Petru Groza - Rise To Power

Rise To Power

Despite having briefly retired from public life in 1928 after holding a series of political posts, Groza reemerged on the political scene in 1933, founding a peasant-based political organization, the Ploughmen's Front.

Although the movement originally began in order to oppose the increasing burden of debt carried by Romania's peasants during the Great Depression and because the National Peasants' Party's couldn't help the poorest peasants, by 1944 the organization was essentiually under Communist control. The Communist Party wished to seize power but was too weak to seize it alone -- in 1944 it had only about a thousand members. Accordingly, the Romanian communist leaders had no choice but to have the party join a broad coalition of political organizations.

This coalition was composed of four major front organizations: the Romanian Society for Friendship with the Soviet Union, the Union of Patriots, the Patriotic Defense (a paramilitary wing of the PCR), and, by far the most widely backed by the Romanian populace, Groza's Ploughmen's Front. From his position as the chief political actor in the largest of the Communist front organizations, Groza was able to assert himself in a position of eminence within the Romanian political sphere as the Ploughmen's Front joined the Communist Party to create the National Democratic Front in October 1944 (it also included Mihai Ralea's Socialist Peasants' Party and the Hungarian People's Union, being briefly joined by the Social Democrats, and other minor groups). He was first considered by the Communist Lucreţiu Pătrăşcanu for the post of Premier in October 1944.

Groza's prominent position within the National Democratic Front afforded him the opportunity to succeed General Nicolae Rădescu as premier when, in January,1945, top Romanian communists, namely Ana Pauker and Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej rebuked Rădescu with allegedly failing to combat "fascist sympathizers". With the help of Soviet authorities, the Communists soon mobilized workers to hold a series of demonstrations against Rădescu, and by February many had died because the demonstrations often led to violence. While the communists claimed on tenuous grounds that the Romanian Army was responsible for the deaths of innocent civilians, Rădescu weakened his own popular support by stating that the communists were "godless foreigners with no homeland". In response, Andrei Y. Vishinsky, the Soviet vice commissioner of foreign affairs, traveled to Bucharest to compel Rădescu to resign and install Groza as premier, which he accomplished on March 6, 1945.