Petru Groza

Petru Groza

1884–1958 ○ Died in office

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".