The Romanian Section of the Comintern

Washington, D.C., August 11, 2023 – Recently unearthed documents from the Romanian national archives shed new light on the Comintern, the Soviet-led international organization that from 1919-1943 was at the forefront of Moscow’s efforts to establish hegemony over Communist parties in Romania, the rest of Europe and worldwide.

Compiled and edited by Dr. Corina Snitar of the University of Glasgow, today’s posting includes new details on the missions assigned by the Comintern to members in “revolutionary” states, highlighting increasingly antagonistic relations with imperial powers in the West—what historian Robert Hager called the “Cold War before the Cold War.”

Other records show how the Romanian Communist Party, in particular, was built and re-assembled several times in accordance with Moscow’s designs and how, under constant pressure from the Romanian secret police, the Comintern’s Romanian section became more concerned with promoting Soviet propaganda and guaranteeing its own security than with empowering Romania’s working class.

Although the Third International came to an end 80 years ago, understanding the role and internal dynamics of the Comintern remains an important goal given its significance in the Communist movement and world affairs in the critical years leading up to and during World War II.

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The Romanian Section of the Comintern,
80 years after the dissolution of the Third International

By Corina Snitar, University of Glasgow

From 25 July to 21 August 1935, the Seventh Congress of the Third International (Comintern) took place in Moscow. Because it would be the global Communist organization’s last convening, the Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky characterized it as the “liquidation congress.” However, another six years would pass before the group finally closed its doors – 80 years ago in 1943 – but even then, the move was largely unexpected. This posting focuses on some of the still unresolved questions surrounding the organization’s termination, with a particular emphasis on the perspectives of one its members – the Romanian section. Although these events occurred decades ago, understanding the role and internal dynamics of the Comintern remains an important goal given its significance in the Communist movement and world affairs in the critical years leading up to and during World War II.

On 15 May 1943, the Presidium of the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI) adopted a resolution recommending the dissolution of the Third International (the Comintern) (see Document 1). The Comintern would officially cease to exist three weeks later, on 10 June. The decision, suddenly taken, came as a surprise for the Communist parties affiliated to the Comintern. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin himself offered an explanation on 28 May the same year, when he spoke about the dissolution of the Comintern as a fait accompli. He mentioned that the organization had ceased to be useful and had even become a hindrance to the development of the Communist parties. Moreover, according to Stalin, they were now mature enough to function without the benefit of a directing center.

The reason behind Stalin’s decision is still subject to scholarly debate. Some authors argue that the dissolution of the Comintern was a strategic gesture of goodwill by the Soviet Union toward their new wartime allies as, throughout its existence, the organization had been accused of stirring world revolution and aiming for the victory of Communism. Other scholars gave merit to Leon Trotsky’s assertion that the Comintern had lost its theoretical and tactical purpose since its Seventh Congress, held in July 1935, when “world revolution” disappeared from the official discourse and the members were advised that they should determine their own policies and tactics from that point forward. According to Trotsky, that meeting would be known to history as “the liquidation congress.”[1]

Even though the Comintern ceased to exist in 1943, its legacy remained visible throughout the period that the Communist regimes remained in power in Central and Eastern Europe. The establishment of the Comintern in 1919 reflected Lenin’s belief in “world revolution” meant to establish proletarian rule worldwide under the guidance of an iron-disciplined “world communist party.” The members were admonished to keep their commitment to the Leninist model of the party and the principles of “democratic centralism,” “the vanguard role of the party,” and the “dictatorship of the proletariat” without any attempt to adapt them to national conditions. The recently uncovered files in this posting, gathered from the Romanian National and Historical Archives, expand on the question of how individual members responded to these directives, revealing how the Romanian Communist Party, in particular, had been built and re-built to comply with Moscow’s edict.

It was also the Comintern that promoted the theme of international unity within the Communist ranks, a trend that would continue with the creation of the Cominform in 1947, and, after its dissolution, with the development of regular bilateral and multilateral meetings of “Communist and Workers’ Parties,” which likewise called for unity in “the revolutionary fight against the imperialists and their national cronies.”[2] Marx’s principle that “the emancipation of the workers is not a local, nor a national, but an international problem” was already enunciated in the statutes of the First International, established in 1864. Lenin dreamed of a world where capitalist regimes “which led their people to a devastated war” would soon disappear and “the peace-loving” and “just” system of Socialism “would triumph everywhere.” The documents in this posting reveal the missions assigned by the Comintern to its members which in turn highlight the antagonistic relations between so-called “revolutionary” states and the imperialist powers (in the West) or, as Robert Hager put it, the “Cold War before the Cold War.”[3]

The first congress of the Comintern did not adopt a constitution, nor did it develop the nature and task of the “world communist party” since many invited guests were not able to attend due to either travel difficulties in time of war or lack of credentials from their parties. It was agreed, though, to elect an executive committee under Grigori Zinoviev’s presidency. In the same year, the first issue of the journal The Communist International was published in Russian, German, English and French, along with the ECCI’s Information Bulletin. These publications, together with pamphlets and books containing the works of Marx, Engels and Lenin, became an important tool of ideological propaganda for all the Comintern’s “sections,” as the national members were called.

The documents in this posting also show Stalin’s thinking about the Communist movement in Europe and the role Communists should play worldwide. After he came to power, the only mission of all these national sections would be to promote and support Soviet foreign policy (see Document 2). It could not have been otherwise since the third congress of the Comintern in the summer of 1921 enforced the ECCI’s capabilities to oversee and intervene in the activities of its national sections. Crucial decisions were already taken not by the Comintern, but by the Politburo in Moscow which also approved the annual budget of the international organization. The ECCI had the task to further distribute the money among national sections. Besides the aim of ensuring centralized control, the subsidies offered to all sections were meant to nurture the international Communist movement and support embryonic Communist entities and small Communist parties to meet the Comintern’s missions which would be assigned to them.

When the Romanian Communists applied for affiliation to the Comintern in 1921, the famous document entitled “Twenty-One Conditions” had already been adopted at the Comintern’s second congress, held in Petrograd and Moscow, between 19 July and 7 August 1920. The document basically formalized the principle of democratic centralism and Soviet hegemony over the Comintern. In accordance with these conditions, before joining the Comintern, all candidates had to agree to fight against “reformism, centrism and pacifism” by removing all persons holding such views among their rank and file; to form “cells” within trade unions to capture them under party control; to make propaganda within national armies; to support the emancipation of “oppressed” nationalities and colonial people; and, above all, to support the Soviet Union in its “struggle with counter-revolutionaries.”

If, under Lenin, open debates and pluralism were encouraged to a certain degree, the issue of how far the directives received from Moscow via the Comintern were or could have been subverted by local Communists to suit national or personal interests is debatable. Possibly, leaders of mass Communist parties in Germany, France or Italy had a chance to question Moscow’s decisions or methods, but this was not the case for the Romanian Communists. The Communist Party in Romania (PCdR – Partidul Comunist din Romania), created on 8 May 1921 through the division of the Socialist Party, was almost invisible on the Romanian political stage and would remain so up to 1944. Moreover, throughout its existence, the PCdR was not able to attract new members; in fact, it was the opposite. If, in 1919, the newly born PCdR inherited from the Socialist Party around 200,000 workers enrolled in several unions, according to local newspapers it ended up with fewer than 500 members by 1923.

The situation can be explained by several factors. First, even before the creation of the PCdR, the Communist groups that formed within the Socialist Party did not evince any intention to support the working class in their claims for “liberty, bread and jobs.” The Romanian Communists were instead extremely vocal in promoting the Comintern’s idea of world revolution and the intention of affiliating the party to the Third International. Discussions had already taken place in Kharkov (Ukraine) and Moscow between Gheorghe Cristescu, the future secretary general of the PCdR, Al. Dobrogeanu Gherea, Constantin Popovici, D.Fabian, Eugen Rozvan and Ion Fluieras from the still Socialist party, and, on the other side, Cristian Rakovski, a Romanian citizen, representative of the Comintern and a former member of the Socialist Party who left the country before the creation of the PCdR and became a member of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party in Moscow. Rakovski asked the Romanian delegates to immediately transform the Socialist Party into the Communist Party, to accept the “Twenty-one Conditions” and to nominate, then and there, new members in the Executive Committee of the Socialist Party who agreed with the affiliation to the Comintern. Among those nominated, only Gheorghe Cristescu was accepted by Moscow.

In the evening of 12 May 1921, at the Socialist Club in Bucharest, the congress of the Socialist Party confirmed the creation of the PCdR. Immediately after the congress, Gheorghe Cristescu informed the ECCI that the affiliation of the PCdR to the Comintern had been decided with a majority of 428 votes and asked the international organization for guidance in the implementation of its directives (see Document 3). It is worth noting that, at the ballot held during the congress, some delegates showed reservations in voting for affiliation to the Comintern (see Document 4). They proposed a “Motion for the affiliation with reservation,” which requested the Third International to accept free critical discussions and popular control over the party’s decisions before signing onto the affiliation. These Socialists considered unacceptable the subordinate position imposed on party members by the Third International. They also rejected the Comintern’s thesis which requested Communist parties to subordinate the trade unions. They probably understood that this would affect further the party’s ability to attract workers whose preference for the Peasant Party had been already recorded.

Second, the Romanian Communists had been subject to permanent surveillance and persecution by the regal secret police – Siguranta – due to their decision to create a party affiliated to the Comintern. In the morning of 12 May 1921, the day of the congress when the PCdR was born, the Socialist Club was surrounded by gendarmery and military troops. Around 300 participants who voted for party affiliation to the Third International were arrested for “plotting against state security.” Among them were nine individuals who were still deputies of the Socialist Party, including Gheorghe Cristescu, Alexandru Doborgeanu-Gherea, and Ion Niculescu-Mizil. They would be transported to Vacaresti prison. Meanwhile, another squad of gendarmes barricaded the entrance to the offices of the party newspaper “Socialismul.” Raids were launched at the home addresses of those arrested (see Document 5). The Communists were put on trial in 1922 in what would become known famously as “The Trial in Dealu Spirii” in the official history of the Romanian Communist Party.

However, a significant blow would come in February 1924 when Gheorghe Marzescu, the minister of justice, well-known for his anti-Communist position, issued a new law regulating “legal bodies and entities,” which authorized, de facto, the disbanding of all extremist parties and organizations. Immediately, the PCdR would be outlawed for its aggressive propaganda and activities considered to be against Romanian national interests. The law made the PCdR even more invisible as the party now had to function clandestinely, using code names for its members and safehouses for their meetings.

Third, frequent quarrels among leaders of the PCdR, not only within local branches but also within the centre in Bucharest, affected the credibility of the party. For instance, in a letter sent to the ECCI in December 1923, Alexandru Badulescu, the PCdR representative at the Comintern and the organization’s rapporteur for the Balkans, asked the ECCI to send a representative to Bucharest to help with implementation of the Comintern’s last directives. He used the correspondence with the ECCI to inform the organization about the lack of discipline on the part of PCdR head Gheorghe Cristescu, who went to Paris without informing the Central Committee of the PCdR of his reasons. Badulescu warned that Cristescu’s behavior “would determine new personal conflicts within the party” (see Document 6).

The significant loss of members and the inability of the PCdR to attract new ones, along with frequent quarrels within the party, forced the Comintern to cut its subsidies in July 1923, despite the effort of party leaders to convince the organization about their intensive activity and the prospect of leading the working-class movement in Romania (see Document 7). For instance, in March 1923, Gheorghe Cristescu sent a letter to the ECCI highlighting the creation of new party branches, the increasing number of readers of the party publication, and the prospect of attracting workers by using their discontent over low incomes. Cristescu also tried to ensure that party leaders were taking the necessary measures to end quarrels within the party branches (see Document 8). In January 1924, Cristescu sent another letter to the ECCI containing the agenda and preparations for the next congress, scheduled for 23-25 February, and asking for the Comintern’s support (see Document 9). However, Cristescu’s efforts were in vain. Moreover, in September 1924, he would be replaced by Elek Koblos, leader of the Transylvanian branch, and in 1925 he would be excluded from the party for his “nationalist vision.”

Meanwhile, the Kremlin decided to create a new Communist Party for Romania under the same name of PCdR which would function in parallel with the Romanian Communist Party in Romania but have its headquarters in Kharkov and Moscow. Members of the new Communist Party for Romania were Romanian emigrants in the USSR who set up Communist organizations in Kharkov and Moscow. They had already participated at the third Congress of the Comintern, on 22 June – 12 July 1921. The next Congress of the Comintern, held in November-December 1922, was the last one where the Communist Party in Romania would be largely represented by their own leadership. At the fifth congress, on 17 June-8 July 1924, the first after Lenin’s death, only David Fabian and Ecaterina Arbore would represent the Communist Party in Romania. The rest of the delegation would be formed by members of the new Communist Party for Romania.

By 1928, the Communist Party in Romania basically ceased to exist in the Comintern’s data base. The Communist Party for Romania silently replaced it under the same name of PCdR, as mentioned above. The fourth congress of the PCdR took place not in Bucharest but in Kharkov, between 28 June and 7 July 1928, and Vitali Holostenko, member of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party, was appointed the new secretary general of the PCdR. The change in leadership produced discontent among party rank and file. The fighting between members of the Communist Party in Romania, led by Marcel Pauker, and those of the Communist Party for Romania, led by Vitali Holostenko, was significant enough to cause the Comintern to intervene. In August 1930, the ECCI issued a “special decision” called “On Unprincipled Factional Struggle and Restoration of Unity in the Communist Party of Romania,” pointing to “the factional strife, bureaucratic methods of leadership and petty-bourgeois adventurism characteristic of both opposing groups” which “weakened the party’s influence among the masses in a time when unity is needed to fight against fascism.” Holostenko would be replaced by Alexandru Stefanski, member of the Polish Communist Party, during the fifth congress of the PCdR in Moscow in December 1931. Stefanski would be replaced in 1935 by Boris Stefanov, a Bulgarian ethnic who lived in Moscow. Stefanov would head the PCdR until 1938.

Realizing that the Romanian Communist movement could not evolve without a strong party based in Romania and fed up with endless quarrels within the PCdR, Stalin decided to re-create the party under the name of the Romanian Communist Party (RCP). The party was filled only with young people with “healthy origins,” meaning they were workers. The future secretary general, Gheorghe Gheorghiu Dej, then a laborer at the Romanian National Railway, would be among the members of the new party. Despite its labor character and leadership, the RCP would not be able to attract many members from the working class either. People quickly identified the same slogans of the Comintern asking for “world revolution” in the RCP program. The fact that the RCP was successively headed by two Hungarian ethnics, Bela Brainer and Stefan Foris, did not serve the party well either. The weak results recorded by the RCP in attracting workers and in fighting against “opportunists” and “deviationists” among its rank and file had been raised by the ECCI in several meetings.

Therefore, the Romanian section of the Comintern was not particularly involved in tasks such as creating “united worker fronts” or cells within trade unions, but mostly in propaganda promoting Soviet interests, especially in connection with the re-annexation of former territories of the Tsarist Empire such as Bessarabia. Articles were published in Scanteia, the Communist newspaper, asking for the revocation of the 1918 Unification Act through which Romania was united with Bessarabia, North Bukovina, Transylvania and Banat. Support to the “masses of ethnic minorities in their will for self-determination” was solemnly promised. After the 1939 Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact was signed and the Soviet Union moved with rapidity towards the annexation of Bessarabia, Northern Bukovina and the Herta region, the RCP immediately published a Manifesto that saluted “happy Bessarabia” for its success in ending “the heavy yoke of the Romanian imperialists with the support of the Red Army.”

Other missions in which the PCdR diligently became involved were chosen from those meant to preserve the party’s position in relation to Moscow and, if possible, to increase the visibility of its leaders. The PCdR actively participated, for instance, in the Comintern’s campaign of recruiting volunteers to support the Spanish government against Franco’s rebels in 1936. Involvement in the Spanish civil war allowed some Communists to reach top positions within the RCP hierarchy after 1944, such as Petre Borila (future vice-premier between 1954-1965), Gheorghe Vasilichi (minister of education in 1948-49 and member of the Romanian Grand Assembly until 1975), Walter Roman (general and chief of staff in the Romanian Army, 1947-1951, and chief editor of Editura Politica until 1985) or Gheorge Stoica (member of the Central Committee, 1948-1974).

Expecting the official announcement about the dissolution of the Comintern in 1943, the RCP members met at the end of May of that year to discuss what to do in the absence of the Comintern’s directives. Minutes of the meeting do not exactly convey the “maturity” Stalin said that the national parties now had. Instead, they illustrate a tense atmosphere within the RCP, marked by the confusion and paranoia of some members who felt “under permanent surveillance run by Siguranta.” It turned out that their major preoccupation was in ensuring the security of their propaganda operations, meetings and safehouses. It could not have been otherwise since most of their leaders were at that time already imprisoned for “Communist agitation” in Vacaresti, Mislea, Aiud, and Caransebes prisons in Romania, or in Grosulovo gulag in Ukraine. However, within several clandestine meetings, the RCP’s members were instructed to continue their efforts to unite workers against “capitalists” and to focus on propaganda against the Germans who were now the Communists’ main enemies. There was not a word about how all this could be done nor what support they would have to carry out their missions. (see Document 10).

Understanding the situation within parties such as the RCP, which lost prominent leaders, might be a reason why Stalin was not ready to renounce strict control over them, especially at a time when the future of the European regimes was at stake following the formal dissolution of the Comintern. On 12 June 1943, a decision was taken in Stalin’s office, in the presence of Vyacheslav Molotov, minister of foreign affairs, Lavrentii Beria, head of the secret police, Aleksandr Shcherbakov, secretary of the CC, and Georgi Dimitrov, former leader of the Comintern, to create a special group of Comintern cadres, headed by Dimitrov and Dmitry Manuilsky and attached to the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, under the supervision of Shcherbakov. The creation of this group was kept secret until July 1944 when it was formally reorganized into the Department of International Information of the Central Committee. The department took over functions of the Comintern, including liaison with foreign parties, illegal radio broadcasts, the foreign-language publishing house, and the direction of “anti-fascist” committees.

In addition, three “special institutions” were established, mysteriously numbered 99, 100 and 205, staffed by former Soviet and foreign cadres of the ECCI and located in the same premises and carrying on the same work as the ECCI departments. “Institute 99” worked with German, Italian, Hungarian, and Romanian prisoners of war with the aim of training them ideologically. Some of them would be sent home after 1945 to serve at the disposal of the local Communist parties. “Institute 100” undertook many of the tasks of the ECCI Department of International Communication (OMS), maintaining radio links and other underground contacts with Communist parties. “Institute 205” undertook the tasks of the Comintern’s Press Department, keeping the Soviet leaders up to date on developments in the Communist movement abroad and maintaining a vast card index on foreign states and party leaders.

After Soviet General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev decided to shutter the Cominform in 1956, some alternatives such as regular and bilateral and multilateral meetings, as mentioned above, had been explored with the aim of continuing the coordination of the Communist movement worldwide. The Sino-Soviet split, the adventurism in Cuba that led to the 1962 missile crisis, and the 1968 military intervention in Czechoslovakia raised questions about the supremacy of Soviet power over world Communism. As early as 1969, the Soviets were forced to recognize that there was no leading center of the international Communist movement. The advocates of what Stern had called “polycentrism” had prevailed.[4]