This research examines the changing political and economic conditions within Romania. The period of interest is subsequent to the general socialist collapse in Eastern Europe that began in 1989.
It was the ascendancy of Mikhail Gorbachev to the Soviet leadership in 1985, however, that ushered in the most dramatic political and economic changes in Eastern Europe since the Russian Revolution in 1917. Gorbachev assumed office with an agenda calling for a liberalization of the Soviet political structure, a reform of the Soviet economic structure, and a policy of self-determination for the Soviet satellite nation states of which Romania was one (Govbachev, 1987, pp. 24, 76, 113). Fortunately or unfortunately, depending upon one's perspective, Gorbachev initiated his reformist policies before establishing new
structures to manage and control the pace and direction of the reforms. As a consequence, the reforms soon went out of control on all fronts--political, economic, and the satellite nation states. In turn, Marxist political and economic control collapsed all across Eastern Europe beginning in 1989, and the Soviet satellite empire in Eastern Europe disintegrated along with the Marxist collapse leaving countries such as Romania with greater political discretion than they had enjoyed for four decades.
The political changes that began to occur in the Eastern Europe socialist bloc in the summer of 1989 were more than any-thing else a rejection of one-party rule. In the Eastern European socialist bloc countries such as Romania, Communist Party parliamentary majorities had been constitutionally institu-tionalized (Hunter (Ed.), 1993, pp. 1119-1121). With an institutionalized parliamentary majority, the Romanian Communist parties manipulated the power of government to repress political dissent, and to impose a rigid centrally-planned economic regime. The more-or-less peaceful political revolutions that occurred in the Eastern European ...