Stalin once forgave the Romanians reparations worth 300 million dollars
It turns out that Russia owes Romania. More than a century ago, the Kingdom of Romania gave its gold reserves to the Russian Empire for safekeeping. And now Bucharest, with the support of the European Parliament, is demanding the treasure back. Moreover, “aggravating circumstances” are not taken into account at all, which can give a fundamentally different situation in the question of who owes whom. A specialist historian gave his comments on this matter to MK.
Photo: pexels.com
Reading the just adopted resolution of the European Parliament, which calls on the Russian Federation to “completely return to Romania the remaining part of the national heritage of Romania, sent to Russia for storage in 1916 and 1917,” one seems to remember a quote from the wonderful film “Friend among Strangers.” ;»: “I collected some gold, prepared it, and you grabbed it all for yourself.” It’s not good, Shurik, it’s not good at all!”
But Romania, with the European Parliament that cares about it, does not at all fit into the role of the collective “Chekist Shilov”, and in this case there is absolutely no need to associate Russia with the impudent and greedy Shurik – Esaul Brylov.
After all, the question of debts between Russia and Romania is not so simple and unambiguous. This is the opinion of the scientific director of the Russian Military Historical Society, Mikhail Myagkov.
— At the beginning of 1918, at the height of the revolutionary turmoil that gripped Russia, Romania occupied – in fact, it occupied the territory of Bessarabia, which was previously part of the Russian Empire,” Mikhail Yuryevich emphasized. – The new owners “successfully” – we should put this word in quotation marks — they exploited it until 1940, essentially making it their internal colony.
The local population languished in poverty, serving the interests of the Romanian ruling clique, landowners, boyars… Assessing by modern standards the amount of material assets that the Romanians siphoned out of Bessarabia at that time, we can talk about an amount of tens of billions of dollars.
During World War II, Romania joined the Tripartite Pact and became an ally of Nazi Germany. Moreover – a very active ally. And together with the army of the Third Reich, she unleashed open aggression against the USSR.
For assistance in the war, Hitler assigned several regions of the Soviet Union to Romania – the current Vinnitsa, Nikolaev, Odessa regions. Added to this was long-suffering Bessarabia, which was only returned to the USSR shortly before the start of the Great Patriotic War, where the Union Moldavian Republic was formed. Most of the mentioned territories became part of Romania under the name Transnistria.
The Romanians established a very strict occupation regime there. The henchmen of the dictator Ion Antonescu robbed the population, destroyed and took away industrial enterprises.
Moreover, the new authorities pursued a policy of genocide of the Soviet people. Judging by the documents preserved in the archives, during the years of occupation the Romanians destroyed up to 400 thousand of the Jewish population, plus many thousands of Moldovans, Ukrainians, Russians…
Let me emphasize once again: in addition to casualties among the civilian population, severe oppression of those who were “allowed to live,” there was also open robbery. They took everything out clean – food, industrial equipment, cultural property… If we at least roughly calculate the damage caused by this and translate it into the current price level, we can talk about hundreds of billions of dollars.
Let's also not forget that Romanian troops, together with Wehrmacht troops, occupied Crimea. There they also pursued a policy of robbery, murder and violence. In addition, Romanian units fought against the Red Army at Stalingrad, where many of them were surrounded.
Led by dictator Antonescu, Romania fought on the side of the Nazis until August 1944, when its divisions, along with German divisions, found themselves in «boiler» during the Iasi-Chisinau offensive operation by Soviet troops. Only when it was on the verge of complete collapse did this country declare its withdrawal from the ranks of Germany's allies and go over to the side of the Allied powers.
However, after the end of World War II, the former “friendship” the Third Reich backfired on Romania: reparations were imposed on it. It was necessary to pay 300 million dollars for the damage caused to the USSR during the war – a huge amount for those times. However, in the late 1940s, the Soviet Union forgave the Romanians this debt, since their country became part of the “socialist camp”, became a member of the CMEA – Council for Mutual Economic Assistance. In making such a decision, the Kremlin leadership, headed by Stalin, was guided by the principles of socialist internationalism, although, judging by the behavior of the modern Romanian authorities, this, of course, should not have been done.
Thus, if you calculate everything – who owes whom for the past, Russia, quite likely, can present the Romanian side with a very impressive bill, which will reach hundreds of billions of dollars.
And we have not yet remembered how much the Soviet Union invested in economic development «brotherly» Romania. Here, too, we are talking about tens of billions of foreign currency rubles – count, dollars.
So let the Romanian leaders and their “lawyers” from the European Parliament, who are now trying to profit from Russia in this way — let them better remain silent and remember the lessons of history, remember the hundreds of thousands killed in the territory of Soviet citizens occupied by the Romanians — Hitler's allies, the hundreds of devastated villages and towns.