The regime also sought to gain increased domestic support by emphasizing the country's historical traditions, by calling for "Romanian solutions to Romanian problems," and by cautiously exploiting the population's latent anti-Soviet sentiments. In August 1954, on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the country's liberation from Nazi forces, Gheorghiu-Dej asserted that the primary credit for driving out the occupiers belonged to Romanian Communists rather than to the Soviet army, a view that was subsequently condemned by the Soviets and supported by the Communist Chinese. Although the Gheorghiu-Dej regime formally supported the Soviet action in suppressing the 1956 Hungarian revolt, the Romanian leaders attempted to exploit the situation in order to obtain additional concessions from the Soviets and to gain recognition of the legitimacy of the so-called Romanian road to socialism. At that time, one of their primary aims was the removal of Soviet occupation forces that had remained in the country throughout the post-World War II period. Although the regime was not successful in obtaining formal Soviet recognition of a Romanian variant of communism, an agreement was reached placing a time limit on the presence of the Soviet troops, the forces finally being withdrawn in 1958. Important problems were posed to the Gheorghiu-Dej regime by the reactivation of COMECON and the Soviet intentions to integrate the economies of the member states. Initially established in 1949 as the Soviet counterpart to the European Recovery Program (Marshall Plan), COMECON was largely dormant until 1955, when Khrushchev decided to revitalize the organization as an instrument of Soviet economic policy in Eastern Europe. COMECON plans called for the subordination of national economic plans to an overall planning body that would determine economic development for the member states as a whole. Romania was to be assigned the role of a supplier of raw materials and agricultural produce for the more industrially developed members (see ch. 2). Gheorghiu-Dej rejected such a subservient role for Romania and proceeded with his own plans for the country's industrial development, asserting the right of each COMECON member state to develop its own economy in accord with national needs and interests, a position that was, in turn, rejected by the Soviets. As a reaction to Soviet pressures and the need to lessen Romanian dependence on COMECON, the regime initiated a gradual and cautious expansion of economic relations with noncommunist states.