Leonte Răutu

Leonte Răutu (until 1945 Lev Nikolayevich (Nicolaievici) Oigenstein; February 28, 1910 – September 1993) was a Bessarabian-born Romanian communist activist and propagandist, who served as deputy prime minister in 1969–1972. He was chief ideologist of the Romanian Communist Party ("Workers' Party") during the rule of Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, and one of his country's few high-ranking communists to have studied Marxism from the source. Răutu was of Jewish origin, though he embraced atheism and anti-Zionism. His adventurous youth, with two prison terms served for illegal political activity, culminated in his self-exile to the Soviet Union, where he spent the larger part of World War II. Specializing in agitprop and becoming friends with communist militant Ana Pauker, he joined the Romanian section of Radio Moscow.

Răutu made his way back to Romania during the communization process of the late 1940s, and, after establishing cultural and political guidelines with his articles in Scînteia and Contemporanul, became a feared potentate of the Romanian communist regime. As head of the Communist Party's new Agitprop Section, he devised some of the most controversial cultural policies, and expanded the scope of ideological censorship, introducing practices such as "processing" and "unmasking". He managed to survive Pauker's downfall in 1952, and supervised a clampdown on her alleged followers. As Gheorghiu-Dej's assistant, he played a leading part in all the successive avatars of Romanian communism: he was a Stalinist and Zhdanovist before 1955, an anti-revisionist until 1958, and a national communist since. During this long transition, he instigated (and gave a Marxist backing to) the successive campaigns against Gheorghiu-Dej's political adversaries, selectively purged academia of suspected anti-communists, and deposed some of his own supporters. He became widely hated for his perceived lack of scruples, depicted by disgraced communist writers as "the perfect acrobat" or "Malvolio".

While maintaining influence during the late stages of Gheorghiu-Dej's rule, Răutu backed the party's "Romanianization" and came to be seen as a self-hating Jew. He preserved some of his prestige after his national-communist friend Nicolae Ceaușescu took over the party leadership, continuing and accelerating Romanianization. Răutu finally lost his Agitprop prerogatives, but remained directly involved in the supervision of cultural affairs, and received high distinctions from Ceaușescu's own hand. After his stint as Deputy Prime Minister, he became rector of the party's own Ștefan Gheorghiu Academy, and still played a part in defining the official dogmas; however, he also tolerated dissenting intellectuals, who criticized national communism from Marxist-Leninist and Neo-Marxist positions. He returned to favor in the earliest 1980s, as Ceaușescu himself fell back on a stricter interpretation of Marxism-Leninism, but was eventually deposed in 1981, as punishment for his daughter's decision to emigrate. He was kept under watch for his alleged contacts with the KGB and spent the rest of his life in relative obscurity, witnessing the fall of communism in 1989.