Alexandru Nicolschi (born Boris Grünberg, his chosen surname was often rendered as Nikolski or Nicolski; , ; June 2, 1915 – April 16, 1992) was a Romanian communist activist, Soviet agent and officer, and Securitate chief under the Communist regime. Active until 1961, he was one of the most recognizable leaders of violent political repression.
Biography
Early life Born to a Jewish family in Tiraspol, on the eastern bank of the Dniester river (part of Russian Empire at the time), he was the son of Alexandru Grünberg, a miller.Bălteanu, p. 46 His family relocated to Chișinău shortly after the union of Bessarabia with Romania. In 1932, he joined the local section of the Romanian Union of Communist Youth, a wing of the Romanian Communist Party (PCdR);Bălteanu, p. 46; Deletant, p. 19 in 1933, due to his political activities, he was arrested and held for two weeks by the Romanian secret police, Siguranța Statului.Deletant, p. 19 Later in the 1930s, as associates of General Secretary Vitali Holostenco, he and Vasile Luca were elected to the internal Politburo (which was doubled by a controlling body inside the Soviet Union).Tismăneanu, p. 93 In 1937, he joined the ranks of the Moscow-controlled PCdR. He did his military service in the Signals Regiment of Iași in 1937–39,Deletant, p. 19; Miruna Munteanu being discharged with the rank of corporal.Miruna Munteanu He subsequently worked for the telephone exchange in Chișinău.
In December 1940, following the onset of the Soviet occupation of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, Grünberg became a Soviet citizen,Bălteanu, p. 47 joined the NKVD, and trained as a spy in Chernivtsi (Cernăuți).Adameșteanu; Deletant, p. 19; Bălteanu, p. 46-47; Tismăneanu, p. 45, 297 He was sent undercover into Romania on May 26, 1941, carrying papers with the name Vasile Ștefănescu, in order to report on Romanian Army movements in preparation for Operation Barbarossa (the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany, in which Romanian troops, under the command of Marshal Ion Antonescu, participated; see Romania during World War II).Bălteanu, p. 47; Deletant, p. 19 He was apprehended by Romanian border guards after just two hours (according to subsequent reports, he was given away by the fact that he could not express himself in Romanian). His case was investigated June 6–12 by the Special Investigations Service's Lieutenant Colonel Emil Velciu; Nicolschi confessed he had been recruited into Soviet intelligence by NKVD Captain Andreev. After a short trial, he was sentenced to life imprisonment and hard labor on August 7, 1941.Bălteanu, p. 47; Deletant, p. 19; Miruna Munteanu He was sent to prison in Ploiești, and then Aiud, where other Soviet spies, such as Vladimir Gribici and Afanasie Șișman, were also held. It was during the time that he began using his adopted name and passed himself off as an ethnic Russian.
Detective Corps
He was set free by the Red Army occupying Romania on August 28, 1944, and benefited from a general amnesty.Adameșteanu; Frunză, p. 150 In October, Nicolschi was incorporated into the police force, becoming an inspector,Bălteanu, p. 47; Deletant, p. 19; Pop, "Antanta extremelor...", p. 36; Tudor & Pavelescu while, in parallel, he rose rapidly through the ranks of the PCR. In May 1945, just after the end of World War II in Europe, he was present in Moscow, where he was entrusted with the task of transporting Ion Antonescu and his group of collaborators (Mihai Antonescu, Constantin Pantazi, , and others, all of whom had been captured by the Soviets) from Lubyanka back to Romania.Tudor & Pavelescu On April 9, 1946, it was he who signed the release papers when these prisoners were taken back to Romania by Soviet Lieutenant Colonel Rodin to face trial.
Under the Petru Groza Communist-controlled government, Nicolschi was appointed head of the Detective Corps. At the time, Nicolschi, together with Minister of the Interior Teohari Georgescu, was contacted by Nicolae Petrașcu, a fascist activist who oversaw the main interior branch of the Iron Guard (claiming to represent Horia Sima's exiled leadership of the movement).Enuță, p. 30-33; Aurel Dragoș Munteanu; Pop, "Antanta extremelor...", p. 35-36 Petrașcu, who had just been arrested, offered his subordinates' support for the National Democratic Front, which was an alliance controlled by the Communists (in the process, he avoided a direct mention of the Communist Party, and later carried on parallel negotiations with the opposition National Peasants' Party, PNȚ).Enuță, p. 33 Georgescu and Nicolschi agreed to the deal, and allowed Iron Guard's affiliates (the Legionaries) to emerge from the underground, awarding them identity papers and employment on the condition that they disarmed themselves. Georgescu was persuaded by Nicolschi to let Petrașcu go free;Pop, "Antanta extremelor...", p. 36 the minister later confessed that this was done on suspicion that the Iron Guard would otherwise provide support for the National Peasantist leaders: "The PNȚ's attempts, successful up to a certain extent, of attracting Legionaries into their party, [thus] giving them a legal possibility to act against the regime".Georgescu, in Pop, "Antanta extremelor...", p. 36
According to Georgescu, as a direct result of the understanding, as much as 800 Iron Guard affiliates applied for recognition, including a number of people who had "returned from Germany after August 23, 1944, having diversion as their [original] purpose".Georgescu, in Enuță, p. 33; Pop, "Antanta extremelor...", p. 37 In autumn 1945, the two Communist representatives intervened to have sizable groups of Iron Guard members set free from various labor camps,Enuță, p. 34; Pop, "Antanta extremelor...", p. 36-37 while Petrașcu was awarded a degree of liberty in resuming political contacts.Enuţă, p. 34; Aurel Dragoș Munteanu; Pop, "Antanta extremelor...", p. 36-37 On Georgescu's orders, Nicolschi drew up a list of Legionaries who had been imprisoned for lesser crimes under Ion Antonescu's regime, a document which formed the basis of pardons.Pop, "Antanta extremelor...", p. 37 Most of the newly released persons were subsequently kept under surveillance by Nicolschi and his Detective Corps. An unknown number of Petrașcu's supporters consequently joined the Communist Party, as part of a large wave of new members.Enuță, p. 34-35
Mobile Brigade Nicolschi was later assigned General Inspector of the traditional secret police, Siguranța Statului, where he and Serghei Nicolau led the will-to-be communist security force "Mobile Brigade", entrusted with silencing political opposition.Bălteanu, p. 47; Deletant, p. 19; Pacepa; Golopenția The unit, which was to become an embryo for the "Securitate", comprised an active cell of Soviet MGB envoys.Bălteanu, p. 47; Pacepa; Pop, "1950. Legația S.U.A..."; Tănase At the time, Nicolschi himself rose to the rank of colonel in the MGB.Pacepa
Together with Alexandru Drăghici, Nicolschi ordered a wave of arbitrary arrests in 1946–1947, which – according to some sources – came to mark the lives of as many as 300,000 people. He also played a role in the killing of Ștefan Foriș, who, after being toppled from his position as General Secretary, had been kept in seclusion;Golopenția it was Nicolschi who ordered Foriș' mother to be drowned in the Crișul Repede.Betea, p. 45; Golopenția In 1967, he indicated that one of his subordinates, a certain "comrade (Gavril) Birtaș" of the Oradea section, had taken the initiative: Comrade Birtaș had received the indication to talk to her and get her to return to Oradea and admit herself into an old people's home. Details of how Comrade Birtaș has accomplished the mission are not known to me.Nicolschi, in Betea, p. 45
In late 1947, after the PCR forced King Michael I to abdicate, Nicolschi escorted the latter out of the country and as far as Vienna. During May, Nicolschi, together with Marin Jianu, engineered a series of trials for sabotage, which notably implicated the industrialists Radu Xenopol and Anton Dumitru, who were accused of having destroyed their own enterprises as a means to resist nationalization.Deletant, p. 17; Golopenția
Securitate crimes After the founding of the Securitate on August 30 of that year, Lieutenant General Gheorghe Pintilie (Pantelei Bodnarenko) became the first Director of this organization. The positions of Deputy Directors went to two Major Generals Nicolschi and Vladimir Mazuru, both of whom were at the same time Soviet KGB officers;The Security Police...; Adameșteanu; Bălteanu, p. 46, 47; Golopenţia; Pacepa; Pop, "1950. Legația S.U.A..."; Tismăneanu, p. 297 nobody could be appointed to the Securitate's leadership without their approval.The Security Police... Together, they oversaw the creation of the massive Communist Romanian penal system and communist terror apparatus, starting in February 1950.Cesereanu; Pacepa; Tismăneanu, p. 43 As historian Vladimir Tismăneanu argues, this was made possible by the Soviet agents and their relations with the group around emerging Communist leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej: "if one does not grasp the role of political thugs such as the Soviet spies Pintilie Bodnarenko (Pantiușa) and Alexandru Nikolski in the exercise of terror in Romania during the most horrible Stalinist period, and their personal connections with Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej and members of his entourage, it is difficult to understand the origins and the role of the Securitate".Tismăneanu, p. 43
Upon introducing the new Securitate policies, Nicolschi presented a series of ideological imperatives, resumed in sentences such as: The rust of bureaucratism has begun to gnaw at us [that is, the Securitate]. Our apparatus cannot be gnawed at, but this is an aspect [of things turned wrong].Nicolschi, in Cesereanu
Involved in the interrogation of Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu, he ensured Soviet intervention in the proceedings, and was personally responsible for the arrest of Lena Constante. He also played a leading role in the brainwashing experiment provoked by the Communist authorities in 1949–1952 at the Pitești Prison;Cesereanu; Cioroianu, p. 317; Frunză, p. 150; Golopenția he encouraged Eugen Țurcanu to carry out the taskCioroianu, p. 317 and carried out regular inspections, during which he would ignore evidence of torture.Bacu, Chapter XXI During that time, Nicolschi also supervised the re-education of hundreds of minors at Târgșor Prison; these minors (some as young as 12) were subjected to psychological experiments and beaten with the intention of being trained in the spirit of the "Communist new man". In the inquiry preceding the show trial for sabotage at the Danube-Black Sea Canal, he led a squad of torturers that was entrusted with obtaining forced confessions from Gheorghe Crăciun and other employees.Hossu-Longin
As early as 1949, Nicolschi was arguably the first Securitate senior officer to become known for his brutality outside the Eastern Bloc. This came after a Romanian refugee to France, Adriana Georgescu-Cosmovici, recounted the manner in which, four years earlier, she had been tortured by a team of which Nicolschi was a member, and indicated that the latter had been one of the three to have threatened her with guns. She also detailed various torture methods (including vicious beatings of detainees) Nicolschi personally engaged in during interrogations at Malmaison Prison. According to a 1992 article for Cuvântul, Nicolschi ordered the murder of seven prisoners (allegedly the leaders of an anti-communist resistance movement) in transit from Gherla Prison in July 1949.Deletant, Communist Terror..., pp. 122–123.
Inner-Party conflicts and retirement