Let's go back in time 100 years and learn something from history.
July 28, 1914: World War I is engulfing Europe. Despite the pro-Entente sentiment of the majority of the population, the Kingdom of Romania remains neutral. This is mainly due to the fact that the King of Romania Carol I - the architect of Romanian’s independence from under Ottoman rule and founder of the modern Romanian state, was born, raised and educated in Germany and belonged to the German Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen dynasty.
Romania’s King Carol I favored the Central Powers - Germany and Austro-Hungary, while Romania’s political elite favored the Entente - the Franco-Anglo-Russian alliance, so a compromise decision was made for the country to remain neutral.
October 10, 1914: King Carol I of Romania dies of old age without leaving any male heirs. His nephew, Crown Prince Ferdinand is proclaimed the new king, as Ferdinand I of Romania. Unlike his uncle, Ferdinand is pro-Entente, despite being himself born, raised and educated in Germany. The fact that his beautiful, feisty and extremely intelligent wife, Queen Marie is English and a niece of Queen Victoria may also have had something to do with the new king's pro-Entente sympathies.
August 27, 1916: after almost two years of neutrality the Kingdom of Romania joins the Entente and declares war on the Central Powers. Romanian troops launch the offensive against the Austro-Hungarian forces in the Battle of Transylvania.
Mid-September 1916: the Romanian offensive is halted by the armies of the Central Powers. A German/Austro-Hungarian/Bulgarian counter-offensive is launched on two fronts (South in the Dobrogea region and West in Transylvania) under the command of the German General Von Mackensen. Things are starting to look bleak for Romania.
Practically surrounded on three sides by better trained, far better equipped enemies, and isolated from her allies (with the exception of Russia who was already in internal revolutionary turmoil), the Romanian government prepares for the worst: enemy occupation. As such, a momentous decision was made: to send the Romanian National Bank gold treasure for safekeeping to the Russian ally.
This is the story of how 120 tons of Romanian gold and other invaluable treasure was sent to Russia by the Romanian government during WWI, just before the German troops marched in the Romanian capital Bucharest:
"On the night of December 14–15, 1916 at 3:00 a.m., a train that was headed east left the Iaşi (city in North-Eastern Romania) train station with 21 rail cars, carrying a payload of one hundred twenty tons of gold bars and gold coins.
In another four rail cars were two hundred policemen guarding the valuable train. In today’s value, the gold treasure they guarded would be well over $2 billion USD.
In the summer of 1917, seven months after the first train loaded with treasure was sent to Moscow, the war continued to affect the situation in Romania adversely. The capital Bucharest was lost and the only free Romanian territory left was the province of Moldova where the Romanian government and the royal family took refuge. As such, the government decided to send the country’s most valuable objects on another train to Russia.
This second transport train contained the archives of the Romanian Academy and several antique valuables, such as the gems of the Princes of Wallachia and Moldavia, ancient Dacian jewels, golden gems found in Romania that were over 3,500 years old, and the jewels of the Romanian royalty.
The transport also carried most precious Romanian cultural and historical heritage: thousands of paintings and other artworks belonging to Romanian art museums, precious sacred itemas owned by Romanian monasteries such as 14th-century symbols and old Romanian manuscripts. The train also carried the private money and the valuables deposits of ordinary Romanian people held at the national banks. The dollar value of this train is difficult to appraise, especially because most of its contents are art objects, but most likely it even exceeded the worth of the gold sent to Russsia on the first train."
https://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/wwi-romania-shipped-120-tons-1-25-billion-of-gold-to-russia-for-safe-keeping-as-of-2014-they-have-returned-just-33-kg-of-it.html
What happened to all that treasure sent for safe keeping to Russia??
From the 120 tons of gold and national treasure, as of today, the Russians returned just 33 kg of gold. But what about the rest? What happened to the rest of gold, artworks and the rest of the treasure? The Soviet, and later the new Russian Federation government simply don't want to talk about it.
"In 1922, four years after WWI ended, the Romanians made an effort to get the treasure back but were unsuccessful. The Soviets returned some of the Romanian Academy Archives in 1935, and in 1956 the Romanians recovered a couple of the paintings and some of the items of the ancient Pietroasele Gothic gold treasure.
Since World War I until present day, every Romanian government, regardless of their political stripe, communist or democratic, has attempted negotiations with the USSR, then wth the new Russian Federation for the return of the valuable treasure items and, of course, the gold as well; but all of the Russian governments have steadfastly refused."
The most ironic part: in WWII Romania was practically forced to join the Axis in order to recover the Moldova province grabbed by the Soviets in 1938. Following by the same secret treaty between Hitler and Stalin in which the two dictators agreed to invade and split Poland between them, Romania had to make the same unfortunate choice Finland did - that of joining Germany and going to war against the Russian aggressor in order to recover the territory grabbed by the Soviets before the start of WWII.
Toward the end of WWII, on August 23rd, 1944, young King Michael I arrested the General Mihai Antonescu, head of the pro-German government and the de-facto dictator of Romania. King Michael then ordered the Romanian Army to join the Allies thus causing the collapse of the German defense line dug along the Carpathian Mountains alpine passes. This daring action and the battles that ensued between the Romanian troops and their former allies caused the German army to hastily retreat and shortened the war in Europe by at least six months. Germany suddenly lost what at the time was called “Hitler’s gas station” - the Romanian oil fields and refineries, richest in Europe. This event, plus the fact that the German defenses in the Carpathian Mountains were hastily abandoned, saved millions of allied troops lives. Nevertheless, when the end of the war came, the Russians who entered Romania as self-proclaimed “liberators”, took their revenge.
They occupied Romania, pillaged cities and villages, raped women at will, murdered civilians, helped communists falsify elections and disassembled entire factories which they transported to their cursed lands where they used slave labor to put them back together. And if that wasn't enough, they established the Sov-Roms - 'joint venture' companies with which for the next two decades they drained Romania of oil, of uranium ore for their atomic bomb program, of lumber, minerals, construction materials and food, causing the 1946-1948 famine that killed millions of Romanians.
"The total number of goods passed by Romania to the Soviet Union surpassed by far the Russian demanded war reparations, being estimated at around 2 billion dollars. [Roper, p.18]. By 1952, 85% of Romanian export was directed at the Soviet Union. [Cioroianu, p.372-373]
Special circumstances also enhanced the negative effects of Sov-Roms on Romanian economy: the severe drought and famine outbreaks of 1946, coupled with the severe devaluation of the Romanian leu; culminating in a forced stabilization through monetary reform (1947)" http://enacademic.com/dic.nsf/enwiki/1545201
So not only the Russian didn't returned the 120 tons of Romanian gold they promised to safe keep during WWI at the time when over 530,000 Romanian troops (1/3 of the entire Romanian male population) heroically bled and died on the front lines fighting the Central Powers, while the Russians themselves turned tail and quit the fight because were too busy killing each other and transforming their country in a Bolshevik hell hole; but because their thievery wasn’t enough, the Russians also took half of the prosperous Moldova province from Romania and transformed it in yet another shitty a Soviet Republic; they deported millions of Romanians from Moldova to Siberia and replaced them with Russians and Ukrainians; they murdered 3,000 Romanian refugees from Moldova, men, women and children, who were seeking asylum in Romania at the infamous Fantana Alba massacre, mowing them down with machine gun fire; they bled dry Romania of its natural resources by using the Sov-Roms; they dismantled, removed and transported to Russia all valuable Romanian factories and their industrial equipment; they causes two years of famine that killed millions of starvation; and they installed their puppet communist terror regime who ruled Romania for the next 45 years.
Is there any wonder Romanians still consider Russia as their natural enemy? And it is wise for Americans of any political orientation to trust and support such a nation of thieves and backstabbers who for over a Century now, continue to allow themselves to be ruled by blood thirsty, mass murdering, maniacal dictators?
Oh, and as an end note: don’t ever tell a Romanian “I hear you have an accent, are you from Russia?”. Not only Romanian doesn’t sound anything like Russian since it’s a Latin language while Russian is the epitome of Slavic languages; but many Romanians may also take it as an insult.
Article edited on 7-2-23:
Found this little news gem while browsing Twitter today and I decided to add it to the article. It is just an example showing how the ungrateful Russian communist thieves “repaid” their WWII allies for the enormous help in military material they were given, help without which their “glorious Red Army soldiers” would have been steamrolled and crushed like bugs by the German Wehrmacht.
