On a cold December morning in 1947, a 26-year-old king drove down from a mountain castle in response to an urgent summons from the capital. He assumed the call concerned his recent engagement. He was wrong. By the time he reached the palace gates, the country he had reigned over for seven years was no longer his to govern.
Michael I of Romania had first become king at age five, inherited the throne a second time at 19, and in August 1944, at the age of 22, carried out one of the most consequential acts of the Second World War: the arrest of his own pro-German dictator and Romania’s withdrawal from the Axis alliance. The young man who drove south that December morning had spent most of his reign as a figurehead. Marshal Ion Antonescu, who had engineered his father’s removal from the throne in 1940, kept Michael in the palace largely for appearances while leading Romania into war alongside Germany. By the summer of 1944, the situation had changed.
The Soviet army had broken through on the Moldavian front, and German forces were retreating across Romania. Yet Antonescu still insisted that loyalty to Berlin was a matter of national honor. On the afternoon of August 23, 1944, Michael summoned Antonescu to the palace, having spent weeks planning with a small group of opposition politicians, including communists. During a meeting lasting about an hour, Michael asked the marshal to break with Germany and sign an armistice with the Allies and the Soviets.
Antonescu refused, shouting that he would not leave the country in the hands of a child. That was the prearranged signal. Soldiers entered the room and arrested the marshal. He was locked in a walk-in safe at the palace, the same safe Michael’s exiled father had built years earlier to house his stamp collection.
That night, Michael went on national radio and announced that Antonescu had been deposed and that Romania had accepted an armistice with Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union. Romanian forces, which had been fighting alongside the Germans that morning, turned their weapons against them. Hitler’s armaments minister later told American interrogators that the loss of Romanian oil was the moment Hitler first admitted in private that the war was lost. The coup had been prepared across the summer of 1944.
Opposition parties had merged into the National Democratic Block, and their first meeting with the king’s representatives took place in mid-June at a safe house in central Bucharest. The lead communist at that meeting was a man named Emil Bodnăraș, a Moscow-trained spy who presented himself to the king as a Romanian patriot. He would matter again. Over the following nine months, Romanian forces fought alongside the Soviets through Transylvania into Hungary and as far as Czechoslovakia, suffering 169,822 casualties as part of the Allied war effort.
For this act, Michael was honored by both sides of the alliance he had joined. On July 1945, Joseph Stalin personally awarded him the Soviet Order of Victory, the highest military decoration the Soviet Union had to give, made with diamonds and rubies. Harry Truman awarded him the Legion of Merit in its highest degree. Some historians have argued that the August coup shortened the war in Europe by as much as six months.
But even while the medals were being presented, the instruments of Michael’s removal were already being assembled. In February 1945, a Soviet diplomat named Andrei Vyshinsky, the former chief prosecutor of Stalin’s Moscow show trials, arrived in Bucharest with a specific assignment. He demanded that Romania’s government, which the king had kept as a broad coalition of historic parties, be replaced. The Romanian foreign minister, present in the room, later recorded that Vyshinsky’s tone was extremely violent.
The Soviet diplomat gave the king two hours to install a new prime minister. He slammed his fist on the table and walked out, slamming the door with such force that the plaster around the frame cracked. The cracks remained visible in the palace wall for years afterward. On March 6, 1945, Michael appointed Petru Groza, a Transylvanian landowner and founder of a small left-wing peasant party, as prime minister.
His cabinet contained 14 ministers from the communist-led National Democratic Front out of a total of 18. The communists kept the four ministries that actually mattered: the interior, which controlled the police; justice, which controlled the courts; war, which controlled the army; and communications, which controlled the press and radio. In return, the Soviets returned Northern Transylvania to Romanian administration. On the morning of November 8, 1945, about 100,000 Bucharesters, mostly students, walked toward the Royal Palace to wish the king well on his nameday.
Troops loyal to the Groza government opened fire on the crowd. Between 10 and 11 people died. The government declared a day of mourning, not for the dead demonstrators, but for seven counter-demonstrators it described in official statements as fighters for democracy assassinated by fascist killers. The students had come to support a monarch who was already conducting what Romanian history calls the royal strike.
On August 21, 1945, frustrated by Groza’s refusal to resign, Michael had simply refused to perform his constitutional duties. He would not sign decrees or receive ministers. For 139 days, Romania technically had no functioning monarchy. It was the first non-violent royal resistance to a communist takeover in post-war Eastern Europe.
By January 1946, it was a complete failure. At a Moscow conference in mid-December 1945, the Western foreign ministers agreed to a face-saving compromise: Groza would accept two ministers from the historic parties, and in return, Washington and London would recognize the government. The two new ministers were never given portfolios. By the autumn of 1946, when a rigged general election was held on November 19, the result was a foregone conclusion.
The communist-led block claimed close to 70 percent of the vote. Washington protested formally. Nothing changed. On the morning of July 14, 1947, senior figures of Iuliu Maniu’s National Peasants’ Party arrived at an airfield outside Bucharest, told they would be flown to the west to form a government in exile.
The flight had been organized by the secret police. About 30 agents rose from the surrounding fields and opened fire over their heads. Maniu himself was arrested days later. In November 1947, the 74-year-old was sentenced to life with hard labor and sent to Sighet prison, where he died in 1953.
His body was thrown into a common grave whose location was never recorded. Two days before Maniu’s sentencing, Michael had flown to London for the wedding of his cousin, Princess Elizabeth, to Prince Philip. The British government’s confidential advice was that he should not come back. He came back.
On December 23, 1947, his last hope of a loyal army disappeared. Emil Bodnăraș, the same communist who had met with the king in June 1944 as a self-described Romanian patriot, was appointed Minister of Defense. The army would not move for the king. On the morning of December 30, 1947, Michael was at Peleș Castle preparing for a New Year’s party.
Around mid-morning, Groza called from Bucharest, urgently requesting to see him. Michael drove south. When he reached the Elisabeta Palace just after noon, he found it surrounded by troops loyal to the communist government, not the Royal Guard. The palace’s external telephone lines had been cut.
Groza was waiting inside, along with Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, the secretary general of the Romanian Communist Party. On the table was a sheet of paper that had already been typed. According to an account later recorded by Albania’s communist leader, there was also a loaded Browning pistol on the table. In interviews decades later, Michael said Gheorghiu-Dej told him plainly that if he did not sign, a thousand recently arrested students would be executed before the day was out.
Michael asked for time. He was given two hours. He tried to telephone army units he believed were still loyal. The lines were dead.
A little before 2:00, he signed. That evening, the radio broadcast a recording of Michael’s voice telling Romanians he was abdicating in their interests and asking them to support the government. The recording had been made under duress, and the king was made to listen to it being played while he sat in the same dining room where he had signed. That evening, the Romanian People’s Republic was proclaimed and the constitution of 1923 was abolished.
On January 3, 1948, Michael, accompanied by his mother, his fiance, and a small retinue, boarded a train at Sinaia and crossed into Hungary. Later that year he was stripped of his Romanian citizenship. He was 26 years old, with four automobiles, a small amount of foreign currency, and no country. In March 1948, from Switzerland, he denounced his abdication as illegal and signed under duress, but it made no practical difference.
The Kingdom of Romania ceased to exist in international law. Michael began a second career as a chicken farmer in England, then a test pilot, and later a stockbroker in Geneva. He kept the diamond-and-ruby Order of Victory that Stalin had personally given him. He outlived all of it: Groza, who died in 1958; Gheorghiu-Dej in 1965; the Romanian People’s Republic; the Warsaw Pact; and the Soviet Union itself.
In April 1992, after the collapse of Ceaușescu’s regime, the post-communist government allowed Michael back into Romania for Easter. He had not been in his country for 44 years. About a million Romanians filled the streets of Bucharest to see him. His citizenship was not restored until 1997, 50 years after the morning at the Elisabeta Palace.
Michael died on December 5, 2017, at his home in Switzerland, aged 96. At his death, he was the last living head of state from the Second World War and the last surviving recipient of the Soviet Order of Victory. His body was returned to Bucharest by train. About a million Romanians lined the streets for his funeral procession, the same number who had come for him in 1992.
A king who had been removed in one morning by people he had helped to power was being mourned in numbers no Romanian government, communist or post-communist, had ever managed to draw.