Eugen Rozvan

Eugen Rozvan (Hungarian: Jenő Rozvány;^[1] Russian: Евгений Георгиевич Розвань, Evgeny Georgiyevich Rozvan; December 28, 1878—May 20, 1938) was a Hungarian-born Romanian communist activist, lawyer, and Marxist historian, who settled in the Soviet Union late in his life.

Biography

Born in Nagyszalonta (Salonta), Transylvania (part of Austria-Hungary at the time), he was of ethnic Romanian origin.^[2] Rozvan attended the University of Budapest, where he became a supporter of socialist ideals.^[3] He continued his studies in Law at the University of Berlin, and, after graduation, returned to his homeland and enrolled in the Social Democratic Party of Transylvania and Banat.^[3] Rozvan was drafted in the Austro-Hungarian Army during World War I, and fell prisoner to Imperial Russian forces on the Eastern Front, returning in 1920.^[4]

After the Aster Revolution, he was offered positions in the hierarchy of the main ethnic Romanian group, the National Romanian Party, but refused to join it and gave his support to the far left.^[3] Following the latter's success in rallying the Social Democrats to the cause of union with Romania, Rozvan became critical of his grouping, but eventually joined the Transylvanian section of the Socialist Party of Romania (PS).^[5] Instead, his brother Ştefan became a National Party local leader, and his politics clashed with those of Eugen Rozvan to the point where, as prefect of Hunedoara County, he organized the repression of the Lupeni Strike of 1929.^[2]

He was elected to a leadership position inside the PS (August 1920), and was designated to serve on its delegation to Bolshevist Russia, deciding on the issue of affiliation to the Comintern.^[6] With Ioan Flueraș, he represented the Transylvanian group (the other delegates were Gheorghe Cristescu, David Fabian, Constantin Popovici, and Alexandru Dobrogeanu-Gherea).^[7] With Rozvan's agreement and the consent of other delegates, Flueraş and Iosif Jumanca were expelled following pressures from Grigory Zinoviev and Christian Rakovsky, due to their wartime support for nationalism and objections raised to Comintern guidelines.^[8]

In the spring of 1921, he was a PS delegate from Braşov to the PS Congress that decided in favor of creating a Communist Party (PCdR) around the group's Bolshevik faction.^[9] On this occasion, Rozvan expressed his concerns that Cristescu had maintained a "minimalist position", and the two briefly engaged in a heated polemic.^[10]

Immediately after the event, Rozvan and all the PCdR notable members were arrested and implicated in the Dealul Spirii Trial (in connection with the violent actions of Max Goldstein).^[9] All those indicted were freed on July 4, 1922, through the amnesty ordered by King Ferdinand I.^[9]

Rozvan remained active inside the outlawed Communist Party, was elected deputy member of its Central Committee by the Second Congress (October 1922),^[11] and helped organize the party's umbrella group, the Workers and Peasants' Bloc, in the region around Oradea (1926–1931).^[9] With Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu, Imre Aladar, and two others, he was elected to the Chamber of Deputies on Bloc lists (May 1931).^[12]

It was during that time that he became critical of Comintern directives regarding the dissolution of Greater Romania, eventually coming into opposition with the PCdR leadership around Marcel Pauker, who accused him of "right-wing opportunism".^[13] In 1929, he was expelled from the party, without being notified of it, and his status remained uncertain for the following years.^[14]

Rozvan decided to clarify matters by presenting his cause to Soviet authorities, and fled to Moscow by illegally crossing the Soviet-Romanian border in Bessarabia.^[15] Readmitted to the PCdR in 1934,^[16] he was employed by Eugen Varga at the Lomonosov University Institute of the World Economy and the World Politics, becoming noted as a scholar of Italian fascism (the subject of his 1937 Ph.D. thesis, which was used as a textbook).^[17] In the opinion of Vladimir Tismăneanu, Rozvan's critique of fascism also alluded to the consequences of Stalinism inside the communist movement.^[12]

Rozvan became a victim of the Great Purge: arrested on December 16, 1937, denounced through the forced confessions of other prisoners, he was indicted in a kangaroo trial,^[18] and officially sentenced to ten years in prison.^[16] He was, however, executed soon after, based on an unpublicized sentence.^[19]

Rehabilitation

For the following years, Rozvan's fate was the topic of investigations by Comintern leader Georgi Dimitrov, who called on the NKVD to account for his whereabouts.^[16] During De-Stalinization in the 1950s, he was rehabilitated inside the Soviet Union; the Romanian Communist regime followed suit only a decade later, in 1968, when Nicolae Ceauşescu used the questioning of previous policies to justify his own grip on power.^[20]

In 1971, a biography of Rozvan was published in Communist Romania, making him one of the few Communist leaders who enjoyed such an honor during Ceauşescu's regime.^[21]

Notes

References

• (Hungarian) D. E. "Romániai magyar irodalmi lexikon I-IV. kötet (A-R)". Retrieved 2007-01-28. 
• "Fişe biografice" ("Biographical Charts"), in Dosarele Istoriei, 10/1998
• "Letter and supporting materials from Dimitrov to Merkulov requesting a review of the cases of E. O. Valter, A. L. Khigerovich (Razumova) and seventeen arrested political emigrés" (Document 59, 28 February 1941), in Annals of Communism at Yale University
• (Romanian) Cristina Arvatu, "Călători spre moarte" ("Travelers onto Death"), in Jurnalul Naţional, February 28, 2005
• Adrian Cioroianu, Pe umerii lui Marx. O introducere în istoria comunismului românesc ("On the Shoulders of Marx. An Incursion into the History of Romanian Communism"), Editura Curtea Veche, Bucharest, 2005
• (Romanian) Cristina Diac, "Delegaţii socialişti români la Moscova" ("Romanian Socialist Delegates in Moscow"), in Jurnalul Naţional, October 7, 2004
• Vladimir Tismăneanu, Stalinism for All Seasons: A Political History of Romanian Communism, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2003, ISBN 0-520-23747-1