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Ion Antonescu’s removal from power on August 23, 1944 is one of the few events in the contemporary history of Romania over which, more than three decades since the demise of communism, the shadow of Nicolae Ceaușescu still lingers. The subsequent political impact of the event, sensitive historical considerations and, above all, the agenda of the people that helped instrumentalize it, to greater or lesser extents, have for a long time prevented an objective assessment.
There are many explanations for that, but the most important has to do with the political consequences generated even by the simple attempt to label the event, without bringing into question criticism of the historical figures that gave rise to it. The variety of tags assigned to the event, some of them downright absurd, confirms it was the object of a permanent “re-reading” in the key of transient political objectives. Coup d'état, “act”, “armed insurrection”, “restoration of democracy” or even “social, national liberation, anti-fascist and anti-imperialist revolution”, are some of the terms that not only imply a series of political options, but almost from the very start rule out the possibility of a critical analysis, free from ideological constraints. At issue are not so much immediate consequences, namely the removal of a dictator who was as tragic as he was mediocre and murderous, or medium-term effects, but also the motivations and visions of the people involved.
“August 23 was the birth certificate of the communist movement” in Romania
For the nationalist period of the communist regime, things were relatively simple. For Ceaușescu, just as for Dej (more specifically the second part of his rule), August 23 served as the birth certificate of the national communist movement. In the framework of representations and myths circulated by historians of the communist regime, August 23 was an event whose importance overshadowed the very foundation of the party. Unlike the formal establishment of the party, a direct effect of the Bolshevik coup and the emergence of the Comintern, August 23 provided the Romanian communists not only with the illusion that they could make a difference in the war economy, but above all with the satisfaction of having succeeded in surprising their patrons by displaying initiative and courage. As the anti-Soviet digression of the Romanian communists grew stronger, the number of protagonists gradually went down, until their place was taken by an amorphous mass of “patriotic and working forces”, which were meant to legitimize the character of “popular movement” by purposefully inducing confusion. Whatever trace of modesty they had left, after years of clinging to power, but especially the fact that some of their peers were still alive, turned August 23 into an event that was not attributed to Dej or to Ceaușescu. However, this did not prevent people from depersonalizing the event or from turning it into a pseudo-canon impervious to all regulations, the perfect narrative to be reinterpreted depending on context.
In 1974, when Ceaușescu formalized the indigestible term “insurrection”, with all its attributes, he did so just as the party’s new program was brought into discussion, which almost directly conveyed the need for a “new regime”. Seen from this perspective, the reexamination of the “act” of August 23, 1944, seen as the communists’ trial by fire, which seemed to wash away the original sin of their tainted conception in the laboratories of the Comintern, no longer seems that meaningless. Later, under the efficient leadership of Ilie Ceaușescu, the party’s trustworthy historians were tasked with evaluating the European impact of Ion Antonescu’s removal from power, thus providing the propaganda machine with a few concrete arguments to work with. The direct result of this decision was Romania leaving the Axis, a move which allegedly shortened World War II by six months. As a sidenote, it must be said that the story of the half-year worth of spared bloodshed was so well received, that it generated a genuine trend of making calculations, so much so that some historians embedded with the regime started evaluating the tribute paid the Sublime Porte by the Romanian Principalities in “today’s money”, prior to their “liberation from the Ottoman yoke”. But that’s a completely different story.
The communists concealed the role the king played on August 23 and embellished the image of Marshal Antonescu
Beyond the discussion regarding the chosen label for the events of August 23, 1944, a key move of the regime, especially under Ceaușescu, was to remove King Michael I from the official narrative, replacing him with an impersonal “Crown” or simply removing any reference to him. Conversely, Ceaușescu had a much softer touch with none other than Ion Antonescu. Himself posing as a “Leader”, and thus on a par with Antonescu, Ceaușescu ordered the hushing of the Romanian Holocaust, toning down its historical significance through poetic license.
Quite quickly, the fall of the communist regime enabled the restoration of the complexity of the historical reality. The king was returned to his rightful place, namely a source of legitimacy and the top protagonist of the plot against Ion Antonescu, while talks resumed about the Romanian Holocaust. All that helped set the moral framing of the August 23 events with no difficulty. Paradoxically, the reappearance of real-life characters in historiographic discourse and the thorough reconstruction of the genesis of the event did not lead to its critical evaluation, in a scholarly sense. The exaggerations and lamentations of those who consider Ion Antonescu a tragic hero and who justify his abominable crimes through his patriotic drive are ruled out from the start. Fully committed to the Axis and to Hitler, Antonescu was as motivated by anti-Semitism as he was by patriotism, as he understood it. Beyond his legitimate desire to recover part of Romania’s national territory, lost in the summer and autumn of 1940, Antonescu was equally engaged in an anti-Bolshevik and anti-Semitic crusade, which aspired to reshape world order in a grandiose and dramatic manner.
Whereas Antonescu’s position leaves little room for interpretation, the agenda of the individuals and groups involved in his removal have yet to be thoroughly examined. The strategy of the democratic opposition for Romania's exit from the war requires an equally critical evaluation. Influenced by the popularity as well as by the historical merits of the protagonists of the events of August 23, 1944, historians and their readership continued to operate with the value judgments offered by the very people who took part in the events.
Antonescu's removal spared most of Romania's territory from the destruction that would have been caused by a Soviet military advance. Democracy was temporarily restored, by returning King Michael I to his rightful place. The Allies' consented to nullifying the “Second Vienna Award”, while Romanian diplomacy once again confirmed its tactical refinement by negotiating with the Allies through multiple channels. All these can be considered consequences of Ion Antonescu’s removal through the Palace coup of August 23, 1944. To a large extent, each of them is supported by a considerable amount of historical evidence, testimonies or comparisons that are linked to the rudiments of historical research. However, there is still much about the events of August 23 that can be subject to historical interpretation.
The efforts of the democratic opposition to negotiate Romania's exit from the war, marked by gullibility and inconsistency
The crucial role of the King cannot be separated from his natural desire to steer clear of the dictatorship, whose criminal obsessions he did not share, but to which he provided legitimacy whenever it was required. The Army’s lack of reaction in the wake of Ion Antonescu’s arrest and the collapse of the chain of command on the frontlines, even during the Soviet Chișinău-Iași offensive, prove that the military commanders also wanted to dissociate themselves from Antonescu's regime and his crimes, amidst the increasingly obvious prospect of Romania losing the war. On the one hand, the country’s one-sided decision to exit the war allowed the Soviets to disarm and detain large military forces and disarm the fleet, without being limited by the provisions of an armistice agreement, which it deliberately delayed signing. On the other hand, the desire and ability of the German troops in Bucharest and Ploiești to fight was greatly overestimated by the authors of the August 23 coup. In the spring of 1944, the two members of the opposition attending the negotiations in Cario, Barbu Știrbey and Constantin Vișoianu, turned down the Allies’ joint request that, once it left the Axis, Romania should immediately declare war against German troops. Considering that, in early 1944, the Soviets were strongly convinced that only Antonescu had the authority to conclude and enforce an armistice, it is not surprising that they seemed willing to offer Antonescu's envoy, Alexandru Crețianu, better terms for Romania leaving the war. Moreover, as Ambassador Nikolai Novikov writes in his memoirs, the Soviets considered the Romanian opposition envoys to be equally Antonescu's representatives, and, for their part, they did nothing to erase that impression. That is precisely why the negotiations in Cairo were rather a good platform only to boost the Soviets’ reputation, showing the Romanians the strong solidarity between the Allies.
The persistent efforts of Iuliu Maniu and the entire democratic opposition, first to negotiate only with the British and Americans, and later the fixation of the democratic opposition to call for the deployment of British troops to Romania as a prerequisite to the country’s exit from the war, an illusion subtly fueled by the British themselves, did nothing but to further infuriate the Soviets, who took the initiative and called off the negotiations. As indicated in the instructions received from Moscow by Novikov, in-between the two rounds of negotiation, the Soviets believed that Maniu was under Antonescu’s control and that he was incapable of taking any significant action against him. Following discussions with the representatives of the opposition, Moscow had reached the conclusion that Antonescu did not seek an immediate exit from the war. As a result, the terms for truce offered to Romanian negotiators were rather drastic.
The political agenda that guided the democratic opposition during the truce talks was not just fanciful, but downright intellectually inconsistent. The overestimation of Britain's ability, but especially its desire, to intervene directly in the Romanian matter, opposing the Soviets in one way or another, was conspicuous at best. Obviously, Maniu or Dinu Brătianu, just like Ion and Mihai Antonescu, knew nothing of the way the December 1941 negotiations had unfolded in Moscow between Anthony Eden, the British foreign minister, and Stalin. Yet, it is possible news had reached them of the epic mishap of the Polish government in exile in London, which the Soviets had removed from the equation of post-war Poland, with the explicit consent of the British and the Americans. The reaction from London and Washington to Moscow severing diplomatic ties with the Poles in exile, under the pretext of the restraint Poland had shown in response to the Axis countries' investigation into the Katyn massacre, clearly showed that, when it came to Eastern Europe, there were no differences between the Allies, merely friction. Acting precisely under the impression of this predictable outcome, in December 1943, president Beneș, himself in exile in London at the time, was forced to sign a treaty of alliance and mutual assistance with the Soviet Union, which transformed the not-yet-restored Czechoslovakia into a satellite of the USSR. It is hard to believe that the leaders of the Romanian democratic opposition did not know about the signing of this treaty, or that they did not have a clear idea about what had driven the Czechoslovaks to sign it.
For Europe, August 23, 1944 was an event “of little political consequence”
None of the aforementioned events, including August 23, 1944, did not radically influence the Soviets’ political plans for these countries, which were only then starting to take shape. In fact, in the summer of 1944, although like other Allies, the Soviets were already thinking about the war in political terms, the most important objective remained the defeat and occupation of Germany. Soviet territorial claims over these countries had already been clearly formulated, except for those related to Czechoslovak Transcarpathia. Similarly, the question of political regimes was not so acute as long as Soviet troops were already in these countries. In this regard, Moscow took all the precautions it considered necessary, although none of its decisions greatly impacted the direction of the war.
Ion Antonescu’s removal was undoubtedly an event intended to prove Romania's appetite for independence. Instead, it merely accelerated the Soviet advance towards the Balkans and Central Europe. As Soviet documents show, Moscow was prepared to rule together with King Michael and the other opposition leaders, at least in the medium term, as long as it had assurances from the West that its interests in the area would be heeded. Nor can the return of Northern Transylvania to the motherland be solely attributed to the Groza government and the provision of the Armistice Agreement. It was rather vaguely worded and, besides, Soviet compliance with treaties was often a matter of choice. The Hungarians’ stubbornness not to vote for the communists in the November 1945 elections, and actually the Soviets’ neglect to get involved in their “organization” (which is what they did a year later in Romania) played just as important a role. In addition, Stalin and his close associates, as Khrushchev would write in his memoirs, had acquired a genuine anti-Hungarian sentiment following Hungary siding against the USSR in the war, an action Stalin and his cronies considered totally unjustified and unprovoked.
Victorious but drained, as long as Roosevelt was in power in the USA, the Soviets were vitally interested in preserving the alliance with the Americans, especially when it came to post-war reconstruction, because the legitimacy of their sphere of influence was no longer contested. The clear-cut effects of the famous ‘percentage agreement’ concluded by Churchill and Stalin have been greatly exaggerated. From a British perspective, the agreement might seem an almost hopeless diplomatic victory, given the developments in Greece. The absence of a significant Soviet fleet and the limited resources at Stalin's disposal meant that the Soviet leader was quite scrupulous in complying with the agreement, which brought him into direct conflict with Tito. What is certain is that, when he struck that vile bargain with Churchill, although he tried to leave the impression of being in charge of Europe, the great would-be strategist Stalin managed to get what he already had and give up what he was about to gain without much effort. Soviet diplomacy would repeat the same mistake three decades later in Helsinki, this time around with lethal medium-term effects for the regime.
Coming back to the events of August 23, 1944, interpreted in the European context, the event had little political consequences, failing even to establish some kind of trust between the democratic opposition and the Soviets. Taken aback by the courage of king Michael I, whom he considered a mere puppet in the hands of Antonescu, Stalin tolerated the “Komsomolist King”, the term he would use to refer to the monarch, as long as he considered that his presence did not endanger his plans. His decision to opt for communist cadres of Romanian origin, to the detriment of those recruited from national minorities, was in turn barely impacted by the August 23, 1944 events, being rather a story that concerned the Soviet masses at home. The shape of Romania's borders was dictated by Soviet political interests, and the country's evolution towards the full installation of the communist regime was influenced not so much by internal reactions, but above all by the evolution of relations among the Allies and, to a similar extent, by the Soviets’ limited capacity to effectively manage their own sphere of influence.
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