Preface: Romania and the Warsaw Pact, 1955-1989

This publication of documents on Romania and the Warsaw Pact, accompanied by the CWIHP Working Paper No. 43 by Dennis Deletant and Mihail Ionescu, is the result of cooperation between the Parallel History Project (PHP) and the Cold War International History Project (CWIHP). It appears simultaneously on their respective websites.
The cooperative venture dates back to 2002, when the PHP took the initiative by obtaining previously classified documents from Romanian archives selected by a group of Romanian historians under the aegis of the Romanian Institute for Political Studies of Defence and Military History, headed by Mihail Ionescu. The CWIHP provided for the facsimile publication and partial translation of those documents in two volumes, edited by Mircea Munteanu.
The volumes became available for the conference on “Romania and the Warsaw Pact,” organized in Bucharest on 3-6 October 2002 by the Institute for Political Studies of Defence and Military History and co-sponsored by the PHP jointly with the CWIHP.
The CWIHP subsequently funded the translation of the remaining documents from the two volumes by Cornel Ban and Mircea Munteanu while the PHP funded the translation of additional documents, obtained through the good offices of Marius Oprea, senior researcher at the Romanian Institute for Recent History, translated by Viorel Buta and edited for publication by Dennis Deletant. The credit due to the respective translators is indicated on each document.
Five documents in this collection have already been published on the PHP website previously as part of its collection of records of the Warsaw Pact’s Political Consultative Committee. They are those dated 10 January 1972, 11 January 1972, 15 January 1972, 20 November 1978, 24 November 1978.
The documents themselves are preceded by two introductions. The first, by offering an overview of political and economic policy in Romania under Communist rule, provides background for the analysis in the second of Romania’s trajectory within the Warsaw Pact.
In the translation of the documents, words or punctuation marks enclosed in [..] have been added by the editors.