Twelfth Global Studies Conference

Abstract

World War I determined changes both on a European and a global level. Romania is a significant case/example considering the fact that in 1918, after the fall of the multinational empires, it achieved the goal of national unity. In the following years, the Romanian state promoted the peace in order to strengthen its territorial integrity and alliances. The institutions of the national security system worked, since the end of the military actions, to fulfill this strategic objective. Both the army and the national secret services were confronted with complex threats. The Great Romania had at the time three neighbouring countries with an obvious revisionist foreign policy and territorial claims – Hungary, Bulgaria, and Soviet Russia. The most dangerous enemy was the Soviet Union which never accepted the territorial losses of the Tsarist Empire and the loss of Bessarabia. Lenin’s Russia and then the Stalin’s Soviet Union have attempted, in the two decades that separated WW I and WW II, to destabilize the Romanian state through means and methods that echo the modern “Hybrid warfare” – from propaganda performed by the communist movement to aimed at changing the constitutional order, to various attempts to ignite peasant revolutions (as a pretext for the Red Army intervention), and factory strikes, to an intensive espionage activity. The paper analyses the ample subversive actions of the soviet secret services on the one hand, and, on the other, countermeasures that the Romanian intelligence structures adopted for their annihilation.