Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej in the context of "Michael I of Romania"

The Soviet occupation of Romania refers to the period from 1944 to August 1958, during which the Soviet Union maintained a significant military presence in Romania. The fate of the territories held by Romania after 1918 that were incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1940 is treated separately in the article on Soviet occupation of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina.

During the Eastern Front offensive of 1944, the Soviet Army occupied the northwestern part of Moldavia as a result of armed combat that took place between the months of April and August of that year, while Romania was still an ally of Nazi Germany. The rest of the territory was occupied after Romania changed sides in World War II, as a result of the royal coup launched by King Michael I on August 23, 1944. On that date, the king announced that Romania had unilaterally ceased all military actions against the Allies, accepted the Allied armistice offer, and joined the war against the Axis powers. As no formal armistice offer had been extended yet, the Red Army occupied most of Romania as enemy territory prior to the signing of the Moscow Armistice of September 12, 1944.

The Romanian revolution (Romanian: Revoluția română) was a period of violent civil unrest in Romania during December 1989 as a part of the revolutions of 1989 that occurred in several countries around the world, primarily within the Eastern Bloc. The Romanian revolution started in the city of Timișoara and soon spread throughout the country, ultimately culminating in the drumhead trial and execution of longtime Romanian Communist Party (PCR) General Secretary Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife Elena, and the end of 42 years of Communist rule in Romania. It was also the last removal of a Marxist–Leninist government in a Warsaw Pact country during the events of 1989, and the only one that violently overthrew a country's leadership and executed its leader; according to estimates, over one thousand people died and thousands more were injured.

Following World War II, Romania found itself inside the Soviet sphere of influence, with Communist rule officially declared in 1947. In April 1964, when Romania published a general policy paper worked out under Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej's instructions, the country was well on its way of carefully breaking away from Soviet control. Nicolae Ceaușescu became the country's leader the following year. Under his rule, Romania experienced a brief waning of internal repression that led to a positive image both at home and in the West. However, repression again intensified by the 1970s. Amid tensions in the late 1980s, early protests occurred in the city of Timișoara in mid-December on the part of the Hungarian minority in response to an attempt by the government to evict Hungarian Reformed Church pastor László Tőkés. In response, Romanians sought the deposition of Ceaușescu and a change in government in light of similar recent events in neighbouring nations. The country's ubiquitous secret police force, the Securitate, which was both one of the largest in the Eastern Bloc and for decades had been the main suppressor of popular dissent, frequently and violently quashing political disagreement, ultimately proved incapable of stopping the looming, and then highly fatal and successful revolt.

Nicolae Ceaușescu (26 January [O.S. 13 January] 1918 – 25 December 1989) was a Romanian communist politician who led the Socialist Republic of Romania. He served as General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party from 1965 to 1989 and as the first president of Romania from 1974 to 1989.

Born in Scornicești, Ceaușescu joined the banned Romanian Communist Party in his teens and was repeatedly imprisoned under the pre-war and wartime regimes for his communist activism. After World War II, he rose through the party ranks under Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, the country’s Stalinist leader, whom he succeeded as general secretary.

The De-Stalinization in Romania was a process of removing Stalinist policies and Stalin's cult of personality between 1956 and 1965. Implemented by Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, it included the marginalization of Stalinists such as Ana Pauker and a large-scale amnesty of thousands of political prisoners. A number of political and cultural figures from the 19th century fight for independence were rehabilitated and writers formerly considered "bourgeois decadent" (like Tudor Arghezi) were allowed to publish again. It marked the beginning of a period of liberalization in Communist Romania, which ended in 1971 with the July Theses returning the country to the Totalitarian side which was renamed Ceauşism.

National communism in Romania is a term referring to a form of nationalism promoted in the Socialist Republic of Romania between the early 1960s and 1989; the term itself was not used by the Communist regime. Having its origins in Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej's political emancipation from the Soviet Union, it was greatly developed by Nicolae Ceaușescu, who began in 1971, through his July Theses manifesto, a national cultural revolution. Part of the national mythology was Nicolae Ceaușescu's cult of personality and the idealization of Romanian history, known in Romanian historiography as protochronism.

This nationalistic ideology was built upon a mixture of both Marxist–Leninist principles and doctrines of Romanian nationalism. The driving force behind the ideology of national communism was the belief that Romanians are an isolated "Latin island" in Eastern Europe who have endlessly and unanimously fought off external forces throughout two thousand years to achieve unity and independence.

The Ploughmen's Front (Romanian: Frontul Plugarilor) was a Romanian left-wing agrarian-inspired political organisation of ploughmen, founded at Deva in 1933 and led by Petru Groza. At its peak in 1946, the Front had over 1 million members.

Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu (Romanian pronunciation: [luˈkretsju pətrəʃˈkanu]; 4 November 1900 – 17 April 1954) was a Romanian communist politician and leading member of the Communist Party of Romania (PCR), also noted for his activities as a lawyer, sociologist and economist. For a while, he was a professor at the University of Bucharest. Pătrășcanu rose to a government position before the end of World War II and, after having disagreed with Stalinist tenets on several occasions, eventually came into conflict with the Romanian Communist government of Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej. He became a political prisoner and was ultimately executed. Fourteen years after Pătrășcanu's death, Romania's new communist leader, Nicolae Ceaușescu, endorsed his rehabilitation as part of a change in policy.