ABSTRACT
In the precommunist era of the early twentieth century, an authoritarian monarch subverted the Romanian parliamentary system with the help of an ultraconservative middle class and aristocracy that controlled most of the country’s wealth. By the 1930s, the country was a repressive dictatorship strongly influenced by Nazi German totalitarianism, for which Romania’s upper classes had much sympathy. They were suspicious of democracy, fearful of Soviet communism, and deeply anti-Semitic. During World War II, Romania was an ally of Nazi Germany and cooperated with its invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. After the war and a punishing armistice imposed on Romania by the Kremlin, Romanian communists ousted the monarch, declared a republic, and turned the country into a Soviet-style socialist dictatorship and, eventually, into a satellite of the Kremlin.
