Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu (Romanian pronunciation: [luˈkretsju pətrəʃˈkanu]; 4 November 1900 – 17 April 1954) 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.
Pătrășcanu was born in Bacău to a leading political family, as the son of Poporanist figure Dimitrie D. Pătrășcanu (Lucrețiu's mother, Lucreția, was a scion of the Stoika family of Transylvanian petty nobility). He became a Poporanist and later a socialist in his youth, joining the Socialist Party of Romania in 1919, and working as editor of its newspaper, Socialismul (1921). Professionally, he was educated at the University of Bucharest's Faculty of Law, from which he graduated in 1922, and at Leipzig University, earning his PhD in 1925.
He had an intense journalistic activity. Collaborator in numerous newspapers, where he published his articles under various pseudonyms: M Andreescu; Bercu; R. Boldur; Coca; V. Dragomir; Fischer; Ghiță; Grigorescu; Ion. C. Ion; N. Lascenco; Mihalcea; Miron; Victor Mălin; A. Moldoveanu; Andrei Moldoveanu; L. D. Pătrășcanu; Stătescu; Titu; Vrabie and with the initials A. M and L. D. P.
Increasingly radical after the success of the October Revolution, he was one of the original members of the PCR (known as PCdR at the time) in 1921. Pătrășcanu, Elek Köblös, and Ana and Marcel Pauker were the representatives of the group to the 4th Comintern Congress in Moscow (November–December 1922). Back in Romania, Pătrășcanu was arrested and imprisoned at Jilava in 1924 (the year when the party was outlawed); he went on hunger strike until being relocated to a prison hospital.
At the Kharkiv Congress of 1928, where he was present under the name Mironov, Pătrășcanu clashed with the Comintern overseer Bohumír Šmeral, as well as with many of his fellow party members, over the issue of Bessarabia and Moldovenism, which was to be passed into a resolution stating that Greater Romania was an imperialist entity. Pătrășcanu argued:
Moldovans are not a nation apart and—from a historical and geographical point of view—Moldovans are the same Romanians as the Romanians in Moldavia [on the right bank of the Prut River]. Thus, I believe that the introduction of such a false point renders the resolution itself false.
With Imre Aladar, Eugen Rozvan, and two others, Pătrășcanu was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in May 1931 as a candidate for the Workers and Peasants' Bloc, an umbrella group masking the outlawed party. Later in the same year, the 5th Party Congress (held in Soviet exile, at Gorikovo), chose him among the new Central Committee members while Alexander Stefanski rose to the position of general secretary.
In 1932, he was involved in polemics at the Criterion group, where he and his collaborator Belu Zilber defended a Stalinist view of Vladimir Lenin in front of criticism from the right-wing Mircea Vulcănescu and Mihail Polihroniade, as well as from the Austromarxist perspective of Henri H. Stahl.
Pătrășcanu again served as the PCdR's representative to the Comintern in 1933, and 1934 (remaining in Moscow until 1935); Stelian Tănase argues that during this time he developed doubts about Stalinism itself. During the following years, Pătrășcanu continued to prioritize opposition to fascism, and remained active in the PCR. In 1936, he was heading the defense team of PCR members who were facing the much-publicized Craiova Trial, but was himself denounced as a communist and consequently handed the position to Ion Gheorghe Maurer.
Pătrășcanu was imprisoned during World War II and, after August 1940, spent time at the Târgu Jiu internment camp with Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej and the "prison faction" of the Party (the communists inside Romania, virtually all imprisoned at various stages of the war, as opposed to those who had taken refuge inside the Soviet Union).
Like his fellow activist Scarlat Callimachi, he was set free by the National Legionary Government while the fascist Iron Guard, which allied Romania with Nazi Germany, was trying to preserve good relations with the Soviet Union. He subsequently followed orders from Teohari Georgescu to re-create a defunct outlet of the party, the cultural society Amicii URSS ("Friends of the USSR").
In 1941, following the Legionary Rebellion, he was again arrested by the regime of Conducător Ion Antonescu. After a release from camp for health reasons in 1943, he was under house arrest in Poiana Țapului; allowed to settle in Bucharest later in that year, he remained under supervision until May 1944.
1944 negotiations and fall of Foriș
According to Ioan Mocsony Stârcea, marshal of King Michael I's court between 1942 and 1944, he met Pătrășcanu in April 1944 in order to mediate an agreement between the monarch and the Communists regarding a pro-Allied move to overthrow Antonescu and withdraw Romania, which was fighting the Soviets on the Eastern Front, from the Axis.
Pătrășcanu (together with Emil Bodnăraș) represented the Communist Party during the clandestine talks with the National Liberal and National Peasants' parties, aimed at overthrowing the Antonescu dictatorship. Corneliu Coposu, who later claimed had friendly contacts with Pătrășcanu at the time, also claimed that the latter had been selected by the Soviets as representative of the Communists (during negotiations in Cairo, Nikolai Novikov, the Soviet ambassador to Egypt, had reportedly first mentioned Pătrășcanu's name to Barbu Știrbey for further contacts). It was also at this time that Gheorghiu-Dej and Bodnăraș, together with Constantin Pîrvulescu and Iosif Rangheț, toppled the general secretary Ștefan Foriș, and assumed leadership of the party (Gheorghiu-Dej had probably attracted Pătrășcanu's support for the planned move as early as 1943).
According to Mocsony Stârcea, Pătrășcanu was responsible for a compromise between the Communist Party and institutions of the Romanian monarchy (allegedly assuring the king that it was not his party's intent to proclaim a republic without a previous referendum on the matter). Coposu also claimed that, through Pătrășcanu, the Communist Party had entered negotiations with the other opposition groups and informed them of abandoning its previous theses of the future Romanian state.
23 August and government position
The collaboration led to the arrest of Ion Antonescu and Mihai Antonescu at the Royal Palace in Bucharest, during the 23 August Coup (1944). Pătrășcanu (together with Belu Zilber) authored the proclamation to the country which the king read on National Radio immediately after the coup, and, confronting the new Premier Constantin Sănătescu, imposed himself as a PCR representative on the delegation that signed Romania's armistice with the Soviets, on 12 September 1944. Present in Moscow, he contacted Ana Pauker and Vasile Luca through their overseer Andrey Vyshinsky, reestablishing communication between the two major sections of the PCR. Pătrășcanu joined the Central Committee in 1945—after having returned to Romania with the Red Army late in 1944—and was largely responsible for the success his party had in controlling Romania's legal framework for the following years.