Béla Breiner

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 (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, muted 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.