Teohari Georgescu

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Teohari Georgescu
Interior Minister of Romania
In office
March 6, 1945 – May 28, 1952
Preceded byNicolae Rădescu
Succeeded byAlexandru Drăghici
Personal details
Born(1908-01-31)January 31, 1908
Chitila, Ilfov County, Kingdom of Romania
DiedDecember 31, 1976(1976-12-31) (aged 68)
Bucharest, Socialist Republic of Romania
Resting placeCarol Park, Bucharest, Romania (until 1991)
Political partyRomanian Communist Party
ProfessionTypographer
Signature

Teohari Georgescu[1] (January 31, 1908 – December 31, 1976) was a Romanian statesman and a high-ranking member of the Romanian Communist Party.

Early life

Born in Chitila, near Bucharest,[2] he was the third of seven children of Constantin and Aneta Georgescu.[3] Georgescu, whose formal education ended after the fourth grade, began his career as an assistant in his father's store. In 1923, he was sent to the main printing house in Bucharest, Cartea Românească, to apprentice as a typesetter. Three years later, his father now dead, he joined the Gutenberg printers' union and secretly began to read Communist leaflets. He soon joined the Communist party, then illegal.

Underground activity

Georgescu became a member of the party's Central Committee and its secretariat, participating in secret meetings, organising strikes, and spreading leaflets. Siguranța Statului, the Kingdom of Romania's secret services, began to keep an eye on him, and he was first arrested in 1933 for authoring leaflets that were spread in the typesetters' room at Cartea Românească. A young and capable lawyer, Iosif Schraer, ensured that Georgescu was released after only two months in prison and a few beatings.

Further arrests followed; finally, after being detained in April 1941, the next month he was sentenced to ten years' imprisonment at Caransebeș. Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej named him leader of the prison's communist group before being transferred to Târgu Jiu prison in 1943.

Career peak (1944-52)

Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu, Teohari Georgescu, and Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej watching a May Day parade in Bucharest, 1946

He was released after the arrival of the

Comintern, and a special technique for writing its messages on glass.[4] In Bucharest he communicated, either directly or through Gheorghe Pintilie, with General Dmitri Fedichkin, a Soviet adviser who gave him orders to infiltrate and Sovietize the security services: Siguranța Statului (the secret police), the Gendarmerie
, and Serviciul Special de Informații (lit. "Special Intelligence Service").

Great National Assembly
in April 1951

As a reward for accomplishing this mission, Georgescu was promoted to Minister of Interior once

social democrats. As Minister of Interior he contributed to the country's denazification and later to the reorganization of the law enforcement system along the Soviet model, supervising the establishment of several penal colonies and coordinating a dekulakization campaign. Georgescu was also instrumental in setting up the administrative divisions of the Romanian People's Republic on the Soviet model.[4] Along with Gheorghiu-Dej, Pauker, and Vasile Luca
, he was considered one of leaders directing the new regime's policy, as highlighted by the popular epigram "Ana, Luca, Teo, Dej / Bagă spaima în burgheji" (Ana, Luca, Teo[hari], Dej / Put the fear into the bourgeois").

Fall from grace 1952

In January 1952,

Comintern's suggestion in 1940 that Georgescu be made General Secretary kept Gheorghiu-Dej wary of his influence. Furthermore, as Luca and Pauker began to fall from grace in early 1952 (their fate having been decided in Moscow), he made the mistake of standing by them. Initially "assigned to work at a lower level", he was arrested on February 18, 1953, and investigated by his former subordinates at the Securitate for three years. At one point, his wife and two children (one of them an infant) were arrested in order to induce him to give evidence against Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu
. He confessed guilt to all charges, but was nevertheless released in April 1956.

Georgescu returned to his old workplace, Cartea Românească, now called "Întreprinderea 13 Decembrie", first working as a proofreader and then being appointed manager before retiring in 1963.

Rehabilition under Ceaușescu (1968–1974)

After

Romanian Revolution of 1989
.

Notes

  1. ^ A number of authors on the far-right claimed that he was a Jew named Burach Tescovici (or a similar name), but he was baptised into the Romanian Orthodox Church. His Securitate file however makes no assertion that he was Jewish. In a general atmosphere of hostility toward "rootless cosmopolites", the files of other Jews who had changed their names did mention their ethnic origin. His second wife, the former seamstress Eugenia Samoilă, was Jewish. See Levy, p. 340 for details.
  2. S2CID 158265104
    .
  3. ^ Oprea, Marius. "Teohari Georgescu". Archived from the original on March 3, 2016. Retrieved April 16, 2020.
  4. ^ a b Andrei, Cristian (April 23, 2022). "România în stand-by. Reforma administrativă, încremenită în modelele Stalin și Ceaușescu" (in Romanian). Europa Liberă România. Retrieved April 28, 2022.
  5. ^ Hodos, p. 103
  6. ^ Tismăneanu, p. 130

References

External links
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