 | This article's factual accuracy may be compromised due to out-of-date information.(February 2013) |
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The following is a description of the social structure of Romania divided into three distinct categories.
| This article's factual accuracy may be compromised due to out-of-date information.(February 2013) |
| |
The following is a description of the social structure of Romania divided into three distinct categories.
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Before World War II, Romania was primarily agrarian; in the late 1940s, about three-quarters of the population were engaged in subsistence agriculture from ever-shrinking plots of land (due to an increasing rural population). Although some industrial activity was encouraged by state contracts and foreign investment, industrial development was slow and failed to create alternative employment opportunities for the overpopulated and impoverished countryside. Atop the low social pyramid stood a disproportionately powerful social elite, a remnant of the nobility that had once owned most of the land in the Kingdom of Romania (1881–1947). Although reforms between 1917 and 1921 had left them with only 15% of the arable land, this aristocracy retained a powerful voice in political affairs.
After World War II, Romania's social structure was drastically altered by the imposition of a political system envisioning a classless, egalitarian society. Marxist-Leninist doctrine holds that the establishment of a socialist state (in which the working class possesses the means of production and distribution of goods and political power) will ensure the eventual development of communism. Under communism, there would be no class conflict or exploitation of man by his fellow man. There would be an abundance of wealth, shared equally by all. The road to communism requires the primacy of the working class and the elimination of the ruling class and bourgeoisie. In Romania the latter was easily accomplished, but most of the population were peasants and not workers.
The Communist government (imposed by the Soviet Union in 1945) eliminated opposition to their consolidation of power by appeals to the working class. Disruption caused by World War II assisted the new government; much of the ruling elite had either emigrated or been killed, and many survivors left with the retreating German forces as the Red Army approached. Most Jews (who had constituted a large segment of the communal and financial elite before the war) either died in fascist Romania or fled the country over the next few years.
Measures taken during the early days of communist rule eradicated what remained of the upper crust. Land reforms in 1945 eliminated large holdings, depriving the aristocracy of their power and economic base. The currency reform of 1947 (which essentially confiscated all money for the state) was ruinous for members of the commercial and industrial bourgeoisie who had not fled with their fortunes. The state also expropriated commercial and industrial properties; by 1950 90% of all industrial output was state-controlled, and by 1953 only 14% of shops were privately owned.
Although opposition from the more economically and socially advanced members of society was eliminated almost immediately, the task of creating an industrial working class (in whose name the communists claimed power) had just begun. In 1950, less than 25% of the population lived in cities or worked in factories. Conditions in the countryside, however, were poised for change in the direction the regime required. The war and Soviet occupation had left the peasantry starving, with much of their livestock and capital destroyed. Their problems were compounded by a drought in 1945–1946, followed by a famine in which thousands died. More important for the regime, many of the peasants became detached from the land and were willing to work in factory jobs resulting from the Communist Party's industrialization program. [1]
From the late 1970s to the 1980s there was a growing economic crisis, leading to a sharp decline in living standards. The response by Nicolae Ceaușescu, which made liberal use of austerity, led to heightened societal tensions and even worse conditions for working people. In December 1989, the government headed by Nicolae Ceaușescu was forcibly overthrown, with rioting in Bucharest. The sudden removal of a state-controlled economy led to further erosion in the standard of living, with unemployment and job insecurity.[ citation needed ] Social change in Romania has been slow, with progress toward a less-centrally-controlled economy sporadic in nature. [2]
Nicolae Ceaușescu was a Romanian communist politician and dictator. He was the general secretary of the Romanian Communist Party from 1965 to 1989, and the second and last communist leader of Romania. He was also the country's head of state from 1967, serving as President of the State Council and from 1974 concurrently as President of the Republic, until his overthrow and execution in the Romanian Revolution in December 1989, part of a series of anti-Communist uprisings in Eastern Europe that year.
The Socialist Republic of Romania was a Marxist–Leninist one-party socialist state that existed officially in Romania from 1947 to 1989. From 1947 to 1965, the state was known as the Romanian People's Republic. The country was an Eastern Bloc state and a member of the Warsaw Pact with a dominant role for the Romanian Communist Party enshrined in its constitutions. Geographically, RSR was bordered by the Black Sea to the east, the Soviet Union to the north and east, Hungary and Yugoslavia to the west, and Bulgaria to the south.
Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej was a Romanian communist politician and electrician. He was the first Communist leader of Romania from 1947 to 1965, serving as first secretary of the Romanian Communist Party from 1944 to 1954 and from 1955 to 1965, and as the first Communist Prime Minister of Romania from 1952 to 1955.
The Romanian Revolution, also known as the Christmas Revolution, was a period of violent civil unrest in Romania during December 1989 as a part of the Revolutions of 1989 that occurred in several countries around the world, including the countries in Eastern Europe, before the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Romanian Revolution started in the city of Timișoara and soon spread throughout the country, ultimately culminating in the drumhead trial and execution of longtime Romanian Communist Party (PCR) General Secretary Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife Elena, and the end of 42 years of Communist rule in Romania. It was also the last removal of a Marxist–Leninist government in a Warsaw Pact country during the events of 1989, and the only one that violently overthrew a country's leadership and executed its leader; according to estimates, over one thousand people died and thousands more were injured.
The Romanian Communist Party was a communist party in Romania. The successor to the pro-Bolshevik wing of the Socialist Party of Romania, it gave an ideological endorsement to a communist revolution that would replace the social system of the Kingdom of Romania. After being outlawed in 1924, the PCR remained a minor and illegal grouping for much of the interwar period and submitted to direct Comintern control. During the 1920s and the 1930s, most of its activists were imprisoned or took refuge in the Soviet Union, which led to the creation of competing factions that sometimes came into open conflict. That did not prevent the party from participating in the political life of the country through various front organizations, most notably the Peasant Workers' Bloc. During the mid-1930s, due to the purges against the Iron Guard, the party was on the road to achieving power, but the dictatorship of king Carol II crushed this. In 1934–1936, PCR reformed itself in the mainland of Romania properly, with foreign observers predicting a possible communist takeover in Romania. The party emerged as a powerful actor on the Romanian political scene in August 1944, when it became involved in the royal coup that toppled the pro-Nazi government of Ion Antonescu. With support from Soviet occupational forces, the PCR pressured King Michael I into abdicating, and it established the Romanian People's Republic in December 1947.
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After the collapse of a short-lived Communist regime, according to historian István Deák:
The Union of Communist Youth was the Romanian Communist Party's youth organisation. Like many Young Communist organisations, it was modelled after the Soviet Komsomol. It aimed to cultivate young cadres into the party, as well as to help create the "new man" envisioned by communist ideologues.
The social structure of China has an extensive history which begins from the feudal society of Imperial China to the contemporary era. There was a Chinese nobility, beginning with the Zhou dynasty. However, after the Song dynasty, the powerful government offices were not hereditary. Instead they were selected through the imperial examination system, of written examinations based on Confucian thought, thereby undermining the power of the hereditary aristocracy.
National communism is a term describing various forms in which Marxism–Leninism and socialism has been adopted and/or implemented by leaders in different countries using aspects of nationalism or national identity to form a policy independent from communist internationalism. National communism has been used to describe movements and governments that have sought to form a distinctly unique variant of communism based upon distinct national characteristics and circumstances, rather than following policies set by other socialist states, such as the Soviet Union.
The collectivization of agriculture in Romania took place in the early years of the Communist regime. The initiative sought to bring about a thorough transformation in the property regime and organization of labor in agriculture. According to some authors, such as US anthropologist David Kideckel, agricultural collectivization was a "response to the objective circumstances" in postwar Romania, rather than an ideologically motivated enterprise. Unlike the Stalinist model applied in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, the collectivization was not achieved by mass liquidation of wealthy peasants, starvation, or agricultural sabotage, but was accomplished gradually. This often included significant violence and destruction as employed by cadres, or Party representatives.
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National communism in Romania is a term referring to a form of nationalism promoted in the Socialist Republic of Romania between the early 1960s and 1989; the term itself was not used by the Communist regime. Having its origins in Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej's political emancipation from the Soviet Union, it was greatly developed by Nicolae Ceaușescu, who began in 1971, through his July Theses manifesto, a national cultural revolution. Part of the national mythology was Nicolae Ceaușescu's cult of personality and the idealization of Romanian history, known in Romanian historiography as protochronism.
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