Regatul României
The Kingdom of Romania had been born from struggle, and it would die in struggle.
The Romanian intervention in the First World War had been nothing short of a debacle. After Prime Minister Ion I.C. Brătianu managed to secure allied guarantees for Romania securing Transylavia, Buknovia, and the Banat; the government rested upon the assumption that with Russian support they would be able to hold Old Romania and break through into Transylvania. Instead, the Central Powers managed to break through into the heart of Romania within the first year of Romania’s intervention in the war. While Russian aid would see Romanian Moldavia endure, the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917 would force Romania to cede for peace. Ironically, the peace would see Romania gain land with the Romanian union with Bessarabia acknowledged, even as Bulgaria seized Dobruja, and German Austria-Hungary secured the vital mountain passes into the plains of Moldovia, and Wallachia.
Nonetheless King Ferdinand never formally signed the treaty, and as the Central Powers collapsed under their own weight Romania reentered the war on the 10th of November 1918. Whilst the Entente looked on the naked opportunism of the Kingdom with distaste, the formation of the Romanian dominated Great National Assembly of Alba Iulia, left the Entete no choice but to acknowledge the ascension of Transylvania to Romania. While legal debates around the status of Greater Romania would continue to rage throughout the interwar years the victories in 1919 had effectively seized by arms what Romania had been struggling towards for decades.
The Communist Party of Romania: An Outsider looking In by Dennis Deletant
Throughout the interwar years, the Communist Party of Romania (Partidul Comunist din România, PCdR) was relegated to minority status, whilst exact membership has never been released, following the declassification of documents from the Kingdom, and Legionary State, an accurate statement would be that the PCdR never passed more than 3,000 members. There are a number of factors behind this intense isolation, the first is that even today the Communist pParty is widely seen as subservient to the Comintern. Whilst the Comintern would not hold the power it would wield later during the immediate post-war years, the Soviet dominance of the organisation ensured that the Romanian party would be nothing more than a puppet. This viewpoint was held both by the broader public but by the Romanian government as well. Following the collapse of negotiations over establishing diplomatic ties between Romania and the USSR, after Moscow’s total refusal to acknowledge Romanian sovereignty over Bessarabia, the PCdR was banned on 11 April 1924. This ban would remain as long as the Kingdom survived.
Henceforth, with the party forced underground the democratic structure that would emerge in America, was squashed, and the party fell under near total control of the Comintern. A control which would further undermine their support. Demands from the Comintern to support Soviet revisionism against the Romanian border created a situation where the party was viewed as foreign. Views that party declarations outlining the hope of the ‘workers and peasants of Bessarabia that their national revolution would unite them with the USSR” would only reinforce. This blatant opposition to the newly formed Greater Romania would cripple their development amongst the Romanian populace. Indeed, Comintern records outline that by the 1930s, despite making up 72% of the Romanian population ethnic Romanians constituted 23% of party members. Whilst Hungarians making up less than 8% formed 26% of the party’s body.
However, the party did prove active in their attempts to counteract this issue with members being active in the labour struggles of the postwar era. Indeed, this intervention into the struggle would be how Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej would join the party. Nonetheless despite intervention into industrial disputes and attempts to push the pro-peasant line of the former Socialist Revolutionaries within the Bolsheviks amongst the peasantry of Romania the body politic looked elsewhere.
Primarily towards the National Peasants’ Party (Partidul Național Țărănesc, PNȚ) as it represented and indeed still does, the most organic movement in the Romanian political scene. Formed from the unification of the Peasant Party of the Old Kingdom and the National Party of Transylvania, following a series of poor results culminating in the 1927 general election. The new party managed to secure mass support amongst the peasantry with their programme of peasant control of the means of production in agriculture, and devolution of local government to the village level. Their level of support was clear even in the traditionally rigged elections under the old system, winning 727,000 votes (28% of the votes cast) in 1926, and in 1932 they won 2,210,000 (78%).
A fervently agrarian party the PNȚ represented a dying economic system. Whilst the Russian comparison falls flat considering Stalin’s mass industrialization policies, the broad European trend was a shift to an increasingly industrial economy. While the PNȚ’s pro-Peasant economic policy may have been an important development they were in some ways too little too late. The 1930’s were ripe with state economic policies forcing through anti-peasant action, and shifting to industrial economies, while the PNȚ tried to maintain a moderate development under the aegis of a benevolent state.
Modern understandings of the National Liberal Party (Partidul Național Liberal PNL) are dominated by the role that they play in the current Romanian political system. In the Communist world they are viewed as at best the resident traitor party. A honeypot for the last scattered nationalists and non-socialists akin to the True Democrats in the UASR. In the Entente they are commonly seen as the vanguard of freedom as Reichskanzler Friedrich Merz famously stated. The truth like all things lies in the middle, a truth whose seeds lie in the chaotic decades between the wars.
The PNL was dominated by an oligarchic core that had emerged from around the Banca Românească (Romanian Bank). Whilst the passage of the 1923 constitution resulted in universal suffrage for all men, the PNL continued to hold political power in a de facto oligarchical way. This is not to say that they did not wield popular support, a majority of voters from the former Conservative Party, and elements of the Romanian parties newly integrated into the Kingdom willingly voted for the PNL. Nonetheless the main reason for the PNL’s political dominance throughout the 20’s rested upon their position as King Ferdinand’s party. Under the leadership of Ion Brătianu the party managed to integrate itself with the state, a level of integration that saw PNL officials appointed to every level of society, and electoral politics. An instructive assessment of the political process that characterised elections is given by the British minister to Bucharest, Herbert Dering, in his annual report for 1922 for the Foreign Office:
The Liberal government therefore lost no time in preparing for these by the methods usually adopted in this country by all political parties in office on such occasions, namely by the removal of the majority of provincial prefects and mayors of communes, and their replacement by Liberal adherents. The Liberal organisation, admittedly the more perfect in the kingdom, secured despatch in thus preparing the way for elections held under the auspices of sympathisers with the actual administration, an effective means of obtaining a substantial majority.
Fundamentally this system allowed for the parties most favoured by the King to form government, and then hold elections to determine the strength of their own government. When analysing the results it cannot be said to be anything other than effective. In 1922 the PNL, when conducting the elections won 222 seats in the Chamber of Deputies against 147 of the combined opposition, whilst in 1932 they were reduced to sixteen deputies. This system was at its height in the years between 1927-1930. Following the death of King Ferdinand, the PNL was able to impose their influence over Mihai’s regency. Influence that would allow them to maintain and assert their dominance. However, the sudden death of Ion Brătianu in April 1930 robbed the Liberals of forceful leadership. With the keystone of the party gone, his brother Vintila was unable to maintain party unity. Then in June Carol II returned from his ignoble exile in Paris. His sudden return in a period of political crisis offered a miracle to rally the Romanian nation. While Iliu Maniu would rage against Carol on moral grounds, the Liberals annulled the act barring him from the throne. Carol would agree to be crowned with his wife Helen in September, which would become the first of an extensive list of financial mistakes. As the new government structure settled into place the crown and parliament rapidly began to enter a deadly political dance. Whilst the oil boom was enough to paper over the increasing cracks in government structure, by the beginning of 1932 the government was falling apart. The PNL was at their own throats as the increasing debate over economic responses to the Depression, and the response to the rising tide of Communism became increasingly vicious.
Gheorghe I. Brătianu was the first to split from the Liberals with his Germanophilia breaking with the traditional Francophile positions of the rest of the party. While the PNL-Brătianu would never try to form its own identity, the German support it received fatally weakened the PNL proper, a weakness that Carol II would exploit, claiming that the PNL no longer had a mandate to govern. Vintila Brătianu would dutifully resign the Premiership, ceding power to Iliu Maniu.
The Greenshirts and the Others: By Edgar Spector [1]
Romanian reactionary politics was born from the fundamentally peasant-like nature of the country’s socio-economic-political landscape. Built from a militant adherence to the Romanian Orthodox Church, deep mysticism, rabid anti-Communism, and the Romanian national inferiority complex. To call the Iron Guard and its allied movements fascist would be a fundamental inaccuracy.
The Fascism of Germany and Italy was born from a revolution against modernity, but also against tradition. Mussolini’s history with socialism lent Italian Fascism a unique air of anti-capitalism and anti-communism. The Iron Guard was born from the history of the Romanian nation, a history born from conflict, and foreign domination. When the Roman Empire collapsed the Romanian people withdrew into Transylvania, transforming them into the bastions of the Romanian nation.
At least in the mythology of the Romanian nation. This almost religious devotion to Transylvania would be the cooking pot for the emergence of fascism in the country. For when Romania as a state was born, the Austrian Empire held an iron grasp over Transylvania, and would do until the end of the First World War. Indeed, a key factor in Romanian intervention into the war was Ion I.C. Brătianu’s desire to unite Transylvania with the Romanian state itself.
There is no better example to the importance that Transylvania held to the Romanian nationalist mythos, than the turbulent autumn of 1937 during what was technically one of the last elections of the Romanian Kingdom. My parents and I were visiting family deep in the Apuseni Mountains, the heart of Romanian Transylvania, home of the Moți and birthplace of the legendary Avram Iancu. That evening the only discussion was of the visiting Codreanu, the dowager duchess of the community presided over the Hungarians of the community, Jewish and Christian alike, heaping abuse on the man. To them he was the head of the beast, a monster that could not be described. Of course, to my eight-year-old mind this was nothing more than something I had to witness. The next night, me and my best friend, the son of the local Orthodox Priest, snuck into the square before the old church. Peasants had come from all over the region in their Sunday best, the aura was one of total awe. I remember vividly the sudden hush when it was clear that Codreanu was nearby.
He rode into the square on a white horse, his tall darkly handsome features radiating more than charisma. To compare his boyish smile to a simple man is wrong. He was akin to the mountains, and the streams. His mere silence spoke more than a thousand words, calling back to a tradition to a
I have few memories of the event itself, yet years later I would uncover a transcript of the speeches given. Transylvania to the Iron Guard was their heart, and soul of their movement. A land where the spirit of the true Romania remained, and that spirit would thunder down onto the plains below. Until the day I die I will never forget my meeting with Codreanu.
The Triumph of the Guard: The failure of Romanian Capitalism by Vladimir Tismăneanu
Despite revisionist claims from the Cypriot Romanian community that the rise of the Iron Guard was a natural response to ‘communist infiltration’ the key player in the Romanian depression of the 1930’s was Fascist Italy. The discovery of Libyan Oil Fields in 1930 combined with the aftermath of the Wall Street Crash was more than enough to throw the Romanian economy into turmoil.
The immediate effects of the announcement of massive oil well discoveries counterintuitively saw an increase in the growth of the Romanian economy, the initial stages of Italian development seeing a brief expansion of Ploești as tens of thousands of Lire poured in. Thousands of peasants would flock to the cities, with the Romanian government’s mass messaging about building a new industrial core for Romania convincing them that good, well-paying industrial jobs were just around the corner. For a brief period, they were.
1930 and 1931 saw Romania enter a brief period of intense growth, with contemporary reports arguing that they may well be one of the European states to ride out the great depression the best. The sudden cut to Italian money that had been funding this growth was devastating. The brief increase in the proletarian population cratered with a simultaneous collapse of the urban economy and a continuing wave of internal migration. The Italian Lira that many hoped would provide a bedrock to launch Romania into the modern economy would in any other case have been able to begin a diversification of Romanian industry, or a modernization of her vast agricultural fields. However, the overwhelming corruption, incompetence, and failure of the PNL government put a brutal end to that hope. The entirety of the profits had been laundered amongst the ruling class of the nation and spent either on debauchery or deposited in western bank accounts. This left the government in a position where the simultaneous deproletarianisation of mass segments of the population alongside an en-masse movement from the countryside required deceive action, led by competent and organised figures. Figures that the Romanian government could not provide. Dennis Deletant’s statement that ‘Institutionalised corruption was matched by a personal variety. The exploitative rule of foreign Phanariot princes in Wallachia and Moldavia in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century had helped to create a culture amongst the dominant elite in which rapacity was regarded as proof of dexterity and cunning, and therefore, corruption of principles had become widespread’ hits the issues on the head. This culture of corruption, and self-serving politics was so deeply integrated into the PNL, stagnated attempts to respond to the crisis. A stagnation that would have fatal consequences.
The immediate result was a massive upswing in support for the PNȚ across Romania, with their demands for drastic pro-peasant action tapping into a mass movement within the Romanian population. Previously ignored ideas of a march on Bucharest much alike the now despised Mussolini began to ferment amongst the leadership of the party.
As the agricultural struggle grew, and the PNL government collapsed, Vintila Brătianu resigned and handed power to Iuliu Maniu. Maniu would implement the traditional pre-election reforms despite the growing political clashes between him and Carol. The 1932 elections could well be described as the only free election in the Kingdom of Romania.
The PNȚ landslide that resulted despite notionally backing Maniu as Prime Minister adhered more to the growing corporatist wave sweeping the world. This contradiction would only break in May 33 as the American Revolution threw Romania into political chaos.
American trade with Romania, which had been a key part of the economic growth of the 1920’s was abruptly cut off with MacArthur’s coup. As the brief economic resurgence that had begun from some of the polices Maniu had managed to push through collapsed, a temporary truce was pushed through between the various factions of the PNȚ. As economic reforms were rammed through, and American assets in the country nationalised some commentators argued that Romania was about to finally turn the corner on the Great Depression.
Then a strike broke out at Grivița. An earlier strike there in 1931 had played a key role in the collapse of the post-Libya boom political consensus. This time it would throw Romanian politics into the grasps of madmen, incompetents, and murderers.
[…]
Within three days of the strike’s beginning a workers committee was established governing the workshop, and across the remainder of the Romanian rail network copycat councils were rapidly being established. PCdR membership exploded during this brief period, with the open leadership of the Grivița council winning many of the incredibly alienated proletariat to their banner. To Bucharest, the strikes were nothing more than a Soviet plot to destroy Romania. On the 1st of June Maniu would authorise a military response to put down the strikes.
As the Romanian Army mobilised forces surrounding Grivița itself, the Iron Guard began to march on the few rural councils established. A key example of the increasing consolidation of the Guard into the form that they would be recognised as during the war is the battle of Covasna.
Covasna was a key part of the small Transylvanian railway network, and the formation of a soviet in the town was both logistically devastating and a major surprise. The small number of railway workers there under the de facto command of Cosmin Diaconescu*, a deeply committed Communist, would try and follow the traditional Bolshevik line of calling for the peasants to rally to them. Their calls for formations of Peasant Committees to oversee the transfer of land was met with on the whole general disinterest. Meanwhile local Guardist forces rallied under the command of the local priest, and with the blessing of the scattered police department marched on the town.
The ten or so workers who had occupied town hall and gathered a collection of old rifles were rapidly surrounded by a massive crowd being whipped into a bloodthirsty religious fervour. The storming of the town hall saw the banner calling for ‘All power to the workers! All land to he who tills it!’ torn apart, with one of the three survivors forced to eat his words before he was beheaded with an axe. The fate of Cosmin Diaconescu however was much darker. Under the direct command of local Guardist forces he was crucified along the train line, and in a dark mirror of the myth that Transylvania was somehow the last bastion of Rome’s heirs a message scrawled across him. The first form of a message that would sear its way into the minds of thousands of Comintern forces during the Liberation of Romania. Mi-am trădat Dumnezeu, țara și regele. ‘I betrayed my god, country, and king.’
[…]
In Bucharest as the cost of the ‘June Massacre’ became clear to the government Maniu would tender his resignation and withdraw into Transylvania. A broken man, his rabid hatred for Communism would only fester, convincing him that the only reason that his government had failed was the perfidious action of the Communists. While his hatred for the Guard, and the position of subservience to Germany that they placed Romania in would outweigh his utter disdain for the Communists it would take the total refusal of the Entente to support the Romanian resistance for him to support the National Democratic Bloc in 1943.
With his removal from the scene Carol II would take an unprecedented step and dissolve parliament. Arguing that the blame for the economic and political struggles of the past few years laid solely on the chaos caused by the lack of a strong monarch he would herald in a new era of incompetence, authoritarianism, and viciousness: The Royal Dictatorship.
[1] The style of this section is taken from the OTL book, while I edited it and used my own words to describe the event the style of writing is verbatim from OTL.
AN: Hello there, this is the first part of a series building up Romania’s lore, and exploring the history of the Iron Guard regime in a plausible manner, while also drawing on the rest of the TL. There’ll probably be a least one more Romania post as well as me working on some of the smaller Axis powers.
*[WPA]: Works Progress Administration
*[NBI]: National Bureau of Investigation
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