The Romanian Communist Party was a communist party in Romania. Successor to the pro-Bolshevik wing of the Socialist Party of Romania, it gave ideological endorsement to a communist revolution that would replace the social system of the Kingdom of Romania. After being outlawed in 1924, the PCR remained a minor and illegal grouping for much of the interwar period, and submitted to direct Comintern control. During the 1920s and 1930s, most of its activists were imprisoned or took refuge in the Soviet Union, which led to the creation of competing factions which at times came in open conflict. This did not prevent the party from participating in the political life of the country through various front organizations, most notably the Peasant Workers' Bloc. The Communist Party emerged as a powerful actor on the Romanian political scene in August 1944, when it became involved in the royal coup that toppled the pro-Nazi government of Ion Antonescu. With support from Soviet occupational forces, the PCR was able to pressure King Michael I into abdicating, and establish the Romanian People's Republic in December 1947.
Ana Pauker was a Romanian communist leader and served as the country's foreign minister in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Ana Pauker became the world's first female foreign minister when entering office in December 1947. She was also the unofficial leader of the Romanian Communist Party immediately after World War II.
Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu was a Romanian communist politician and leading member of the Communist Party of Romania (PCR), also noted for his activities as a lawyer, sociologist and economist. For a while, he was a professor at the University of Bucharest. Pătrășcanu rose to a government position before the end of World War II and, after having disagreed with Stalinist tenets on several occasions, eventually came into conflict with the Romanian Communist government of Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej. He became a political prisoner and was ultimately executed. Fourteen years after Pătrășcanu's death, Romania's new communist leader, Nicolae Ceaușescu, endorsed his rehabilitation as part of a change in policy.
Vasile Luca was an Austro-Hungarian-born Romanian and Soviet communist politician, a leading member of the Romanian Communist Party (PCR) from 1945 and until his imprisonment in the 1950s. Noted for his activities in the Ukrainian SSR in 1940–1941, he sided with Ana Pauker during World War II, and returned to Romania to serve as the minister of finance and one of the most recognizable leaders of the Communist regime. Luca's downfall, coming at the end of a conflict with Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, signaled that of Pauker.
Gheorghe Cristescu was a Romanian socialist and, for a part of his life, communist militant. Nicknamed "Plăpumarul", he is also occasionally referred to as "Omul cu lavaliera roșie", after the most notable of his accessories.
Elek Köblös was an Austro-Hungarian-born Hungarian and Romanian communist activist and political leader. He was also known by the pseudonyms Balthazar, Bădulescu, and Dănilă. He served as general secretary of the Romanian Communist Party from 1924 to 1927 and was executed in the Soviet Union during the Great Purge.
Marcel Pauker was a Romanian communist militant and husband of the future Romanian Communist leader Ana Pauker.
Max Goldstein (1898–1924), also known as Coca, was a Romanian revolutionary, variously described as a communist and an anarchist.
Miron Constantinescu was a Romanian communist politician, a leading member of the Romanian Communist Party, as well as a Marxist sociologist, historian, academic, and journalist. Initially close to Communist Romania's leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, he became increasingly critical of the latter's Stalinist policies during the 1950s, and was sidelined together with Iosif Chișinevschi. Reinstated under Nicolae Ceauşescu, he became a member of the Romanian Academy.
Eugen Rozvan was a Hungarian-born Romanian communist activist, lawyer, and Marxist historian, who settled in the Soviet Union late in his life.
Alexandru Nicolschi was a Romanian communist activist, Soviet agent and officer, and Securitate chief under the Communist regime. Active until 1961, he was one of the most recognizable leaders of violent political repression.
Boris Stefanov Mateev was a Romanian communist politician, who served as general secretary of the Romanian Communist Party from 1936 to 1940.
The Socialist Party of Romania was a Romanian socialist political party, created on December 11, 1918 by members of the Social Democratic Party of Romania (PSDR), after the latter emerged from clandestinity. Through its PSDR legacy, the PS maintained a close connection with the local labor movement and was symbolically linked to the first local socialist group, the Romanian Social-Democratic Workers' Party. Its creation coincided with the establishment of Greater Romania in the wake of World War I; after May 1919, it began a process of fusion with the social democratic groups of in the former territories of Austria-Hungary — the Social Democratic Parties of Transylvania, Banat and Bukovina. The parties adopted a common platform in October 1920. Progressively influenced by Leninism, the PS became divided between a maximalist majority supporting Bolshevik guidelines and a reformist-minded minority: the former affiliated with the Comintern as the Socialist-Communist Party in May 1921, while the minority eventually established a new Romanian Social Democratic Party.
Ion Vincze was a Romanian communist politician and diplomat. An activist of the Romanian Communist Party (PCR), he was married to Constanța Crăciun, herself a prominent member of that party.
Petre Borilă was a Romanian communist politician who briefly served as Vice-Premier under the Communist regime. A member of the Romanian Communist Party (PCR) since his late teens, he was a political commissar in the Spanish Civil War and a Comintern cadre afterwards, spending World War II in exile in the Soviet Union. Borilă returned to Romania during the late 1940s, and rose to prominence under Communist rule, when he was a member of the PCR's Central Committee and Politburo.
Mihail Roller was a Romanian communist activist, historian and propagandist, who held a rigid ideological control over Romanian historiography and culture in the early years of the communist regime. During his training in engineering, he rallied with the communist cells in Romania and abroad, joining the Romanian Communist Party while it was still an underground group. He collaborated with the Agitprop leaders Leonte Răutu and Iosif Chișinevschi, spent time in prison for his communist activity, and ultimately exiled himself to the Soviet Union, where he trained in Marxist historiography.
Alexandru Drăghici was a Romanian communist activist and politician. He was Interior Minister in 1952 and from 1957 to 1965, and State Security Minister from 1952 to 1957. In these capacities, he exercised control over the Securitate secret police during a period of active repression against other Communist Party members, anti-communist resistance members and ordinary citizens.
Leonte Răutu was a Bessarabian-born Romanian communist activist and propagandist. He was chief ideologist of the Romanian Communist Party during the rule of Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, and one of his country's few high-ranking communists to have studied Marxism from the source. His adventurous youth, with two prison terms served for illegal political activity, culminated in his self-exile to the Soviet Union, where he spent the larger part of World War II. Specializing in agitprop and becoming friends with communist militant Ana Pauker, Răutu made his way back to Romania during the communization process of the late 1940s, and became a feared potentate of the Romanian communist regime. As head of the Communist Party's new Agitprop Section, he devised some of the most controversial cultural policies, and managed to survive Pauker's downfall in 1952.
Dealul Spirii Trial was a political trial conducted by a military tribunal in the Kingdom of Romania. 271 members of the Communist Party of Romania were accused of treason after voting for the inclusion of the party into the Third International. The defendants were convicted and later pardoned.
The 1936 Craiova Trial was a political trial of some members of the Romanian Communist Party, part of the repression of communists in the Kingdom of Romania, judged by a military tribunal in Craiova.
