NICOLAE CEAUSESCU AND THE ARMY. DISSIDENCE AND MILITARY OPPOSITION. 1965 – 1989 (II)

During the communist regime in Romania (1945 - 1989), the Romanian Army was at the centre of the attention of the governmental political factor in order to transform it into an armed and secure arm of the Romanian Communist Party (PCR) for the defence of the political, economic and social regime, as well as the independence and sovereignty of the socialist state against foreign intervention, especially by the member states of the Warsaw Treaty. The military institution was “democratised' after 6 March 1945 and, later on, pushed down the slope of a nationalism with clear anti-Sovietism and anti-Russian accents. This study aims at analysing this process of deSovietisation and re-nationalisation of the Romanian Army after 1965, the relations between Nicolae Ceausescu and the Army's leaders, as well as the ability of the Army to position itself in relation to the political and economic failures of Ceausescu regime, through different formulas of opposition and dissidence. Did some of the generals of the Romanian Army plan a military coup against Nicolae Ceausescu, with the support of the USSR, or was it just an unjustified fear of Ceausescu regime? The answer to this question, as new documents and testimonies have entered the historiographical circuit after December 1989, confirms that the representatives of Ceausescu regime amplified their fear of the power of the Army and tried to control and rein it in. According to some military decision-makers at the time, the leadership of the Socialist Romanian Army did not dare to think of a military coup against Nicolae Ceaușescu.