Iosif Chişinevschi

Iosif Chișinevschi (1905–1963), born Iosif Roitman, was a Romanian communist politician. The leading ideologue of the Romanian Communist Party (PCR) from 1944 to 1957, he served as head of its Agitprop Department from 1948 to 1952 and was in charge of propaganda and culture from 1952 to 1955. He has been described as "Moscow's right-hand man in Romania".

Chișinevschi was born to a poor Jewish family in Bassarabia, then part of the Russian Empire. Largely self-taught and a high-school dropout, he joined the PCR in 1928. Arrested that year (since the PCR had been banned in 1924), he went to the Soviet Union upon his release in 1930. He attended the Comintern's International Lenin School (his only ideological training) and was a participant at the Vth PCR Congress, held in Gorikovo near Moscow in December 1931. The Comintern delegates to the congress, Béla Kun and Dmitry Manuilsky, sponsored his election to the PCR central committee. He had personal connections within the Soviet secret police, of which he was an agent (which he remained through the 1950s), infiltrating the PCR hierarchy’s upper ranks.

Chișinevschi came back to Romania with instructions from Moscow, helping to reorganize the Agitprop Department, the PCR’s propaganda nucleus. During the party's years of underground activity, he helped orient it toward Bolshevism (specifically Stalinism). He shunned real intellectual problems and the debates of the Marxist left, instead idolizing Joseph Stalin. He was most influenced by the latter’s The Problems of Leninism, a sort of thumbnail sketch of revolutionary theory; once he had read the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks) Short Course, with its blatant falsifications, he looked no further than Stalin for ideological guidance. A devoted Comintern man, he was unconcerned with Romania’s cultural and political history and context.

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