The Red Army in Bucharest

On 31 August 1944 the first units of the Soviet 2nd Ukrainian Front under General of the Army Rodion Malinovsky entered Bucharest. Crowds greeted them with banners and flowers, and that same evening Moscow marked the capture of the Romanian capital with artillery salutes. Soviet communiqués spoke of the “liberation” of Bucharest, but there were no Germans left in the city. The Romanians had driven them out themselves in the week following the coup of 23 August, when King Michael I had Marshal Ion Antonescu arrested and the new government declared war on Germany.

The report that the Soviet army had entered Bucharest is therefore accurate as to date and fact, but it needs qualifying: the Red Army marched into the capital of a country that for a week had no longer been fighting it, although it had still not formally concluded an armistice with it. That ambiguity – ally or defeated enemy – shaped Romania’s fate for years to come.

The Romanians clear their capital

At the time of the coup, the German forces in and around Bucharest consisted mainly of rear-echelon, anti-aircraft and service units, with headquarters staffs and the military mission in the city itself. The front in Moldavia, where the Jassy–Kishinev offensive had begun three days earlier, lay several hundred kilometres away. During the night of 23–24 August the Romanian city command managed to blockade and disarm some of the German posts in the centre. On the morning of 24 August a column under General Alfred Gerstenberg, commander of the air defences of the oil region, approached the capital from the north, and the Luftwaffe began bombing the city; among the buildings hit was the Royal Palace. The Romanians – largely recruits, training units and gendarmerie – halted the attack on the outskirts, around Băneasa airfield and the forest north of the city. According to some accounts, American bombers attacked the German positions in that forest on 26 August at the Romanians’ request. By 28 August the Germans around Bucharest had been destroyed or had surrendered, and Gerstenberg and other senior officers had been taken prisoner.

The picture was the same across the country. The Romanians seized the Carpathian passes and Brașov, the port of Constanța and the Danube crossings. The longest fighting was for Ploiești, the centre of the oil industry, which had for months been a target of Allied air raids. Its German garrison of some 25,000 men, mostly anti-aircraft gunners, held out for several days against the Romanian 5th Territorial Corps. On 30 August Soviet troops entered Ploiești, and the remnants of the Germans, trapped in a pocket near the nearby village of Păulești, surrendered the following day; only about 2,000 broke through the Carpathians into Hungary. According to figures cited by Romanian historians, in the fighting between 23 and 31 August the Romanian army took some 56,000 Germans prisoner and killed around 5,000, at a cost of 8,600 killed and wounded. The prisoners were later handed over to the Red Army.

The entry of 31 August

After the destruction of the German armies in Moldavia, the mobile groups of the 2nd Ukrainian Front, led by the 6th Tank Army, drove south through the Focșani Gate, which they passed on 27 August, towards Ploiești and Bucharest, while the 3rd Ukrainian Front advanced along the Danube towards the coast. Soviet troops entered the capital on 31 August without meeting resistance. With them, or just ahead of them, came a motorised detachment of the 1st Tudor Vladimirescu Volunteer Infantry Division – a unit formed in the USSR in 1943 from Romanian prisoners of war, under Soviet command and under the wing of Romanian communists from Moscow. Sources differ on the date of its entry (29 or 31 August), but its presence mattered above all politically: for years communist propaganda presented it as a co-liberator of the capital.

On the same day the first American Flying Fortresses of Operation Reunion took off from Popești-Leordeni airfield near Bucharest. After changing sides, the Romanians had released the Allied airmen shot down during the raids on Ploiești and Bucharest, and over a few days, from 31 August to 3 September, the Fifteenth Air Force flew more than 1,100 former prisoners, most of them Americans, to Italy. It was one of the few direct actions by the Western Allies in Romania.

Treated as a defeated country

The Romanians who welcomed the Soviet soldiers soon discovered that Moscow did not regard them as allies. Until the armistice was signed, the Red Army disarmed the Romanian units it encountered and took their men prisoner – between 100,000 and 140,000, according to various estimates, most of them after 23 August; many were deported to camps in the USSR. Vehicles, food and equipment were requisitioned, and there was looting and violence against civilians. Oil-industry plant was shipped out of Ploiești. Antonescu, held by the Romanian communists since the day of the coup, was handed over to the Russians at the turn of August and September and taken to Moscow.

The Romanian delegation headed by the communist Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu, which flew to Moscow at the end of August, had in practice no room for negotiation. The armistice, signed on the night of 12–13 September 1944 by Marshal Malinovsky on behalf of the three Great Powers, confirmed the Soviet acquisitions of 1940, imposed reparations of 300 million dollars, obliged Romania to field at least twelve divisions against Germany and Hungary, and placed the country under the supervision of an Allied Control Commission acting under the direction of the Soviet High Command. The Vienna Award was declared void, and northern Transylvania was promised to Romania.

Significance

The Red Army’s entry into Bucharest concluded the Jassy–Kishinev operation, in which the Germans lost Army Group South Ukraine and one of their last sources of oil, and it opened the way for the Soviet Union into the Balkans and the Hungarian Plain. Within a few days the Red Army stood on the Danube at the Bulgarian border, while the Romanian army, now fighting at its side, went into action against German and Hungarian forces in Transylvania.

For Romania itself, 31 August marked the beginning of a Soviet military presence that would last until 1958. The Allied Control Commission and the Soviet command became the real power over the government. The Communist Party, which in August 1944 had, by various estimates, only about a thousand members, gained influence within a few months in the police, the army and the trade unions, helped by the Soviet military administration and by activists returning from Moscow such as Ana Pauker. The Sănătescu government fell in December 1944, and in March 1945, under direct pressure from the Soviet deputy foreign minister Andrey Vyshinsky, the king was forced to appoint a communist-dominated government under Petru Groza. The elections of November 1946 were rigged; in 1947 the opposition Peasants’ Party was dissolved and its leaders imprisoned; and on 30 December 1947 Michael I was forced to abdicate and the Romanian People’s Republic was proclaimed.

Communist Romania celebrated 23 August as its national day and presented the entry of Soviet troops into Bucharest as an act of liberation to which the Romanians owed their freedom. Since 1989 Romanian historians have tended instead to stress that the Romanians freed their capital from the Germans themselves, and that for many of them 31 August 1944 was not a day of liberation but the beginning of a new dependence that would last more than forty years.