Petre Borilă

Who was Petre Borilă?

Petre Borilă was a Romanian communist politician who briefly served as Vice-Premier under the Communist regime. A member of the Romanian Communist Party since his late teens, he was a political commissar in the Spanish Civil War and a Comintern cadre afterwards, spending World War II in exile to the Soviet Union. Borilă returned to Romania during the late 1940s, and rose to prominence under Communist rule, when he was a member of the PCR's Central Committee and Politburo.

Initially close to the faction formed around Ana Pauker and Vasile Luca, Borilă rallied with their adversary Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, thus ensuring his own political survival. He subsequently endorsed the official policies, and played a part in ousting Gheorghiu-Dej's newly found rival, Iosif Chişinevschi, but was progressively marginalized after Nicolae Ceauşescu emerged as Romania's ruler. Objecting to Ceaușescu's nationalism, he also had a notorious personal conflict with the new leader, after the latter's son Valentin married Borilă's daughter.