History of Romania

            The human remains found in Peștera cu Oase ("The Cave of the Bones"), radiocarbon dated as being from cca. 40,000 years ago, represent the oldest known Homo sapiens in Europe.

            Prior to the Roman conquest of Dacia, the territories between Danube and Dniester rivers were inhabited by various Thracian peoples, including the Dacians and the Getae.Herodotus, in his work "Histories", notes the religious difference between the Getae and other Thracians,however, according to Strabo, the Dacians and the Getae spoke the same language.Dio Cassius draws attention to the cultural similarities between the two people. There is a scholarly dispute whether the Dacians and the Getae were the same people.

         Roman incursions under Emperor Trajan between 101–102 AD and 105–106 AD led to result that about half of the Dacian kingdom became a province of the Roman Empire called "Dacia Traiana". The Roman rule lasted 165 years. During this period the province was fully integrated to the Roman Empire and a sizeable part of the population was newcomers from other provinces.The Roman colonists introduced the Latin language. According to followers of the continuity theory, the intense Romanization gave birth to the Proto-Romanian language.The province was rich of ore deposits (especially gold and silver in places like Alburnus Maior). As a result of invasions by Germanic tribes, Roman troops were pulled out of Dacia around 271 AD, making it the first province to be abandoned.

        The territory was later invaded and dominated by various peoples, including Goths,Huns,Gepids,Avars,Bulgars,Slavs, Magyars, Pechenegs,and Cumans, who have been labelled as "migratory peoples" in Romanian historiography. Many of these populations also settled, cohabitated and mixed with the locals.Several competing theories have been proposed to explain the relations (or non-relations) between ancient Dacians and present-day Romanians.

         In the Middle Ages, Romanians lived in three Romanian principalities: Wallachia (Romanian: Țara Românească – "The Romanian Land"), Moldavia (Romanian: Moldova) and in Transylvania.The existence of independent Romanian voivodeships in Transylvania as early as the 9th century is mentioned in Gesta Hungarorum,but by the 11th century, Transylvania had become a largely autonomous part of the Kingdom of Hungary.In the other parts, many small local states with varying degrees of independence developed, but only under Basarab I and Bogdan I the larger principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia would emerge in the 14th century to fight the threat of the Ottoman Empire.

            By 1541, as with the entire Balkan peninsula and most of Hungary, Moldavia, Wallachia, and Transylvania were under Ottoman suzerainty, preserving partial or full internal autonomy until the mid-19th century (Transylvania until 1711). This period featured several prominent rulers such as: Stephen the Great, Vasile Lupu, and Dimitrie Cantemir in Moldavia; Matei Basarab, Vlad the Impaler, and Constantin Brâncoveanu in Wallachia; and John Hunyadi and Gabriel Bethlen in Transylvania.In 1600, the three principalities were ruled simultaneously by the Wallachian prince Michael the Brave (Mihai Viteazul), which was considered in later periods as the precursor of a modern Romania and became a point of reference for nationalists, as well as a catalyst for achieving a single Romanian state.

              During the period of the Austro-Hungarian rule in Transylvania and of Ottoman suzerainty over Wallachia and Moldavia, most Romanians were given few rights in a territory where they formed the majority of the population.Nationalistic themes became principal during the Wallachian uprising of 1821, and the 1848 revolutions in Wallachia and Moldavia. The flag adopted for Wallachia by the revolutionaries was a blue-yellow-red horizontal tricolour (with blue above, in line with the meaning "Liberty, Justice, Fraternity"),while Romanian students in Paris hailed the new government with the same flag "as a symbol of union between Moldavians and Wallachians".The same flag, with the tricolour being mounted vertically, would later be officially adopted as the national flag of Romania.

        After the failed 1848 revolutions not all the Great Powers supported the Romanians' expressed desire to officially unite in a single state.But in the aftermath of the Crimean War, the electors in both Moldavia and Wallachia voted in 1859 for the same leader, Alexandru Ioan Cuza, as Domnitor (prince in Romanian), and the two principalities became a personal union formally under the suzerainty of the Ottoman Empire.Following coup d'état in 1866, Cuza was exiled and replaced with Prince Carol I of Romania of the House of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen. During the 1877–1878 Russo-Turkish War Romania fought on the Russian side,and in the aftermath, it was recognized as an independent state both by the Ottoman Empire and the Great Powers by the Treaty of San Stefano and the Treaty of Berlin.The new Kingdom of Romania underwent a period of stability and progress until 1914, and also acquired Southern Dobruja from Bulgaria after the Second Balkan War.

        Romania remained neutral for the first two years of World War I. Following the secret Treaty of Bucharest, according to which Romania would acquire territories with a majority of Romanian population from Austria-Hungary, it joined the Entente Powers and declared war on 27 August 1916.The Romanian military campaign began disastrously for Romania as the Central Powers occupied two-thirds of the country within months, before reaching a stalemate in 1917. Total military and civilian losses from 1916 to 1918, within contemporary borders, were estimated at 748,000.After the war, the transfer of Bukovina from Austria was acknowledged by the 1919 Treaty of Saint Germain,of Banat and Transylvania from Hungary by the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, and of Bessarabia from Russian rule by the 1920 Treaty of Paris.

        The following interwar period is referred as Greater Romania, as the country achieved its greatest territorial extent at that time (almost 300,000 km2 or 120,000 sq mi).The application of radical agricultural reforms and the passing of a new constitution created a democratic framework and allowed for quick economic growth. With oil production of 7.2 million tons in 1937, Romania ranked second in Europe and seventh in the world.and was Europe's second-largest food producer. However, the early 1930s were marked by social unrest, high unemployment, and strikes, as there were over 25 separate governments throughout the decade.[citation needed] On several occasions in the last few years before World War II, the democratic parties were squeezed between conflicts with the chauvinistic Iron Guard and the authoritarian tendencies of king Carol II.[citation needed]

           During World War II, Romania tried again to remain neutral, but on 28 June 1940, it received a Soviet ultimatum with an implied threat of invasion in the event of non-compliance.Again foreign powers created heavy pressure on Romania, by means of the Soviet-Nazi Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact of non-aggression from 23 August 1939. As a result of it the Romanian government and the army were forced to retreat from Bessarabia as well as from northern Bukovina in order to avoid war with the Soviet Union.The king was compelled to abdicate and appointed general Ion Antonescu as the new Prime-Minister with full powers in ruling the state by royal decree. Romania was prompted to join the Axis military campaign. Thereafter, southern Dobruja was ceded to Bulgaria, while Hungary received Northern Transylvania as result of an Axis powers' arbitration. Romanian contribution to Operation Barbarossa was enormous, with the Romanian Army of over 1.2 million men in the summer of 1944, fighting in numbers second only to Nazi Germany.Romania was the main source of oil for the Third Reich, and thus became the target of intense bombing by the Allies. Growing discontent among the population eventually peaked in August 1944 with King Michael's Coup, and the country switched sides to join the Allies. It is estimated that the coup shortened the war by as much as six months. Even though the Romanian Army had suffered 170,000 casualties after switching sides, Romania's role in the defeat of Nazi Germany was not recognized by the Paris Peace Conference of 1947, as the Soviet Union annexed Bessarabia and other territories corresponding roughly to present-day Republic of Moldova.

           The Antonescu regime played a major role in the The Holocaust in Romania, and copied the Nazi policies of oppression and genocide of Jews and Gypsies, mainly in the Eastern territories reoccupied by the Romanians from the Soviet Union in Transnistria and in Moldavia. Jewish Holocaust victims in Romania totaled more than 280,000, plus another 11,000 Gypsies ("Roma")

            During the Soviet occupation of Romania, the Communist-dominated government called for new elections in 1946, which were fraudulently won, with a fabricated 70% majority of the vote.Thus they rapidly established themselves as the dominant political force, and in 1947, forced King Michael I to abdicate and leave the country, and proclaimed Romania a people's republic.Romania remained under the direct military occupation and economic control of the USSR until the late 1950s. During this period, Romania's vast natural resources were continuously drained by mixed Soviet-Romanian companies (SovRoms) set up for unilateral exploitative purposes.

           In 1948, the state began to nationalize private firms and to collectivize agriculture. Until the early 1960s, the Communist government established a terror regime carried out mainly through the Securitate (the Romanian secret police). During this period they launched several campaigns of purges in which numerous "enemies of the state" and "parasite elements" of the society were imprisoned for political or economic reasons, tortured and eventually killed.Punishments included deportation, internal exile and internment in forced labour camps and prisons, sometimes for life; dissent was vigorously suppressed by the regime. Nevertheless, anti-communist resistance was one of the most long-lasting in the Eastern Bloc.Tens of thousands of people were killed as part of repression in Communist Romania.A 2006 Commission estimated the number of direct victims of the communist repression at two million people. This excludes civilians who died in liberty as a result of their "treatment" and malnutrition in communist prisons and those who died because of the dire economic circumstances in the country, and whose numbers remain unknown but could reach a few millions.

           In 1965, Nicolae Ceaușescu came to power and started to conduct the foreign policy more independently from the Soviet Union. Thus, communist Romania was the only Warsaw Pact country who refused to participate at the Soviet-led 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia (Ceaușescu even publicly condemned the action as "a big mistake, [and] a serious danger to peace in Europe and to the fate of communism in the world"); it was also the only communist state to maintain diplomatic relations with Israel after the 1967 Six-Day War; and established diplomatic relations with West Germany the same year. At the same time, close ties with the Arab countries (and the PLO) allowed Romania to play a key role in the Israel–Egypt and Israel–PLO peace talks. As Romania's foreign debt sharply increased between 1977 and 1981 (from US$3 billion to $10 billion), the influence of international financial organizations (such as the IMF and the World Bank) grew, gradually conflicting with Ceaușescu's autocratic rule. The latter eventually initiated a policy of total reimbursement of the foreign debt by imposing austerity steps that impoverished the population and exhausted the economy. At the same time, Ceaușescu greatly extended the authority of the Securitate secret police and imposed a severe cult of personality, which led to a dramatic decrease in the dictator's popularity and culminated in his overthrow and eventual execution, together with his wife, in the violent Romanian Revolution of December 1989.