Between External Constraint and Internal Crackdown Romania's Non-reaction to Soviet Perestroika

Abstract

This chapter analyzes the reaction of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s regime to the
Soviet quest for an internal reform of the communist system. Was the
Romanian choice not to follow Mikhail Gorbachev’s advice inevitable?
And how was it perceived both at home and abroad in the second half of
the 1980s?
Over the last two decades, a large literature has explored the neo-patrimonial
turn, the nationalist pervertion, and the repressive practices
of the Ceaușescu regime.1 The few recent archival-based accounts of the
Soviet–Romanian relationships offer useful insights into the “inevitable
conflict” between the anti-nationalist and supra-national Soviet reform
path, and the dogmatic nationalism promoted by Ceaușescu.2 However,
less attention has been paid to the financial and social constraints that
late communist Romania had to accept from its Western creditors.3 On
the basis on a wide range of new archival evidence, I argue that it was
firstly the debt crisis of the early 1980s that pushed the Romanian communist
regime toward self-isolation, after its vaunted independence
from Moscow had been jeopardized by the Western-imposed fiscal consolidation.
The same international financial institutions (the International
Monetary Fund and the World Bank) that Romania had proudly adhered
to in 1972 as the first Warsaw Pact country member and had long benefited
from before the second oil crisis of 1979–80, suddenly became an
instrument of political pressure.4 Meanwhile, Western countries were
beginning to show greater interest in the poor human rights record of the
154 Stefano Bottoni
Ceaușescu regime. This multiple legitimacy crisis helps explain why the
Ceaușescu regime reacted negatively after 1985 to the Gorbachev plans to
reframe existing socialism. As I will analyze in the second part of the chapter,
the Romanian leader looked with suspicion on what he perceived as
an entangled (Western and Eastern) threat to his rule. It was not an ideological
committment, but rather the fear of being overthrown by a Sovietled
conspiracy that made him so vocally unreceptive to perestroika.