The Social Structure of Romania

The social structure of Romania.

Since the end of the Second World War, Romania witnessed some societal changes. Those societal changes were mainly designed and managed by the state leadership in order to achieve their wishes. The aim of this part of the paper is to assess which elements of the Romanian social sphere evolved and which one changed in order to illustrate our problem statement: Romania, in between changes and continuity. In order to properly assess those changes and continuity of Romanian social upheaval, one needs a short description of the basic social situation of Romania before the Second World War, the old regime. Then focus will shift to the different social status that classified the country’s population, the peasantry, the proletariat, the intelligentsia, and the ruling elite.

The societal situation of the Romanian population before World War II was mainly composed of people of the agrarian sector. About seventy five per cent of the population was peasants. The slow rate of development of the country did not allow for the creation of new jobs opportunities. People in the countryside were very poor and too populated; the country was managed by a small amount of persons enormously powerful that formed the social elite of the country while the biggest part of the population had no say in state matters. Concretely, an astonishing amount of the population, the peasants, was ruled by an amazingly little amount of social elite that enjoyed exaggerated luxury and richness (Library of Congress, The end of the ancient regime, 1989).

However, the social situation of Romania changed with the end of the Second World War. A new system was imposed to Romania by the Soviet Union, which wanted to abolish the different classes that composed the country. Soviets wanted everyone to be equal. They believed that by establishing a working class owning production’s means and “the distribution of goods and political power”, a social state -and eventually...