Petru Groza

Romania state institutions Marxism–Leninism Romania Romania 1884–1958 ○ Natural causes

The "red bourgeois", a landowning lawyer who never joined the party yet served as the communist regime's first prime minister and head of state

In early March 1945 Vyshinsky flew to Bucharest and demanded that King Michael appoint Groza prime minister within two hours, warning that otherwise he could not guarantee Romania's survival as an independent state. The Rădescu government fell and the Groza government took office on 6 March.

Born into an Orthodox priest's family in Hunedoara, Transylvania, he studied law in Budapest, Berlin and Leipzig and became a lawyer and landowner. Starting in the Romanian National Party during the Hungarian parliament years, he twice served as a minister in Averescu's governments in the 1920s, founded the Ploughmen's Front at Deva in 1933 and allied it with the Communist Party through the Țebea agreement of 1935. Deputy prime minister after 23 August 1944, he became prime minister on 6 March 1945 as Soviet deputy foreign commissar Vyshinsky demanded at the palace, and at once decreed a land reform that broke up the great estates. When King Michael demanded his resignation in the summer of 1945 and began the "royal strike" of refusing to sign decrees, Groza held on, trusting Soviet backing. After the rigged election of 1946 and the dissolution of the National Peasant Party in 1947, he forced the king's abdication together with Gheorghiu-Dej on 30 December that year. Prime minister until June 1952, he then became chairman of the Presidium of the Grand National Assembly, the nominal head of state, and kept the post until his death. A wealthy landowner who never joined the Communist Party, he was friendly to the Hungarian minority of Transylvania and famous for the wit with which he called himself a "red bourgeois".

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Related historical events

Premiership in the Stalinist transformation, 1948-1952

Groza kept the premiership until 2 June 1952, and the rule exercised in these years differed in character from the earlier coalition facade. The Stalinist model of social organization and management was imposed, and on 11 June 1948 his cabinet passed the law nationalizing industry, abolishing private ownership and generalizing public ownership in industry, banking and transport. A State Planning Committee was created to direct economic development on the basis of central planning, and from 1951 economic organization proceeded through five-year plans. In agriculture too, collective and state farms were set up on the Soviet model, and peasants were allowed to keep only small plots of no more than 0.15 hectares. The Assembly of Deputies was dissolved on 24 February 1948 and elections to the Great National Assembly were held on 28 March, its first task being to draft a new fundamental law. As in the DPRK and other Eastern European countries, this constitutional and ownership transformation followed the common path of postwar people's democracy. When he handed over the premiership in June 1952, he remained the symbolic apex of the system as nominal head of state. This is the point at which the landowner and lawyer who called himself the "red bourgeois" is hardest to reconcile with his own record. The Ploughmen's Front he had once led was forced, old and ill, to accept its dissolution on 7 February 1953.