As prepared for delivery

Ladies and gentlemen,

Welcome to the 24^th edition of the “Cristian Popișteanu” Banking History and Civilisation Symposium organised at the National Bank of Romania. We hold this event every year in order to mark the anniversary of our institution, which this month celebrates 136 years since its establishment.

The symposium, which was given the name of Cristian Popișteanu in 1999, has now come to its 24th edition. When we think of a bank, one of the first associations we make is with tradition. In our case, back in 1993, when the “Cristian Popișteanu” Banking History and Civilisation Symposium took place for the first time, after 50 years of communism and centrally-planned economy, both professionals and Romania’s population had been cut off from tradition. It was then that we, at the NBR, encouraged by Professor Cristian Popișteanu, the chief-editor of Magazin Istoric magazine, committed ourselves to organising this symposium with the declared intention to rediscover and share with the future bank employees, as well as with banks’ future customers, the historical tradition of Romanian banks, the role they played in the economic, social and cultural life of our country, and a correct perception of the new banking system in the making in Romania.

To what extent we have been successful – I think it would be more appropriate to discuss next year, when we organise the 25th edition. Anyway, we already have several certainties. First, the “Cristian Popișteanu” Symposium has become a cultural landmark, being one of the projects not easily abandoned, as it is common practice nowadays. Second, the dozens of scientific communications held within the symposium for two decades were then published in Magazin Istoric, reaching the general public, as, luckily, the magazine still sells at an affordable price all over the country. Furthermore, in order to popularise the symposium among the young, the symposium papers have been posted on the magazine’s website for a good number of years now, where interested readers can access them free of charge.

Just like Magazin Istoric has succeeded, with a master hand, in “making history understandable for everyone” for more than 50 years, we think that, during our 24-year long partnership with the magazine, we have also managed to rediscover the banking tradition in Romania prior to 1947 and make the present banking system “comprehensible to everyone”.

This year’s edition is, I would say, naturally dedicated to marking 100 years since Romania’s entry into World War One, in which context the National Bank of Romania was among the institutions directly engaged through:

• financing military training ever since 1914;
• 201 of its employees fighting on the battlefield, of whom 21 gave their lives for achieving Greater Romania;
• the odyssey of its gold treasure, which I will refer to at length during my intervention.

This is the reason why the topic of this year’s edition of the Symposium is The National Bank of Romania and World War One.

This year’s session of communications, moderated by Mr. Cristian Păunescu, will feature the following speakers:

• Academician Ioan-Aurel Pop, the rector of the Babeș-Bolyai University, who will present his paper entitled The Issue of Transylvania prior to World War One (in a Romanian and European context);
• Professor Ioan Bolovan, the prorector of the Babeș-Bolyai University, who will deliver his presentation entitled Life beyond Death: Children, Gender Relationships and Morality during the Great War;
• our colleagues, Mr. Cristian Păunescu and Ms. Brîndușa Costache, who are to deliver a presentation on NBR Employees in World War One – Ștefan Constantinescu’s War Diary;
• Ms. Doina Păuleanu, the manager of the Art Museum of Constanța, to speak about the visit paid by the Tsar and the Russian Imperial family at Constanța (1914);
• Ms. Nadia Manea, an expert at the National Bank of Romania, delivering her presentation entitled Daily Life, Money and Trade in Occupied Bucharest (1916-1918);
• Mr. Alin Spînu, from the University of Bucharest, who will talk about Espionage in Romania during 1914-1916;
• and, finally, Mr. Cristian Scăiceanu, a strategy consultant at the National Bank of Romania, who will speak about The Public Philatelic Collections in Romania, between Moscow and Berlin during World War One;
• following the discussions and conclusions, the Magazin Istoric Cultural Foundation annual awards will be handed over for the most significant contributions to historic research in 2015 and a cocktail will be offered to the guests by the National Bank of Romania.

The National Bank of Romania – a century since the Treasure was evacuated to Moscow

After two years of neutrality, Romania entered the Great War following the war declaration of 14 August 1916 (old style) on Austria-Hungary. Because of the battles fought on two warfronts and the defeats conceded along the Danube, Romania’s General Headquarters decided to put a halt to the offensive in Transylvania on 2 September.

Mindful of how frontlines moved, the National Bank of Romania’s General Council decided, also in those days, that the bank’s metal reserve comprising 91.48 tonnes of gold in coins and bullions should be relocated to a safe place.

Considering the interest of the general public in this topic and the fact that the media circulates quite a few wrong ideas regarding the role, composition and owner of the Treasure, I think I have to point out several issues.

Thus, Article 35 in the NBR’s Statutes set forth that “the Bank shall have a gold reserve equal to at least 40 percent of the amount of notes it had issued”. Hence, the size of the metal reserve was a condition for the volume of banknotes issued, being viewed as public wealth, “our wealth”, as Governor I. G. Bibicescu used to say during those trying years. Moreover, in those times, whoever brought a one-hundred-lei note to the desks in the Lipscani Palace and asked for it being replaced by gold was handed out gold coins in exchange. For this reason too, most of the Bank’s Treasure was made up of coins.

Therefore, this gold amount belonged to the bank, being neither the shareholders’ property, nor part of some individuals’ deposits.

Turning back to 1916, on 6 September, the Treasure started to be evacuated to the NBR branch in Iași and, despite the discretion that had to surround this operation, the citizens of Bucharest noticed something was going on. Specifically, V. Th. Cancicov noted in his memoirs that he saw on Victoriei Avenue “trucks-motorcars” loaded with trunks containing the treasure of the Savings House, and the same took place at the National Bank, with “trucks being loaded at the back entrances”. Attended by Director Căpitanovici and auditor Saligny, several bank employees and a strong military guard, the Treasure reached Iași on 9 September 1916.

But it was only the beginning of Romania’s drama in the autumn of 1916, as what followed was the abandonment of Bucharest and the relocation of all institutions to Iași, including the National Bank starting 14 November 1916. With winter coming on, with two thirds of the country’s territory under occupation, with an army in need of restoration and a significant part of the population seeking refuge, the government reckoned that the NBR Treasure should be relocated to a safe place. And where else could it be shipped if not to Russia, its only allied neighbouring country?

All the more so because:

• Russia had signed, in August 1916, together with France, the United Kingdom and Italy, the two cooperation agreements with Romania within the Entente;
• the two royal families were kindred, as Queen Maria was the cousin of Tsar Nicholas II;
  • more precisely, Maria Alexandrovna was the daughter of Tsar Alexander II and the sister of Tsar Alexander III, father of Nicholas II of Russia; she married Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh in the Saxe-Coburg and Gotha house, the son of Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom; they were the parents of Queen Maria (1875-1938).
• in 1914, while the Russian ruling family visited Constanța, a topic to be dwelt upon in today’s session, a matrimonial alliance strongly supported by Russia’s foreign minister Sazonov was discussed to unite Prince Carol and Great Duchess Olga, the tsar’s eldest daughter, but the idea ended up in failure, since Olga expressed her unwillingness to leave the country;
• in December 1916, A. Mossolof, the extraordinary envoy and plenipotentiary minister of Russia in Romania, actively lobbied with the local decision-makers and Queen Maria, and provided guarantees, in view of the powers he had been vested with by the Russian Finance Minister, for both the conveyance to and storage of the treasure in Moscow and its subsequent return to Romania;
• testifying to these guarantees and the handing-over of the National Bank of Romania’s treasure to Russian caretakers are unquestionable documents worded both in Iași, upon delivery, and Moscow, upon receipt, bearing the signatures and stamps of Russian and Romanian government officials, as well as of the Moscow branch of the State Bank of Russia and the representatives of our National Bank; these documents, which were carefully preserved by all the governors, irrespective of the historic moment when they headed this institution, are still available today;
• when the decision was made to ship the treasure to Moscow, the Romanian authorities consulted the representatives of the Entente, who also were in Iași at that time;
• in December 1916, the domestic context in Russia was not foreshadowing the great instability to follow; as a matter of fact, not even in the autumn of 1917 could anyone believe in the victory of the Bolshevik group that Constantin Conțescu, a plenipotentiary minister at the Romanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, would label in August 1918 as “a faction small in number, but armed with endless boldness and a destructive spirit never seen all along the history”;
• instead, occupied Romania was facing troublesome events:
  • firstly, at our head office in Lipscani Street, where two acting directors were authorised to oversee the performance of certain operations with the public, the military authorities commandeered first the first floor of the Lipscani Palace, then the second, and eventually seized the entire Bank; it goes without saying that the treasure would have shared the same fate and any defence would have been impossible as long as, ever since December 1916, Constantin Băicoianu, one of the acting directors, had been taken into custody by a military official from his office at the National Bank; Băicoianu’s guilt was that he had worded a letter of protest against domestic currency devaluation by the new authorities;
  • not even the jewellery of the citizens of Bucharest were spared by the interest of the occupying authorities that issued an ordinance stipulating that “all the concealed objects shall be seized without any commandeering receipt if detected by the military”; the renowned art historian Virgiliu N. Drăghiceanu, the secretary of the Historical Monuments Commission, noted with outrage in his memoirs: “That is to say, all our wealth at the disposal and discretion of the military authorities! We’re worried about the jewellery, silverware, money. We’re starting a desperate running to find hideouts. If only our architects still had the good habit of including hideouts in cellar vaults, house walls and floors!”.
• that is why, in December 1916, 1,738 cases with NBR gold, worth around lei 315 million (the exact figure is lei 314,580,456.84), weighing 91.32 tonnes, were sent to Moscow on board 17 train carriages.
• the content of the cases was inventoried in Moscow for 19 days, from 9 January to 16 February, on which occasion a new protocol was drawn up, in four copies, in Russian and French.
• on that same day of 16 February 1917, the members of the NBR delegation accompanying the Treasure also dispatched a letter from Moscow, detailing the inventory procedures and specifying that “both the first official report and the final protocol were drafted by the delegation of the Russian Government, who insisted on having this honour”.
• at the time, the senior management of the National Bank of Romania highly appreciated the support from the Russian authorities, by sending letters of gratitude and even contemplating the idea of awarding decorations to the Russian central bank clerks in charge of receiving and safekeeping the NBR Treasure.
• the second shipment took place in July 1917: three train carriages were loaded with 188 NBR cases containing gold, in the amount of lei 574,523.57, i.e. 0.16 tonnes, and “securities, valuables, deposits, parts of archives and books, documents”; thus, the two shipments combined weighed 91.48 tonnes of gold.
• once again, Russian minister Stanislaw Poklewski-Koziell notified the Romanian minister of finance, Nicolae Titulescu, that “my government has vested me with full power and authority to sign the protocols on the evacuation to Russia of the valuables belonging to the central bank and other public institutions of Romania”.
• once again, representatives of the Russian ministry of finance and of the Russian central bank signed and stamped the delivery-receipt protocols.
• however, half a year later, the Bolshevik authorities confiscated the Treasure of Romania, including the NBR Treasure, by declaring it “intangible”, yet taking “the responsibility to safe-keep the treasure in order to hand it over to the Romanian people”.
• some of the archives and of the goods of historic and artistic value belonging to the cultural heritage of Romania were returned in 1935 and 1956.
• in June 1935, 212 of the trunks arriving from Russia on the route Moscow – Odessa – Constanța – Obor train station were handed over to the National Bank of Romania; they contained:
  • lei 1, 2 and 100 notes and their printing plates;
  • printing inks, banknote printing paper, a numbering device, glue;
  • securities, including some deposited by individuals with the NBR, but for which duplicates had already been issued, as well as archive documents.
• the year 1956 saw the return, among others, of the famous “Golden Brood Hen with Its Chickens” hoard (19.763 kilos), presently on display at the National History Museum. But neither of the two shipments from Moscow included any items belonging to the NBR Treasure.
• failure to return the NBR Treasure had dire consequences on the Romanian economy in the interwar period:
  • it contributed to the suspension of the domestic currency convertibility;
  • it coerced the Romanian authorities to take a substantial external loan for currency stabilisation in 1929; according to Mihail Romașcanu, in 1934, the updated value of the Treasure in Russia accounted for two thirds of the net value of the 7 percent Stabilisation Loan; it is common knowledge that the repayment effort in relation to this loan burdened the Romanian economy and, in the context of the Great Depression, generated inter alia the de facto suspension of the leu’s convertibility at the beginning of 1932.
  • it prompted the National Bank of Romania, in the interwar period, to purchase almost the entire domestic gold output at the market price.
• we know now that the shipment of 1956 was the result of talks between the two communist parties, as a sign of goodwill of the Soviet Union towards the so-called people’s regime in Romania; however, the rationale behind Stalin’s decision of 1935 – Stalin, who had never given anything to anybody – remains a mystery, unless the USSR sought to re-establish diplomatic ties with Romania, as further evidence of the slogan “USSR – champion of peace”, which managed to deceive for a while not only Nicolae Titulescu, but also a large part of the European diplomacy.
• at the same time, these restitutions are in themselves the expression of the legal continuity between tsarist Russia and the USSR, as well as proof of the restitution commitment made by the soviets themselves at the time of confiscation.
• in this vein, the Moscow gold continued to be mentioned in the Romanian central bank’s records as “gold deposited in Moscow”:
  • until 1929, as a “disputed claim on foreign parties”;
  • and then, up to 1943, as a “memory item” in the annual balance sheet; following the Red Army invasion, from 1944 onwards the NBR balance sheet no longer included any mention in this respect.

Nevertheless, neither the NBR, nor the Romanian Government – irrespective of its ideological leaning – abandoned the attempts to recover the Treasure of the National Bank of Romania.

Let me just remind you that, over the two interwar decades, the Bucharest authorities constantly raised this issue during the bilateral meetings held in Copenhagen, London, Warsaw, Geneva etc.

N. D. Ciotori, Romania’s representative at the first meetings with Soviet diplomats, drew their attention to the fact that “our Treasure has been entrusted to the Russian people, as a greater ally of the Romanian people, for safekeeping only and, therefore, no laws of war could entitle our allies to claim it; on the contrary, it is a duty of honour of the Russian people to return the said Treasure” and our message has remained the same, regardless of what happened to our Treasure, of its trials and tribulations also amid the interests of the Third International.

Besides, mention should be made that relations between central banks are governed by the principle of mutual trust. Thus, in the difficult conditions of World War II, the NBR also received for safekeeping three tonnes of gold belonging to Bank Polski, a treasure which it returned in full and unconditionally to its rightful owner at the end of the war. Furthermore, I would like to remind you that, back in September 1939, Romania allowed and supported the evacuation of the entire gold treasure of the central bank of Poland, namely 83.5 tonnes, as well as of valuable assets belonging to the cultural and artistic heritage of Poland, the German threats notwithstanding. Romania observed its treaty of alliance with Poland, but this came at the cost of the life of the then prime-minister, Armand Călinescu, who was assassinated on 21 September 1939, only a few days after the Polish Treasure had transited Romania.

Ladies and gentlemen,

Here we are, a century without the Treasure. We, at the National Bank of Romania, still consider it our duty to take all necessary action for these valuable goods to return home.

Thank you for your attention and I wish you a pleasant day at the National Bank of Romania!