This was due to a number of factors: the country's lack of industrial development, which resulted in a relatively small working class (with industry and mining employing fewer than 10% of the active population[20]) and a large peasant population; the minor impact of Marxism among Romanian intellectuals; the success of state repression in driving the party underground and limiting its activities; and finally, the party's "anti-national" policy, as it began to be stated in the 1920s—supervised by the Comintern, this policy called for the breakup of Greater Romania, which was regarded as a colonial entity "illegally occupying" Transylvania, Dobruja, Bessarabia and Bukovina (regions that, the communists argued, had been denied the right of self-determination).

At the same time, the left-wing political spectrum was dominated by Poporanism, an original ideology which partly reflected Narodnik influence, placed its focus on the peasantry (as it notably did with the early advocacy of cooperative farming by Ion Mihalache's Peasants' Party), and usually strongly supported the post-1919 territorial status quo—although they tended to oppose the centralized system it had come to imply.

[26] Shortly after its creation, the PCdR's leadership was alleged by authorities to have been involved in Max Goldstein's bomb attack on the Parliament of Romania; all major party figures, including the general secretary Gheorghe Cristescu, were prosecuted in the Dealul Spirii Trial.

[27] Constantin Argetoianu, the Minister of the Interior in the Alexandru Averescu, Take Ionescu, and Ion I. C. Brătianu cabinets, equated Comintern membership with conspiracy, ordered the first in a series of repressions, and, in the context of trial, allowed for several communist activists (including Leonte Filipescu) to be shot while in custody—alleging that they had attempted to flee.

[30] The PCdR was thus unable to send representatives to the Comintern, and was virtually replaced abroad by a delegation of various activists who had fled to the Soviet Union at various intervals (Romanian groups in Moscow and Kharkiv, the sources of a "Muscovite wing" in the following decades).

[40][41] In 1934, Stalin's Popular Front doctrine was not fully passed into the local party's politics, mainly due to the Soviet territorial policies (culminating in the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact) and the widespread suspicion other left-wing forces maintained toward the Comintern.

[48] In the years following the elections, the PCdR entered a phase of rapid decline, coinciding with the increasingly authoritarian tone of King Carol's regime (but in fact inaugurated by the 1936 Craiova Trial of Ana Pauker and other high-ranking Communists).

[53] Consequently, the executive committee of the Comintern called on Romanian Communists to infiltrate the National Renaissance Front (FRN), the newly created sole legal party of Carol's dictatorship, and attempt to attract members of its structures to the revolutionary cause.

1950, stated that the PCdR protested Northern Transylvania's cession to Hungary later in the same year (the Second Vienna Arbitration), but evidence is inconclusive[61] (party documents attesting the policy are dated after Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union).

[43] At around the same time, a small section of the exterior wing remained active in France, where it eventually joined the Resistance to German occupation—it included Gheorghe Gaston Marin and the Francs-tireurs' Olga Bancic, Nicolae Cristea and Joseph Boczov.

[64] Some communists, such as Petre Gheorghe, Filimon Sârbu, Francisc Panet or Ștefan Plavăț, tried to establish organised resistance groups; however, they were quickly captured by the Romanian authorities and executed, as were some of the more active propagandists, such as Pompiliu Ștefu.

[69] In early 1944, as the Red Army reached and crossed the Prut River during the Second Jassy–Kishinev Offensive, the self-confidence and status gained by the PCdR made possible the creation of the Bloc, which was designed as the basis of a future anti-Axis government.

[95] On 6 March, Groza became leader of a Communist-led government and named Communists to lead the Romanian Armed Forces as well as the ministries of the Interior (Georgescu), Justice (Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu), Communications (Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej), Propaganda (Petre Constantinescu-Iaşi) and Finance (Vasile Luca).

[105] The Communist Party held its first open conference (16–22 October 1945, at the Mihai Viteazul High School in Bucharest) and agreed to replace the Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej–Constantin Pîrvulescu–Iosif Rangheț troika with a joint leadership reflecting an uneasy balance between the external and internal wings: while Gheorghiu-Dej retained his general secretary position, Ana Pauker, Teohari Georgescu, and Vasile Luca became the other main leaders.

A new series of economic changes followed: the National Bank of Romania was passed into full public ownership (December 1946),[123] and, in order to combat the Romanian leu's devaluation, a surprise monetary reform was imposed as a stabilization measure in August 1947 (severely limiting the amount convertible by people without an actual job, primarily members of the aristocracy).

[127] Of newly enforced measures, the arguably most far-reaching was collectivization—by 1962, when the process was considered complete, 96% of the total arable land had been enclosed in collective farming, while around 80,000 peasants faced trial for resisting and 17,000 others were uprooted or deported for being chiaburi (the Romanian equivalent of kulaks).

[134] In 1952, with Stalin's renewed approval,[135] Gheorghiu-Dej emerged victorious from the confrontation with Ana Pauker, his chief "Muscovite"rival, as well as purging Vasile Luca, Teohari Georgescu, and their supporters from the party—alleging that their various political attitudes were proof of"right-wing deviationism".

[144] Uncomfortable and possibly threatened by the reformist measures adopted by Stalin's successor, Nikita Khrushchev, Gheorghiu-Dej began to steer Romania towards a more "independent" path while remaining within the Soviet orbit during the late 1950s.

[156] On the outside too, the PMR, leading a country that had joined the Warsaw Pact, remained an agent of political repression: it fully supported Khurshchev's invasion of Hungary in response to the Revolution of 1956, after which Imre Nagy and other dissident Hungarian leaders were imprisoned on Romanian soil.

[161] This marked a toning down in the violence and scale of repression, after almost twenty years during which the Party had acted against political opposition and active anti-communist resistance, as well as against religious institutions (most notably, the Romanian Roman Catholic and Greek-Catholic Churches).

[177] The change in policies was to become obvious in 1964, when the Communist regime offered a stiff response to the Valev Plan, a Soviet project of creating trans-national economic units and of assigning Romanian areas the task of supplying agricultural products.

[181] During late 1964, the PMR's leadership clashed with new Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev over the issue of KGB advisers still present in the Securitate, and eventually managed to have them recalled, making Romania the Eastern Bloc's first country to have accomplished this.

[187] The circumstances surrounding this process are still disputed, but theories evidence that the support given to him by Ion Gheorghe Maurer and Emil Bodnăraș, as well as the ascendancy of Ilie Verdeț, Virgil Trofin, and Paul Niculescu-Mizil, were instrumental in ensuring legitimacy.

[197] Although military intervention in Romania was reportedly taken into consideration by the Soviets,[198] there is indication that Leonid Brezhnev had himself ruled out Romanian participation in Warsaw Pact maneuvers,[197] and that he continued to rely on Ceaușescu's support for other common goals.

One of them was the plan, announced as early as 1965, to "systemize rural areas", which was meant to urbanize Romania at a fast pace (of over 13,000 communes, the country was supposed to be left with 6,000);[227] it also brought massive changes for the cities—especially Bucharest, where, following the 1977 earthquake and successive demolitions, new architectural guidelines were imposed (see Ceaușima).

[237] In 1983, Radu Filipescu, an engineer working in Bucharest, was imprisoned after distributing 20,000 leaflets which called for a popular rally against the regime,[238] while a protests of miners in Maramureș County against wage cuts was broken up by Securitate forces; three years later a strike organized by Romanian and Hungarian industrial workers in Turda and Cluj-Napoca met with the same result.

[131] In the end, these records contrasted the fact that the PCR had become completely subservient to its leader and no longer had any form of autonomous activity,[196][243] while membership became a basic requirement in numerous social contexts, leading to purely formal allegiances and political clientelism.

"In Gorbachev's mind, Ceaușescu was part of a "Gang of Four" inflexibly hardline leaders unwilling to make the reforms he felt necessary to save Communism, along with Czechoslovakia's Gustáv Husák, Bulgaria's Todor Zhivkov and East Germany's Erich Honecker.

[252] It initially appeared that the PCR would ride out the anti-Communist tide sweeping through Eastern Europe when on 24 November—two weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the same day that Communist rule effectively ended in Czechoslovakia—Ceaușescu was reelected for another five-year term as General Secretary.

A month later, both Ceaușescu and the party were overthrown in the Romanian Revolution of December 1989, begun as a popular rebellion in Timișoara and eventually bringing to power the National Salvation Front, comprising a large number of moderate former PCR members who supported Gorbachev's vision.