Romanian Communist Party

At the Socialist Party congress held in Bucharest on 8–12 May 1921 the maximalist wing, taking advantage of the imprisonment of most of the party's leaders, voted to turn the party into the Socialist-Communist Party, which soon renamed itself the Communist Party of Romania (PCdR). The congress was broken up by police intervention and arrests on 12 May, the day after the vote to join the Comintern. The Romanian source regards it as the party's first congress; the first general secretary was Gheorghe Cristescu. According to the English source, of the Socialist Party's roughly 40,000 members only between 2,000 and 500 remained in the new party, while the Romanian source says membership fell from about 2,000 in 1922 to fewer than 1,000 during the Second World War.

Following the Comintern line, the party regarded Greater Romania as a colonial entity ‘illegally occupying’ Transylvania, Dobruja, Bessarabia and Bukovina and called for its breakup. On 11 April 1924 the Liberal government banned the party in the context of the Tatarbunary Uprising, and it remained illegal until 1944. Most of its members came from minorities such as Jews, Hungarians and Bulgarians, and none of its general secretaries between 1924 and 1944 was an ethnic Romanian. With many activists imprisoned or in Soviet exile, competing factions arose.

In 1944 the ‘prison faction’, with Soviet approval, deposed General Secretary Ștefan Foriș and installed a troika including Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej. On 23 August the party, as part of the National Democratic Bloc, took part in the coup in which King Michael I and army officers arrested Ion Antonescu. With the backing of the Soviet occupation forces the party forced the king to abdicate on 30 December 1947 and proclaimed the Romanian People's Republic. In February 1948 it absorbed the Social Democratic Party to form the Romanian Workers' Party (PMR), and in 1952 Gheorghiu-Dej, with Stalin's approval, purged Ana Pauker, Vasile Luca and Teohari Georgescu. The successive purges removed between 300,000 and 465,000 of roughly one million members, and by 1962 96% of the arable land had been collectivised.

When Gheorghiu-Dej died in March 1965, Nicolae Ceaușescu became general secretary, and on 24 July the party reverted to the name Romanian Communist Party. In August 1968 Ceaușescu publicly opposed the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, and membership grew from about 1.4 million in 1965 to 2.6 million in 1976. With the ‘July Theses’ he returned to a hard line and built up a personality cult; from 1974 to 1989 the general secretary was also President of Romania.

The crisis deepened after the Brașov strike of 1987, and in March 1989 the ‘Letter of the Six’ by former party officials criticised Ceaușescu. He was re-elected general secretary on 24 November 1989, but a month later he and the party were overthrown in the December revolution that began in Timișoara, and he and his wife were executed in Târgoviște. The party simply disappeared without a formal dissolution, and power passed to the National Salvation Front, which included many former members.