Alexandru Dobrogeanu-Gherea

Alexandru Dobrogeanu-Gherea or Alexandru Gherea (rendered in

literary critic Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea. He also used the pseudonyms

of G. Alexe and Sașa/Sasha.

Socialist activism

He was born in

Romanian Social-Democratic Workers' Party in 1910. During World War I, Gherea served in a field artillery

regiment.

He joined the

Bolshevik lines. He was twice elected to the Romanian Parliament

(in 1920 and 1922).

Communism

Dobrogeanu-Gherea was one of the Party members who had voted in favor of the transformation of the group into the Socialist-Communist Party (that soon turned into the

general secretary, as some sources claim). Arrested in December, he was released on probation in 1925, using the circumstances to make his escape to the Soviet Union, being sentenced in absentia

to ten years in prison.

Gherea took part in the July 1928 4th Party Congress in Kharkiv, returning yet again to Romania, arrested for a third time and serving time in prison, only to benefit from another amnesty, in 1929.

Victim of repression

From 1932, he lived in the Soviet Union, working as a journalist and holding official positions in the Comintern. Gherea translated some of Vladimir Lenin's works into Romanian.

Together with the majority of Romanian communists inside the Soviet Union, after attracting Joseph Stalin's suspicion, he fell victim to the Great Purge: arrested in September 1937 for "participation in a counter-revolutionary organisation", he was executed the following month in Moscow.

In April 1968, Nicolae Ceaușescu's regime chose to investigate and exonerate most of the former Party members to have died in the period, Dobrogeanu-Gherea included. A similar measure had been taken inside the Soviet state in 1956, during Nikita Khrushchev's process of de-Stalinization.

Sources

Stelian Tănase, Procesul din Dealul Spirei
Dosarele Istoriei, 10/1998