Ordered House

In a Bucharest apartment last week, obdurate, old (74) Juliu Maniu, leader of the opposition to pro-Communist Petru Groza's Government, sat at lunch with two friends. Unannounced, an officer of Rumania's S.S.I, (secret political police) walked in, arrested Maniu. As he departed, the S.S.I, man offered his hand to one of Maniu's friends, saying: "I suppose you don't want to shake hands with a man who is doing this?" Replied the friend: "Oh, that's all right. I'm a surgeon--I've got blood on my hands too."

As part of the Molotov answer to the "Marshall approach," Rumania was being leeched of its last drops of democracy in preparation for a paper peace. A ratified treaty would mean withdrawal of the Red Army, and that might mean the downfall of Groza, the triumph of Maniu. To make sure that would not happen, Moscow's Andrei Vishinsky had ordered Groza: "Get your house in order."

Terror & Grain. Groza acted. From every hamlet, every urban neighborhood, one, two, three people disappeared. Many of them had nothing to do with politics, but fear inhibits opposition. Next, opposing leadership was wiped out. Top officials of Maniu's National Peasant Party were jailed for plotting to overthrow Groza. To prove how guilty they were, newspapers printed an official photograph which showed twelve of the accused, with two pilots and piles of baggage, "preparing to flee" in a rickety old single-engined, three-place biplane.

Then the Government was ready to tackle the idol of Rumania's peasants, Maniu. Police raided his party headquarters, suppressed his party newspaper, Dreptatea, which had just defiantly printed the American Declaration of Independence (TIME, July 21).

The arrests were accompanied by a rat-a-tat fire of Moscow-inspired Groza decrees: drastic shake-up of the Ministry of Industry to insure adherence to Communist economics; virtual nationalization of industry; a budget cut to speed the purge of "unreliable" civil servants; an order empowering shop committees to dictate a purge of industrial employees; transfer of the best Rumanian Army corps to the Communist-run Ministry of Interior; purge of several thousand Army officers; an order that peasants must thresh their grain in the presence of Government officials to prevent widespread hoarding.

Ana & the King. Rumania's Communist matriarch, grey, unkempt Ana Pauker, demanded "peoples' courts to judge those who have betrayed the interests of the people . . . dissolution of Maniu's party and arrest of all its traitorous leaders."

Right along, Maniu had seen what was coming. In 1945, when Britain's Sir Archibald Clark Kerr (now Lord Inverchapel) and the U.S.'s Averell Harriman "guaranteed" democratic rights in Rumania, Maniu had asked Harriman: "If the prefect of Constantsa falsifies the election list, will Britain send her fleet? The U.S. mobilize her army?" In 1947 Maniu answered himself: "The prefect of Constantsa did falsify the list. But there was no sign of the British fleet, no sound of American mobilization. Instead the prefect of Constantsa is still in office."

Maniu was down, and Ana thundered on. She demanded the heads of Liberal Party Leader Bratianu, Socialist Party Leader Titel Petrescu. When they also had been downed, Ana and her opportunist Communists would share Rumania with a young king in a tattered constitution. And if Mihai and Ana proved to be incompatible, Mihai would always have a memory: when the Red Army entered Rumania in 1944, 81 Communists among his 16 million subjects greeted it, and Ana was in Moscow.

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