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The Crack in the Plaster: Crisis in Romania and the Origins of the Cold War*

On February 27, 1945, Soviet deputy foreign minister Andrei Vyshinskii descended on Bucharest and in a stormy interview at the palace demanded that young King Michael replace his government with a coalition of the communist-dominated National Democratic Front (NDF). Upon leaving the troubled monarch, Vyshinskii slammed the door so violently that he cracked the plaster of the wall.1 That crack became enshrined in Cold War iconography as a dual symbol of brutal Soviet intervention in the domestic affairs of Romania and of the growing division between the Soviet Union and the West over the future of Eastern Europe. The aim of this essay is to reinterpret the incident and its aftermath as emblematic of Soviet frustration with a policy of limited intervention that foundered on the reefs of Romanian domestic politics. When Vyshinskii’s temper flared the ink had hardly dried on the Declaration of Liberated Territories approved at Yalta by the Big Three that guaranteed free elections in the countries of Europe that had been occupied by the Nazis and their allies. No such elections were held in Romania. In less than a year President Harry Truman’s personal representative to investigate the political situation in Romania, the editor of the Louisville Courier, Mark Etheridge, presented his report in which he clearly stated that Romania was falling under the control of a communist dictatorship. It was this document that so angered Truman that he rebuked his own secretary of state, James Byrnes, for having sold out Romania to the communists during the Foreign Ministers’ Conference in December 1945 and that prompted his famous remark, “I’m tired of babying the Soviets.”2 In this short period of time Romania replaced Poland as the