro Nazi government of Ion Antonescu, and putting Romania's Army on the side of the Allies. As a result, King Michael was the last monarch behind the Iron Curtain to lose his throne, on December 30, 1947. The coup facilitated the advance of the Red Army into Romania at an accelerated pace, the Soviet troops continued to treat the Romanians as a hostile force. The armistice was signed three weeks later, on September 12, 1944, "on terms Moscow virtually dictated." The coup effectively amounted to a "capitulation", an "unconditional" "surrender" to the Soviets and the rest of the Allies. In the wake of the cease fire order given by King Michael, between 114,000

By September 12, the Red Army had already gained control over much of the Romanian territory. Under the terms of its Armistice Agreement with the Allies, Romania became subject to an Allied Control Commission, composed of representatives of the Soviet Union, the United States, and the United Kingdom, while the Soviet military command exercised predominant, de facto authority. Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina were again incorporated into the Soviet Union. At the beginning of the occupation, pillaging and rapes of Romanian women by Soviet soldiers were recorded, prefiguring the eventual epidemic of rape during the occupation of Germany. To this day, this remains a sensitive subject; for instance, in late 2018, the Russian Embassy in Romania denounced "the existence in Romania of a campaign of denigration against the Red Army," by means of which the Soviet soldiers were presented as "a gang of robbers and rapists," instead of "liberators of Romania." Historians ro and Vadim Guzun disputed these assertions, the latter noting that "the USSR occupied, dismembered and Sovietized Romania. Red Army atrocities cannot be washed away with offensive statements, which disagree with the truth."

The effect of the Armistice Agreement ceased on September 15, 1947, when the Paris Peace Treaty with Romania entered into force. Article 21, paragraph 1 of the new treaty provided the legal foundation for continued and unlimited Soviet military presence in Romania:

Upon the coming into force of the present Treaty, all Allied Forces shall, within a period of 90 days, be withdrawn from Roumania, subject to the right of the Soviet Union to keep on Roumanian territory such armed forces as it may need for the maintenance of the lines of communication of the Soviet Army with the Soviet zone of occupation in Austria. The Romanian delegation at the Paris Conference was headed by Minister of Foreign Affairs Gheorghe Tătărescu. The Peace Treaty with Romania was signed on February 10, 1947, in the Salon de l'Horloge of the Ministère des Affaires Étrangères. On the Romanian side, the four signatories were Gheorghe Tătărescu, Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu, Ștefan Voitec, and Dumitru Dămăceanu. The signatories for the Allied powers included United States Secretary of State James F. Byrnes, Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, and British Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs Ernest Bevin.

Immediately following the August 23, 1944, events, communists began to infiltrate the Ministry of Internal Affairs on a large scale. Starting in October 1944, the chief of NKVD operations in Romania was colonel Nikolai Petrovich Zudov. The General Directorate of the Security of the People (Romanian initials: DGSP, but more commonly just called the Securitate) was officially founded on August 30, 1948, by Decree 221/30. The Securitate was set up by SMERSH, an NKVD unit charged with dismantling the existing intelligence agencies and replacing them with Soviet style bodies in the Soviet occupied countries of Eastern Europe. The SMERSH unit in Romania, called Brigada Mobilă, was led until 1948 by the former NKVD operative Alexandru Nicolschi. Its stated purpose was to "defend democratic conquests and guarantee the safety of the Romanian People's Republic against both internal and external enemies." The first Director of the Securitate was Soviet intelligence operative Gheorghe Pintilie. Alexandru Nicolschi (by then a general) and another Soviet officer, Major General ro, held the two deputy director positions.

The Red Army took part in the expulsion of up to 70,000 Transylvanian Saxons from Romania that was initiated in January 1945. In October 1944, the Sănătescu government, at the request of the Allied Control Commission, began arresting young Romanian citizens of German descent, who were eventually placed at the disposal of the Soviet command. At the request of the Allied Commission, the Rădescu government ordered the forced transportation by train of Transylvanian Saxons to the Soviet Union. In a protest dated January 13, 1945, the Rădescu government affirmed the Romanian government's duty to protect each of its citizens, regardless of ethnic origin, and noted the absence of a legal basis for the deportation of the Transylvanian Saxons. The expellees were gradually allowed to return to Romania between late 1945 and 1949, though it is estimated that up to 10,000 perished during the expulsion or while in the Soviet Union. Such deportations would be outlawed in 1949 by the Fourth Geneva Convention.

The SovRoms were Soviet Romanian joint ventures established on Romanian territory at the end of World War II, and lasting until 1954–1956. An agreement between the two countries regarding the establishment of these enterprises was signed in Moscow on May 8, 1945. In theory, the purpose of these ventures was to generate funding for post war reconstruction efforts. However, their real purpose was to provide resources for the Soviet side. Generally, they were a contributing factor to the draining of Romania's resources, in addition to the war reparations demanded by the Armistice Agreement and the Paris Peace Treaties, which had been initially set at 300 million U. S. dollars. At the agreement on reparations signed in Bucharest on January 16, 1945, the Soviets imposed the dollar as the reference currency at its exchange rate in 1938; due to the dollar's devaluation in the meantime, in actuality the reparations amounted to 384 million dollars. The Soviet contribution to the creation of the SovRoms consisted mostly in reselling leftover German equipment to Romania, at systematically overvalued prices. The total value of goods sent from Romania to the Soviet Union was estimated at 2 billion dollars, exceeding by far the amount of war reparations demanded by the Soviets. By 1952, 85% of Romanian exports were directed towards the Soviet Union. Its initial workforce consisted of 15,000 political prisoners; after most of them died of radiation poisoning, they were replaced by local villagers, who were completely unaware of the fact that they were working with radioactive material. Romania secretly delivered 17,288 tons of uranium ore to the Soviet Union between 1952 and 1960, which was used, at least in part, in the Soviet atomic bomb project. Uranium mining continued there until 1961. All ore was shipped abroad for processing, initially to Sillamäe in the Estonian SSR; the uranium concentrate was then used exclusively by the Soviet Union. The writer Mihail Sebastian was among the eyewitnesses to the events of 1944. In his diary (Journal, 1935–1944: The Fascist Years), he described the atmosphere in Bucharest at the time, as follows: "Bewilderment, fear, doubt. Russian soldiers rape women (as Dina Cocea was saying yesterday). Soldiers stop cars, let the driver and passengers out, get behind the wheel, and take off. Stores looted. This afternoon, at Zaharia, three of them broke in the safe, taking watches (The watch is the toy they like the best)". Sebastian died in a tram accident just weeks after the Soviet Army occupied Romania. In 2004, American playwright David Auburn wrote a one man play, entitled The Journals of Mihail Sebastian; it made its debut the same year in New York City, starring actor Stephen Kunken in the role of Sebastian. The 25th Hour. Virgil Gheorghiu's best known book depicts the plight of a young farmhand, Johann Moritz, under German and Soviet occupation. Johann is sent to a labor camp by a police captain who covets his wife, Suzanna. At first, he is tagged as a Jew. Later, he is "rescued" by a Nazi officer, who forces him into service as a model for German propaganda. Imprisoned after the war, he is severely beaten by his Russian captors, then put on trial by Allied forces because of his work for the Nazis. In 1967, Carlo Ponti produced a film based on this book; directed by Henri Verneuil, it featured Anthony Quinn as Johann and Virna Lisi as Suzanna.