Leonte Tismăneanu

Who was Leonte Tismăneanu?

Leonte Tismăneanu was a Romanian communist activist and propagandist.

Born into a Jewish family in Soroca, Bessarabia, Russian Empire, he joined the Romanian Communist Party in the early 1930s. He engaged in illegal communist activities in Bucharest, Galaţi, Brăila and Soroca. Later, he fought as a volunteer in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War, losing his right arm at the age of 24. In 1939, Tisminetski left for the Soviet Union, where he became a student of the Moscow State Linguistic University. After the start of Operation Barbarossa, in which Romania took part, he worked with Ana Pauker, Leonte Răutu, and Vasile Luca for the Romanian language branch of Radio Moscow, first as a newsreader, then as a writer.

In 1948, Tisminetski and his family were sent to Soviet-occupied Romania, where he changed his name in 1949 to Leonte Tismăneanu, at the request of the PCR. He was named deputy director of Editura PMR, later Editura Politică, the publishing house of the Communist Party and also held the Chair of Marxism-Leninism at the University of Bucharest.