ABSTRACT
Prior to the establishment of Communist rule, the Romanian army had an undistinguished record. It’s most significant and certainly most consequential military involvement had been Romanian participation in World War II on the German side. The imposition of party control over the Romanian army, despite Soviet occupation of the country, proceeded at a rather slow pace at first and was not completed until the end of 1947. With party control of the armed forces firmly secured, beginning in 1948 the Romanian army entered a period characterized by a massive restructuring of the military establishment patterned on the Soviet model. In the second half of the 1950s, the Romanian military, along with most other East European military establishments began to undergo a gradual process of modernization and renationalization triggered by the destalinization process in the Soviet Union. A watershed in Romania's attitudes toward the Warsaw Pact was reached in 1968 with the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.
