The Grivița strike of 1933 was a railway strike which was started at the Grivița Workshops, Bucharest, the Kingdom of Romania in February 1933 by workers of Căile Ferate Române (Romanian Railways). The strike was brought about by the increasingly poor working conditions of railway employees in the context of the worldwide Great Depression, which affected Romania significantly. As the workers occupied the workshops, the Romanian Army surrounded and sieged them. The fighting resulted in the death of 7 workers, including Vasile Roaită, a 19-year-old worker whose image was used by the early communist regime.
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👉 Grivița strike of 1933 in the context of Great Depression in Romania
The Great Depression (Romanian: Marea Criză Economică or, rarely, Marea Depresie) of 1929–1933, which affected the whole world, had several consequences in the Kingdom of Romania. Romania had been among the winner countries of World War I. It received several new territories (Bessarabia, Bukovina and Transylvania), with many natural resources. However, the war caused heavy human and economic losses to the country. Romania had to fight inflation and the non-convertibility of its currency, the Romanian leu (lei in plural). Romania then had a fundamentally agrarian economy, with agriculture accounting for 63.2% of the national production. The Great Depression affected Romania in several ways. For example, in 1933, the net national income was of 172,614,000,000 lei, only 62% of that of 1929, which was of 275,180,000,000 lei. To fight the economic crisis, the National Bank of Romania carried out various measures and the country took various loans. Help was also called upon from France.
The Great Depression led to a drop of 50% in industrial production and an increase of 300,000 persons in unemployment in Romania. By the early 1930s, the price of a quintal of wheat had fallen below the cost of harvesting it; agricultural goods, unprotected by any customs measures, were left to the discretion of international competition, which contributed to the decrease of their prices by 60–70% compared to those of 1928 and 1929. Landowners went bankrupt and the peasants had little left to eat or pay taxes to the state. By 1932, some 2.5 million farmers had unpaid debts to banks, worth 52 billion lei.
In this Dossier
- ⭐ Core Definition: Grivița strike of 1933
- 👉 Grivița strike of 1933 in the context of Great Depression in Romania
- Grivița strike of 1933 in the context of National Peasants' Party
Grivița strike of 1933 in the context of National Peasants' Party
The National Peasants' Party (also known as the National Peasant Party or National Farmers' Party; Romanian: Partidul Național Țărănesc, or Partidul Național-Țărănist, PNȚ) was an agrarian political party in the Kingdom of Romania. It was formed in 1926 through the fusion of the Romanian National Party (PNR), a conservative-regionalist group centred on Transylvania, and the Peasants' Party (PȚ), which had coalesced the left-leaning agrarian movement in the Old Kingdom and Bessarabia. The definitive PNR–PȚ merger came after a decade-long rapprochement, producing a credible contender to the dominant National Liberal Party (PNL). National Peasantists agreed on the concept of a "peasant state", which defended smallholding against state capitalism or state socialism, proposing voluntary cooperative farming as the basis for economic policy. Peasants were seen as the first defence of Romanian nationalism and of the country's monarchic regime, sometimes within a system of social corporatism. Regionally, the party expressed sympathy for Balkan federalism and rallied with the International Agrarian Bureau; internally, it championed administrative decentralization and respect for minority rights, as well as, briefly, republicanism. It remained factionalized on mainly ideological grounds, leading to a series of defections.
With its attacks on the PNL establishment, the PNȚ came to endorse an authoritarian monarchy, mounting no resistance to a conspiracy which brought Carol II on the Romanian throne in 1930. Over the following five years, Carol manoeuvred against the PNȚ, which opposed his attempts to subvert liberal democracy. PNȚ governments were in power for most of the time between 1928 and 1933, with the leader Iuliu Maniu as its longest-serving Prime Minister. Supported by the Romanian Social Democrats, they expanded Romania's welfare state, but failed to tackle the Great Depression, and organized clampdowns against radicalized workers at Lupeni and Grivița. This issue brought Maniu into conflict with the outlawed Romanian Communist Party, though the PNȚ, and in particular its left, favored a Romanian popular front. From 1935, most of the centrist wing embraced anti-fascism, outvoting the PNȚ's far-right, which split of as a Romanian Front, under Alexandru Vaida-Voevod; in that interval, the PNȚ set up pro-democratic paramilitary units, or Peasant Guards. However, the party signed a temporary cooperation agreement with the fascist Iron Guard ahead of national elections in 1937, sparking much controversy among its own voters.
View the full Wikipedia page for National Peasants' Party