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Béla Breiner

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Romanian communist activist and politician (1896–1940) The native form of this personal name is Breiner Béla. This article uses Western name order when mentioning individuals.
Béla Breiner
Breiner c. 1940
Acting General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party
In office
1939 – 10 March 1940
Preceded byBoris Stefanov
Succeeded byȘtefan Foriș
Personal details
Born(1896-02-13)13 February 1896
Nagyvárad (Oradea), Transleithania, Austria-Hungary
Died10 March 1940(1940-03-10) (aged 44)
Bucharest, Kingdom of Romania
NationalityHungarian (to 1919)
Romanian (1919–1940)
Other political
affiliations		Social Democratic Party of Hungary (1912–1919)
SpouseParaschiva Abraham
Children1
OccupationMetallurgist
NicknameOrlov
Military service
Allegiance Austria-Hungary
 Soviet Hungary
Branch/serviceHungarian Landwehr
Battles/warsWorld War I
Hungarian–Romanian War

Béla Breiner, also rendered as Bela Brainer (13 February 1896 – 10 March 1940), was an Austro-Hungarian-born communist activist, who served as acting general secretary of the Romanian Communist Party (PCR or PCdR) during the early stages of World War II. The scion of a Hungarian Jewish and working-class family, he was child laborer who acquired skills in metallurgy, moving from his native Nagyvárad (Oradea) to Budapest. Breiner was also involved in the labor unrest, and joined the Social Democratic Party of Hungary at age sixteen. His contribution in the field of socialist propaganda made him a political suspect by the time of World War I, and he was punished with conscription into the Hungarian Landwehr—though he continued to proselytize among his fellow soldiers. Breiner was enthusiastic about the Aster Revolution, and went on to fight for the Hungarian Soviet Republic, resulting in his brief imprisonment by the Romanian Land Forces during the expedition of 1919.

Breiner settled in Greater Romania after the Hungarian defeat, and involved himself in organizing the general strike of 1920. He was then a founding member of the PCR, opting to preserve his membership after the group had been outlawed, and then emerging as its regional head in Crișana. In 1926, shortly after joining the central committee, he was arrested by the Romanian authorities, and reportedly tortured. A tribunal sentenced him to a five-years term in prison, which he served at Doftana. Upon release, he traveled clandestinely into the Soviet Union, where he participated in the PCR's fifth congress—which confirmed his own induction by the party secretariat, as well as his role in editing Scînteia, the underground newspaper. While engaged with masterminding the strike action at Grivița, he was again picked up by the Romanian authorities, who had uncovered a Comintern network that was sponsoring the PCR. Breiner benefited from a more lenient regime, at Văcărești, and was thereafter involved in a campaign to improve prison conditions across the country.

The PCR had by then been largely neutralized, and had effectively lost its general secretary, Boris Stefanov, who had exiled himself in Soviet territory. From 1937, Breiner served as the senior member of a triumvirate party leadership, alongside Ștefan Foriș and Ilie Pintilie; he himself spent most of 1938 in Moscow, seeking to achieve (and finally obtaining) recognition from the Comintern. While there, he began contributing denunciations of his colleagues, which were used as justification for their extermination in the Great Purge. Himself disgraced by Soviet political realignments, Stefanov ultimately abandoned his position as general secretary in 1939, leaving Breiner to take over in a provisional capacity. He was by then seriously ill with stomach cancer, which ultimately killed him March 1940. Political homages, mutated by political circumstances during his cremation ceremony, were taken up publicly by the communist regime between 1948 and 1989. Several landmarks were named after him during that interval, when he was also publicly celebrated as a working-class hero.

Biography

Early life

Breiner was born on 13 February 1896, as a subject of the Hungarian Crown, in Nagyvárad (Oradea). Though sometimes described as having Hungarian ethnicity, he was noted by researcher Eva Țuțui as one of several far-left activists who belonged to Nagyvárad's Hungarian Jewish community. Both his parents were destitute workers in the local industry; their union also produced another son, Ludovic. At the age of twelve, Béla himself began working in a factory, training himself as a lathe operator. He was treated with cruelty by his employers, and, by the age of fourteen, had contributed to several protests of trainees against the beatings they were receiving regularly. His first place of employment was Jakab Weinberger, also in Nagyvárad. Upon being recognized as a journeyman at the age of sixteen, he could also join the trade union; shortly after, he also entered the Social Democratic Party of Hungary (MSZDP). He was immediately recognized for his skills as a propagandist.

During the earliest stages of World War I, Breiner was employed at a one of the major metallurgical plants on Csepel, in southern Budapest, and was recognized by the local branch of the MSZDP as a reliable cadre. He is said to have actively opposed the war effort, resulting in his being arrested and sent to the front. He then served in the Hungarian Landwehr and saw action in the trenches—but also continued to be active as a socialist, helping diffuse his ideology among his army comrades. The latter activity intensified after the October Revolution. Breiner also supported the Aster Revolution, joining the effort to preserve the Hungarian People's Republic and its territorial claims. Upon its transformation into a Hungarian Soviet Republic, he actively resisted the Romanian military intervention: some sources indicate that he did so out of Nagyvárad, by organizing his fellow workers, while others suggest that he was taken prisoner by the Romanian Land Forces on the front lines—but that he then managed to escape.

Breiner's native city, renamed as "Oradea" or "Oradia Mare", was attached to Greater Romania. He made his way back to the region, and rejoined the labor movement. In 1920, he helped organize a general strike among Oradea workers, as part of the nation-wide labor conflict. Breiner joined the PCR upon its creation as a legal party, in 1921. He opted to continue in its ranks when it was outlawed and repressed in 1924, and, by 1925, was its regional organizer in all of Crișana. Ștefan Foriș, who attended a high-level PCR meeting in October 1926, reports that Breiner, also present there, was co-opted on the central committee during the proceedings.

At Doftana

Breiner, tasked with organizing the communist underground in Transylvania, was arrested at Sibiu in early November 1926. Foriș claims that he had been "most certainly" betrayed by a suspected infiltrator, namely Willy Roth, and notes that his place on the central committee went to Petre Imbri. One of Breiner's official biographies claims that torturers were specially brought in from Bucharest, and that, despite being subjected to "barbaric" torments, "he never gave them any of his comrades' names". He was still tried for sedition, beginning in October 1927. At the time, the prosecution alleged that he and Eugen Fuelop had been sponsored by the Soviet Union with a "large sum of dollars". Defended by lawyers Eugen Dunca and Ilariu Popescu, Breiner denied that this was true.

Breiner was eventually sentenced to five years in prison, which he served at Doftana—where he immediately connected with other communists and took care of their political education. His biographies suggest that he was tortured and otherwise mistreated, to the point where his general health was greatly affected. He was later freed, and could help organize the PCR's fifth congress, held inside the Soviet Union in 1931. Breiner traveled clandestinely to Moscow, where he used the pseudonym "Orlov". Once welcomed there in October 1931, he also helped eleven other delegates cross the border illegally—a twelfth delegate was prevented from leaving, his cover blown by his need to address a medical emergency. In 1932, Breiner was elected a member of the PCR central committee and secretariat. In this capacity, he took charge of editing Scînteia newspaper, and also helped instigate the protest movement that became the Grivița strike of 1933.

Before the strike had broken out, Breiner himself had been detained: in April 1932, he was picked up alongside fellow activist Pavel Bojan after a sting operation on Rozelor Street, Bucharest. In May, a mandate for his arrest was upheld by the Ilfov County tribunal, which followed up on accusations that he had circulated "subversive manifestos" alongside comrades Arpad Weiss and Moscu Parlacu. He was then sentenced to another three years behind bars. This was immediately after the authorities had captured Gustav Arnold, an agent of the Comintern, who had tried to launder 1.2 million lei as funds set aside for the PCR. The investigation had pointed to Breiner and Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu as Arnold's personal contacts in the communist underground. The case against him was made during a mass trial, where lawyer Paul Moscovici represented Breiner and his co-defendant Sara Tzan, as well as several communist bill-stickers; during the proceedings, Moscovici challenged testimonies according to which Breiner had met Arnold in Berlin.

Secretariat advancement and death

Again sent to Doftana, Breiner persuaded the prison guards to let him visit with new arrivals such as Bojan. He brought them food and ensured links between them and what he termed the "leadership of the inner-prison communist committee". In December, he was transferred to a more relaxed regime at the prison-hospital of Văcărești, bunking with Foriș and Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej. Released in 1935, he appeared as a defense witness at the 1936 Craiova Trial, substantiating allegations of mistreatment and "terror" exercised against communist inmates. Foriș contends that the both of them helped obtain a more liberal regime at Doftana. With much of the party now arrested or self-exiled in Soviet territory, the Comintern intervened to depose the PCR secretariat; in May 1937, Breiner, alongside Foriș and Ilie Pintilie, received a mandate from Moscow to organize a new executive body. Within this triumvirate, he managed the clandestine regional networks, while the other two supervised legal activities by front organizations, including in the field of agitprop.

From February to December 1938, at a time when the PCR had virtually been neutralized by the Romanian authorities, Breiner was in Moscow, reporting on the PCR's activities. As noted by historian Cristian Diac, he provided mostly negative assessments of other activists, including many who had fled into the Soviet Union. Diac argues that such denunciations made Breiner complicit in the Great Purge, which decimated the Romanian communist colony in Moscow. Upon his return to Bucharest, he dedicated himself to opposing the authoritarian regime established around the National Renaissance Front (FRN), and also focused on anti-fascism. Acting as general secretary of the PCR at the time, Boris Stefanov had joined the exodus into the Soviet Union and never considered returning—leaving Breiner to replace him as provisional secretary of the rump party, acting out of various homes in Bucharest. He was again seconded by Foriș and Pintilie.

Stefanov, who could only be demoted by the Comintern, maintained some contacts with Breiner, who asked him not to send him any funds, since these were unlikely to help revive party activity. The Comintern eventually recognized Breiner as provisional general secretary in 1939, after Stefanov had been condemned by the Soviet leadership (which had just ratified the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact) for being too focused on defeating fascism. Breiner preserved that office to his death on 10 March 1940. According to early reports, he was killed off by the after-effects of his imprisonment, with his place of death given as a PCR hiding spot, or "conspiratorial house". Later research indicates that he had in fact died of a stomach cancer at Bucharest's Colentina Hospital. During his final days, unsure about who would succeed him, he had selected Gavrilă Birtaș, who seemed to qualify for the position, and had sent him the PCR archive. His widow Paraschiva "Pari" was herself Jewish and communist, as were her two sisters—one of whom, Ecaterina, was married to communist militant Petre Borilă. Béla was also survived by a three-year-old son, Andrei, who was raised by a grandmother somewhere in the countryside.

Legacy

On 12 March, Breiner was cremated at a specialized facility called Cenușa. The ceremony, closely monitored by agents of the Siguranța, was attended by several PCR figures, by Breiner's brother Ludovic, as well as by some 50 workers. One of the latter was Ovidiu Șandru, who tried to hold an impromptu speech about Breiner's activity in the labor movement—he was forced to step down by the other participants, who feared that any revolutionary message would provoke a violent response from the authorities. An obituary appeared in Scînteia of 24 April, which asserted that "his memory lives on in our hearts, in the hearts of all party members, of all Romanian laborers." Foriș was by then unofficially the interim secretary, and in May 1940 traveled to Moscow to obtain backing. The Comintern eventually became aware that the PCR had virtually no executive leadership during the great upheavals caused by the FRN's downfall and the emergence of a National Legionary State. It nominated Teohari Georgescu as the general secretary, but he declined, leaving Foriș to take up that position on a more official basis.

Breiner's contribution was revisited at various intervals by the Romanian communist regime (1948–1989). The printing company of Sonnenfeld & Friedländer was nationalized in 1948, and immediately after renamed after Breiner; the same occurred at the Volna Metallurgical Plant in Brașov. In March 1949, he was honored by the National Federation of Former Political Prisoners and Anti-fascist Deportees, which also inaugurated a "Breiner Corner" at Cenușa. In March of the following year, the Pioneer Organization formed a guard of honor at his urn, while Iosif Rangheț penned and published his biography. Also then, Andrei Breiner, who was a Pioneer at Bucharest's Lyceum No 7, published a piece honoring his father. Andrei claimed that Béla's example was inspiring him to do his best in school, but also that, during the few father–son moments in his early childhood, he had learned to love the Soviet Union and Joseph Stalin. His mother went on to marry Colonel Andrei "Bandi" Roman.

In later years, the communist press referred to Breiner Sr as a "shining example" and "fearless revolutionary militant". At the peak of Socialist Realism, his portrait was painted by Ștefan Szönyi. Apele Minerale Street in Bucharest's Dobroteasa mahala was renamed after the former party secretary in the 1950s. His ashes were eventually transported to a mausoleum in Liberty Park, and placed there alongside those of his colleagues in the communist movement. The trend was reversed after the Romanian Revolution of 1989: the Dobroteasa street was renamed after poet Ion Minulescu in January 1991, and a commemorative plaque was similarly removed. Andrei had by then become an engineer at the Chemical Engineering Institute in Bucharest, and working on a system to reduce waste in gas flares. In 1993, the family was still living in the city, in a formerly nationalized (and since litigated) house on Ion Mincu Street.

Notes

  1. ^ Maria Covaci, "Un exemplu de devotament și sacrificiu pentru cauza poporului. 75 de ani de la nașterea lui Bela Brainer", in Drum Nou, 13 February 1971, p. 4
  2. Nicoleta Ionescu-Gură, "Studiu introductiv", in Florica Dobre, Liviu Marius Bejenaru, Clara Cosmineanu-Mareș, Monica Grigore, Alina Ilinca, Oana Ionel, Nicoleta Ionescu-Gură, Elisabeta Neagoe-Pleșa, Liviu Pleșa, Membrii C.C. al P.C.R. (1945–1989). Dicționar, p. 6. Bucharest: Editura Enciclopedică, 2004. ISBN 973-45-0486-X
  3. Eva Țuțui, "Unele particularități ale evreilor din provinciile integrate", in Nicolae Cajal, Hary Kuller (eds.), Contribuția evreilor din România la cultură și civilizație, p. 90. Bucharest: Federation of Jewish Communities of Romania, 1996
  4. ^ V. Pîrvu, V. Neagu, "Un vrednic fiu al clasei muncitoare. 75 de ani de la nașterea lui Bela Brainer", in Clopotul, 16 February 1971, p. 3
  5. Burcea (2024), p. 13
  6. ^ "10 ani dela moartea lui Bela Brainer", in Opinia, 10 March 1950, p. 2
  7. ^ Ilarion Țiu, "Aliatul lui Stalin", in Jurnalul Național, 8 June 2005, p. 27
  8. Diac, p. 205
  9. Diac, p. 205
  10. "Proces comunist la Cluj", in Cuvântul, 17 October 1927, p. 2
  11. Burcea (2016), p. 38
  12. Burcea (2016), p. 38
  13. ^ Pavel Bojan, "Nu bate! Viața de zi cu zi la Doftana", in Magazin Istoric, February 1970, p. 16
  14. "Cronica judiciară. Comuniști arestați", in Epoca, 17 May 1932, p. 3
  15. Stelian Tănase, "Afacerea Agabekov. Rețeaua Cominternului", in Jurnalul Național, 1 June 2005, p. 27
  16. "Palatul Justiției. Procesul marelui grup de comuniști", in Dimineața, 22 December 1932, p. 10
  17. Diac, p. 213
  18. Diac, p. 212
  19. Diac, pp. 197, 215. See also Burcea (2016), pp. 43–44
  20. Diac, p. 215
  21. Diac, p. 196
  22. Burcea (2024), p. 13
  23. Burcea (2024), p. 13
  24. Câmpeanu, pp. 149–150
  25. Tismăneanu, p. 30
  26. ^ Andrei Breiner, "'In amintirea tatălui meu îmi iau angajamentul să învăț în așa fel încât să fiu demn de a purta numele lui'. Scrisoarea pionerului [sic] Andrei Breiner", in Crișana, 12 March 1950, p. 3
  27. Burcea (2024), p. 13
  28. Diac, pp. 196–198
  29. Câmpeanu, p. 150
  30. Diana Iancu, "Muzeul Istoriei Evreilor din Oradea. Concept și recunoștință", in Studii și Comunicări Științifice. Lucrările Sesiunii Anuale a Muzeului Județean de Istorie și Arheologie Maramureș, Vol. I, 2020, p. 332
  31. Ion R. Ionică, "Să desființăm 'cimitirele' de materiale vechi din întreprinderi! La uzinele 'Brainer Bela' din Brașov, muncitorii dau viață mașinilor aruncate la fier vechi de către vechea conducere", in Scînteia, 23 October 1948, p. 5
  32. Burcea (2024), pp. 13, 14
  33. Agerpres, "In amintirea neînfricatului luptător Bela Brainer", in Scînteia Tineretului, 12 March 1950, p. 1
  34. Tismăneanu, p. 30
  35. Tismăneanu, p. 30
  36. Al. P., "Recenzii. Artele plastice în Romînia după 23 August 1944", in Studii. Revistă de Istorie, Vol. XII, Issue 4, 1959, p. 399
  37. ^ Virgiliu Z. Teodorescu, "Note", in Gheorghe Crutzescu, Podul Mogoșoaiei. Povestea unei străzi, p. 430. Bucharest: Biblioteca Bucureștilor, 2011. ISBN 978-606-8337-19-7
  38. Mircea Florin Șandru, "Scurta poveste a unei 'piramide' și a 'faraonilor' ei (III)", in Tineretul Liber, 16 March 1990, p. 3
  39. Cronicar, "Revista revistelor. Străzile poeților", in România Literară, Issue 1/1991, p. 24
  40. Florin Condurățeanu, "Organizare, modernizare, răspundere. Faclele nu mai ard gazul!", in Flacăra, Vol. XXXVI, Issue 13, March 1987, p. 4. See also Tismăneanu, pp. 30–31
  41. "Lista cu o parte din imobilele naționalizate", in Revista 22, Vol. IV, Issue 48, December 1993, p. 8

References

General Secretaries of the Romanian Communist Party
Party symbol
Italics indicate interim officeholders.
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