Romanian Treasure

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You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in Romanian. (January 2022) Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the Romanian article. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing Romanian Wikipedia article at [[:ro:Tezaurul României]]; see its history for attribution. You may also add the template {{Translated|ro|Tezaurul României}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

The Romanian Treasure (Romanian: Tezaurul României) is a collection of valuable objects and the gold reserves (~120 tonnes) that the Romanian government sent to Tsarist Russia for safekeeping during World War I, with the aim of being sheltered from the armies of the Central Powers, which had occupied a significant part of Romania and threatened to occupy the entire national territory. After the Romanian Army entered Bessarabia, at the time part of the Russian Empire, in early 1918, the new Soviet government that managed to rule Russia severed all diplomatic relations and confiscated the Romanian Treasure. As of today, only part of the objects and none of the gold reserves have been returned.^[1][2]

After the Great October Revolution and the seizure of power by the Communists under Lenin's leadership, the newly installed Soviet power sequestered the treasure and refused its restitution. It was partially returned, in three separate tranches, in 1935, 1956, and 2008, as a gesture of goodwill from the Soviets and later from the Russians. However, the majority of the treasure remained unrestituted, which makes it a sensitive subject in diplomatic relations between Romania and Russia.