Russia breaks off relations with Romania

On 28 January 1918 (15 January in the Julian calendar), at 3 p.m., the Romanian minister in Petrograd, Constantin Diamandy, was ordered to leave Russia within ten hours. The People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs refused him a twelve-hour delay to pack up a legation of about a hundred people. At about one in the morning a special train carried the diplomats off towards the Swedish border at Tornio. This was the execution of a decree of the Council of People’s Commissars of 26 January (13 January Old Style), which broke off diplomatic relations with Romania and declared that the country’s gold reserve, kept in Moscow, was “untouchable by the Romanian oligarchy”. The British chronology of the war records the rupture under 28 January, although the decision itself had been taken two days earlier.

The conflict had been growing since December. After the Armistice of Focșani the Russian troops on the Romanian front were disintegrating, and the Bolsheviks were trying to take control of them. Their envoy Semyon Roshal wanted to arrest the front commander, General Dmitry Shcherbachev, who did not recognise Lenin’s government. On 21 and 22 December Romanian and Ukrainian troops broke up a Bolshevik revolutionary committee near Iași, Roshal was killed in unclear circumstances, and the Romanians began disarming unreliable Russian units and sending them back across the Prut. Lenin’s government regarded this as an armed attack on the revolution. On 13 January Lenin, the Commander-in-Chief Nikolai Krylenko and the Commissar for War Nikolai Podvoisky demanded in a note the release of the arrested soldiers and the punishment of those responsible. That same evening, while Diamandy was entertaining guests at the legation, soldiers came for him and took him to the Peter and Paul Fortress. According to the minister’s own account, the order for the arrest had been sent by telegraph from the talks at Brest by Leon Trotsky.

The imprisonment of a diplomat provoked an unprecedented protest. On 14 January the heads of all the missions accredited in Petrograd, Allied and neutral, led by the United States ambassador David Francis, went to Lenin at the Smolny and demanded Diamandy’s release, refusing to discuss the reasons for the arrest. Lenin explained that he had wanted in this way to prevent a war with Romania, but promised to put the matter before the Council of Commissars. On the afternoon of 15 January the minister, who had refused to sign an undertaking to intercede for the Bolsheviks arrested in Romania, was released without conditions.

Meanwhile the dispute had moved to Bessarabia. In the Moldavian Democratic Republic a Bolshevik committee was trying to seize power in Kishinev, and some of the leaders of the Sfatul Țării called on Romanian troops for help. The government in Iași, in agreement with Shcherbachev and with the support of the Entente missions, sent them across the Prut under the slogan of protecting the front’s supply lines. The left in Bessarabia and the soldiers’ soviets treated this as an invasion. After several days of fighting, on the evening of 26 January (13 January Old Style), the Romanian 11th Division entered Kishinev. That same day the Council of Commissars adopted the decree breaking off relations. “The Romanian oligarchy, stained with crimes, has opened hostilities against the Russian Republic,” it stated. The legation and all representatives of the Romanian authorities were to be expelled by the shortest route, and Shcherbachev was declared an enemy of the people and outlawed. In the evening Trotsky, now back from Brest, declared at the congress of soviets that a state of war existed between Russia and Romania.

The second point of the decree hurt Romania most. In December 1916, when the troops of the Central Powers were occupying Wallachia, the government in Iași had sent the gold reserve of the National Bank of Romania to Moscow for safekeeping: 1,738 chests of gold worth more than 314 million gold lei, together with Queen Marie’s jewels. In the summer of 1917 they were joined by the bank’s remaining assets, archives and museum collections. All of it was deposited in the Kremlin. The Council of Commissars declared that it was taking this treasure into its care and would hand it over “into the hands of the Romanian people”. France took over the protection of Romania’s interests in Russia. Prime Minister Ion I. C. Brătianu asked the Allies how they would show solidarity with his country, but Romania, cut off from its allies, was increasingly isolated. A few days later the German side, citing the new situation after the rupture with Russia, called on the Romanians to negotiate. In the spring Romania made peace with the Central Powers, and it never recovered the treasure in the Kremlin in full.