Context In 1915, at a time when Romania kept its neutrality, the PSDR, led by the revolutionary-minded
Marxist Christian Rakovsky, played a prominent part inside the anti-war
Zimmerwald Movement. Throughout the following year, it organized rallies in support of non-intervention into what it deemed "an
imperialist conflict". When Romania joined the
Entente Powers in August 1916, the group came under suspicion of supporting the
Central Powers, and was outlawed soon after. While its secretary
Dumitru Marinescu was drafted and killed in action during the
Romanian Campaign, several of its prominent activists, including Rakovsky, were arrested. The PSDR's history was decisively marked by the
Russian Revolution of 1917. Following the
February Revolution, Rakovsky was set free by Russian troops present in
Iaşi, and took refuge in
Odessa — he became active in revolutionary politics against the Romanian state, and joined the Bolsheviks.
Creation The PSDR itself radicalized its message, adding to its previous calls for
universal suffrage a
republican program and support for
land reform. Its program also called for an end to all forms of
exploitation, but argued that this was to be fulfilled inside the existing legislative framework.
King Ferdinand I's promise to legislate the land reform, together with
electoral reform, was embraced by PSDR's moderate wing. , published in
Socialismul, December 1919) On , just days after the party was founded,
typesetters at various presses in Bucharest, who had been protesting since November, rallied in front of the Sfântul Ionică building and marched on the Ministry of Industry headquarters on
Calea Victoriei, asking for the
eight-hour day, salary increases, the guarantee of
civil liberties, and more say for the
trade unions. The group quickly swelled in numbers, to about as many as 15,000 workers in a contemporary account. On orders of the
Constantin Coandă cabinet, who feared Bolshevik agitation, troops were ultimately ordered to fire on the crowd and assail it with
bayonets in as many as three successive waves. They also stormed into the Sfântul Ionică building and arrested several Socialist leaders, including the
general secretary Moscovici and
I. C. Frimu (Frimu later died in custody). A single statute was adopted in October 1920. Talks yielded no results, especially after Averescu attempted to impose his party's platform on the Socialists. During negotiations, Argetoianu observed that unease was growing between Moscovici's group and the party's
far left, rallied around Cristescu. the PS sent 7 representatives to the
Chamber of Deputies; it was awarded 19 seats in the latter and 3 in the
Senate following the
1920 elections. The three senatorial candidates of that year — Cristescu,
Alexandru Dobrogeanu-Gherea and
Boris Stefanov — were not validated into
Parliament, despite having carried the popular vote. The PS' involvement in the 1920 strike caused authorities to organize a swift crackdown (50 party members were still held in prisons by early 1921). In early 1921, the PS had 27 branches nationwide, and rallying support from most workers affiliated with trade unions (more than 200,000 people). Estimates place the industrial
working class of the 1920s and 1930s at between 400,000 and 820,000 people. Notable PS activists at the time were
David Fabian,
Elena Filipescu, and
Panait Muşoiu. Among the PS' sympathizers were the artist and former
prisoner of war Nicolae Tonitza, who regularly contributed graphics to
Socialismul, and the writer
Gala Galaction. These were Cristescu, Dobrogeanu-Gherea,
David Fabian, and Constantin Popovici; the two delegates representing the
Socialist Party of Transylvania and Banat were
Eugen Rozvan and Flueraş — as a former member of the
National Romanian Council in Transylvania, Flueraş was deemed a "
class enemy" by the Comintern. Specifically, Bukharin called on the PS to accept the policy changes theorized by
Vladimir Lenin (the so-called
21 points), to exclude Flueraş and others, to submit itself to supervision from the Comintern's
Balkan Communist Federation, to vote in a new
Central Committee, and to guarantee that
Socialismul would be turned into a communist newspaper. According to journalist Victor Frunză, an additional and hotly contested demand involved submitting trade unions to party control. Dobrogeanu-Gherea, Popovici, and Cristescu met with Lenin, who urged them to adopt the resolution in this form, while allegedly making some promises to preserve a certain degree of autonomy for the Romanian group. Returned to Bucharest, Flueraş called on the party to return to a reformist stance and support for
Greater Romania; together with the similarly-minded
Iosif Jumanca, he severed all links with the PS in after its Conference of January–February 1921 (they were later followed by
George Grigorovici).
May Congress At the same time, the maximalist wing, led by Cristescu (who renounced his reserves after first engaging in a heated polemic with Rozvan), passed the resolution to join the Comintern and accept Lenin's 21 points. The Cominternist motion was drafted with support from 18 out of 38 members of the General Council, and submitted to the Congress which took place after May 8, with the maximalist faction adopting the name of
Socialist-Communist Party (PCdR). According to sources, during the vote on May 11, advocates of the Comintern had received 428 mandates from a total of 540, and, given the departure of the reformists, represented 51 out of 77 delegates. Such supposition was however not shared by contemporaneous opponents of the affiliation: according to the deposition of reformist leader
Iacob Pistiner during the
Dealul Spirii Trial, had the PSR leaders failed to affiliate to the Third International, the mass of the party membership would have overridden them. A third PS wing, comprising the
centrists who supported conditional affiliation and provided 111 mandates, was marginalized inside the Communist group over the following period. The procedures were cause for much deliberation: according to his own testimony, the reformist
Şerban Voinea, who translated Lenin's 21 points, was accused of having fabricated them as a means to give the Bolsheviks bad press (a fellow delegate shouted that "It was absolutely impossible for the Third International to have voted such a text, with such conditions"), while
Boris Stefanov allegedly
heckled him, suggesting Voinea leave the PS and join the
National Liberal Party ("[he] kept shouting at me [...]: «To the Liberals! To the Liberals!»"). An additional 200 known Socialist-Communist militants were also incarcerated. The intervention occurred at a time when the floor was taken by Köblös, the PS delegate from
Târgu Mureș, who was much later accused of
conspiring with the authorities, based on speculation that his speech was in fact a signal. Authorities prosecuted those arrested (as many as 300 in one account) in the
Dealul Spirii Trial, and attempted to connect them with
Max Goldstein, a
terrorist of uncertain affiliation who had detonated a bomb inside the Romanian Senate on December 8, 1920. Charges were based on the group's rejection of Greater Romania and their advocacy of "
World revolution", which had raised suspicion that they were trying to overthrow the existing order through actions such as Goldstein's. In technical terms, this was formulated by the prosecutors as: Congress overstepped [its] order of the day and submitted to debate affiliation to the Third International, deciding to vote on it. The instigator for the move was
Constantin Argetoianu,
Minister of the Interior in the
Alexandru Averescu People's Party cabinet, who later admitted that the arrest lacked legal grounds. The move provoked mixed reactions inside the executive: according to Argetoianu,
Premier Averescu was hesitant, while the Minister of Justice,
Grigore Trancu-Iași, advised against it (reason why Argetoianu decided to order the arrest without prior knowledge from his fellow People's Party members, as a
fait accompli). As the trial was under way, Argetoianu allowed for several Socialist-Communist defendants (including
Leonte Filipescu) to be shot while in custody — alleging that they had attempted to flee. Several of the detainees declared they had been beaten, and some were occasionally moved to
solitary confinement. At the 3rd Comintern Congress in July,
Karl Radek reported that the
Russian Bolshevik government and the international group at large continued to recognize the Socialist-Communist leaders in prison as the official executive body of the Romanian party. Several refugees, mostly natives of
Bessarabia, were elected as the party's representatives in
Moscow: they included
Saul Ozias and
Gelber Moscovici. his view was disputed by
Vladimir Tismăneanu, who concluded instead that subordination to the Comintern was equally demanded from all pro-Bolshevik PS members. At their 1922 Congress in
Ploieşti, the Socialist-Communists officially established the
Communist Party of Romania (PCdR), of which Cristescu was the first
general secretary. It was outlawed by the
Ion I. C. Brătianu cabinet in April 1924, through the
Mârzescu Law (named after its proponent, Minister of Justice
Gheorghe Gh. Mârzescu). In 1925, Cristescu himself left the Communist group after clashing with the
Balkan Communist Federation over the issue of
Greater Romania and being progressively marginalized. The PCdR survived as a marginal grouping in the underground, with much of its leadership taking refuge in the
Soviet Union; upon the close of
World War II, it was resurrected with the help of
Soviet occupation, to become the ruling party of
Communist Romania. Reestablished in January 1922 and led by
Ilie Moscovici,
Litman Ghelerter and
Constantin Popovici, the PS continued to have nominal existence after it merged into the newly created
Federation of Romanian Socialist Parties or FPSR (May 1922). Using PS symbolism and reuniting the country's reformist groups, this established its own faction in the
Chamber of Deputies, and was represented to the
2½ International. On May 7, 1927, the various groups in the Federation merged to reestablish the
Romanian Social Democratic Party (PSD), led by
Constantin Titel Petrescu. The Socialist Party, unlike other groups, refused to join the
Second International, and affiliated instead with the
Paris Bureau (it was joined in this by a group on the PSD's left wing). (such a view was virulently rejected by the FPSR, who credited the PCdR with no more than 500 members, while the Comintern itself eventually reduced the official claim to 2,000 members); ==Electoral history==