Gheorghe Apostol

Gheorghe Apostol

Gheorghe Apostol (born May 16, 1913 in Tudor Vladimirescu , Galați district , † August 21, 2010 in Bucharest ) was a Romanian politician and diplomat .

biography

Promotion to General Secretary of the PCR

The son of a railroad worker worked as a railroad worker from 1927 to 1931 after attending elementary school and the technical school of the Romanian State Railways Căile Ferate Române . In 1934 he became a member of the Romanian Communist Party ( Romanian Partidul Comunist Român , PCR) and imprisoned shortly afterwards for participating in the Grivița railway strike . He was then chairman of the Communist Youth Union and was arrested again in 1936. After the subsequent conviction , he was imprisoned between 1937 and 1944 . During his imprisonment in the Târgu Jiu concentration camp , he met other PCR politicians such as Emil Bodnăraş , Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej and Chivu Stoica, as well as other later members of the party's political bureau. He was released from custody in April 1944.

After the Second World War he was president of the General Conference of Workers ( Romanian Confederației Generale a Muncii ) from 1945 to 1952 . As such, he became a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee (ZK) of the PCR in 1948 , of which he was a member until 1969. Together with Bodnăraș, Gheorghiu-Dej and Stoica, he was one of the supporters of the arrest of Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu in 1948 , who was the first Communist Party leader to protest against the methods of exploitation of the Soviets after the war.

Between 1952 and 1954 he was First Vice President of the Council of Ministers in the government of Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej. Subsequently, on April 20, 1954, he was elected as the successor to Gheorghiu-Dej as Secretary General of the Central Committee of the PCR and thus party leader. As early as September 30, 1955, after internal party disagreements, he had to hand this office back to Gheorghiu-Dej and instead took over the post of chairman of the Central Council of Trade Unions ( Romanian Consiliului Central al Sindicatelor ) until 1961 .

Disempowerment and critic of Ceaușescu

On March 21, 1961 he was again First Vice-President of the Council of Ministers and held this office in the government of Prime Minister Ion Gheorghe Maurer until 1967. Then he was again chairman of the Central Trade Union Confederation ( Romanian Uniunii Generale a Sindicatelor din România ) until 1969 . This was followed in 1969 by the appointment of General Director of the General Directorate for State Reserves ( Romanian Direcției Generale a Rezervelor de Stat ). From April 7, 1969 to May 4, 1970, he was a member of the Executive Committee of the Central Committee of the PCR and a member of the Defense Council of the Socialist Republic of Romania .

After he had to relinquish this office to the Deputy Prime Minister Gheorghe Rădulescu after a little more than a year because of differences of opinion with the Secretary General of the PCR Nicolae Ceaușescu , he was finally dismissed on March 13, 1975 because of "deviations from morality " as Director General of the State Reserves.

Two years later he was appointed ambassador and was accredited as such in Argentina , Uruguay and then in Brazil until 1988 . After he had recently been critical of the Ceaușescu regime as ambassador to Brazil , he was finally dismissed as ambassador in 1988.

On March 11, 1989, he was alongside other politicians such as Alexandru Bârlădeanu , Silviu Brucan , Corneliu Mănescu , Constantin Pîrvulescu and Grigore Răceanu author of an open letter to Ceaușescu, in which they expressed their criticism of the dictator's rule. He was then placed under house arrest on charges of foreign espionage and imperialist propaganda . In the course of the Romanian Revolution , he was liberated on December 22, 1989 after the fall of Ceausescu.

Web links

• Gheorghe Apostol in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely available)
• rulers.org

Individual evidence

1. ↑ http://www.romanialibera.ro/actualitate/eveniment/a-murit-fostul-lider-comunist-gheorghe-apostol-197130.html
2. ↑ spiegel.de , Der Spiegel : Eastern Bloc / Romania: Tarzan from Temeschwar , (No. 36/1968)
3. ↑ The composition of the Defense Council of the SRR ( Memento of the original from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.