page_title: Former administrative divisions of Romania
section_title: Socialist Republic of Romania
hierarchical_section_title: Former administrative divisions of Romania / Communist Romania / Socialist Republic of Romania
caption_attribution_description: Romania, administrative map. The proposal of Central Comission of the Romanian Communist Party and the State regarding the future counties and municipalities of Romania. January 14, 1968. Proposal text (in Romanian).
context_page_description: The 41 județe and the municipality of Bucharest comprise the official administrative divisions of Romania. They also represent the European Union' s NUTS-3 geocode statistical subdivision scheme of Romania.
context_section_description: In February 1968, the old administrative division of județ was reinstated. On January 14, 1968 the law proposal included 35 counties. The final result was substantially different from the situation existent before 1950. This included 39 counties, municipality of Bucharest, 236 cities, out of which 47 were municipalities, and 2706 communes comprising 13149 villages. There were several reasons for restoring the județe. For one, the Nicolae Ceaușescu regime wished to distance itself from the Soviet Union, and discarding the Soviet administrative model was a means of achieving that. For another, the regime had a nationalist outlook, and bringing back an old Romanian system fit with the prevailing ideology. Finally, during his first years, Ceaușescu was preoccupied with replacing functionaries named by his predecessor Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej and creating his own power base; dismissing the regional administrations and naming his own county officials was a step in that process.
caption: The original 1968 proposal with 35 counties
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