Vitali Holostenco


Vitali Holostenco or Holostenko was a Romanian and Soviet communist politician. He used several pseudonyms, among which were Barbu and Petrulescu.

Early life

Born in Izmail, Bessarabia Governorate in the Russian Empire, he was a student in Bucharest during the 1920s. Holostenco joined the Socialist Party of Romania and was one of the members to vote for its transformation into the Socialist-Communist Party in May 1921. He was immediately arrested alongside the new formation's leadership, and faced prosecution in the Dealul Spirii Trial, being detained in Iaşi for the following year.
Upon his release, he fled to the Soviet Union, becoming the protégé of Christian Rakovsky, and climbed in the hierarchy of the Communist Party of Ukraine. His return to Romania is still mysterious - in 1927, Holostenco was already general secretary of the Romanian party. The emerging Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had taken care to tighten his grip on the select group of Romanian leaders, trusting Vitali Holostenco to enforce the Comintern thesis on the Romanian state's heterogeneous character. Reaction to this goal had already provoked a crisis within the Party: in 1924, Gheorghe Cristescu had left the PCdR without its leadership after being expelled for refusing to take the directives.

Political role

Holostenco could not finish the assignment of unifying the Romanian prison faction with the group inside the Soviet Union. More attached to the latter, he faced the virulent opposition of Marcel Pauker. Pauker had been involved in countless political battles inside Romania, and aimed at being the next general secretary. Stalin decided to reject both options, and called Marcel Pauker to the Soviet Union, while replacing Holostenco with Alexander Stefanski.
Holostenco was recalled in 1931, and was executed during the Great Purges. The charges brought against him are not known, but several things would have made Holostenco an unlikely survivor. Beside his association with Rakovsky, he had become of no use to Stalin after the Popular Front doctrine re-oriented the Comintern.