Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu (; November 4, 1900 – April 17, 1954) was a Romanian communist politician and leading member of the Communist Party of Romania (PCR), also noted for his activities as a lawyer, sociologist and economist. For a while, he was a professor at the University of Bucharest. Pătrășcanu rose to a government position before the end of World War II and, after having disagreed with Stalinist tenets on several occasions, eventually came into conflict with the Romanian Communist government of Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej. He became a political prisoner and was ultimately executed. Fourteen years after Pătrășcanu's death, Romania's new communist leader, Nicolae Ceaușescu, endorsed his rehabilitation as part of a change in policy. Early life Pătrășcanu was born in Bacău to a leading political family, as the son of Poporanist figure Dimitrie D. Pătrășcanu (Lucrețiu's mother, Lucreția, was a scion of the Stoika family of Transylvanian petty nobility). He became a Poporanist and later a socialist in his youth, joining the Socialist Party of Romania in 1919, and working as editor of its newspaper, Socialismul (1921). Professionally, he was educated at the University of Bucharest's Faculty of Law, from which he graduated in 1922, and at Leipzig University, earning his PhD in 1925. He had an intense journalistic activity. Collaborator in numerous newspapers, where he published his articles under various pseudonyms: M Andreescu; Bercu; R. Boldur; Coca; V. Dragomir; Fischer; Ghiță; Grigorescu; Ion. C. Ion; N. Lascenco; Mihalcea; Miron; Victor Mălin; A. Moldoveanu; Andrei Moldoveanu; L. D. Pătrășcanu; Stătescu; Titu; Vrabie and with the initials A. M and L. D. P. Increasingly radical after the success of the October Revolution, he was one of the original members of the PCR (known as PCdR at the time) in 1921. Pătrășcanu, Elek Köblös, and Ana and Marcel Pauker were the representatives of the group to the 4th Comintern Congress in Moscow (November–December 1922). Back in Romania, Pătrășcanu was arrested and imprisoned at Jilava in 1924 (the year when the party was outlawed); he went on hunger strike until being relocated to a prison hospital. At the Kharkiv Congress of 1928, where he was present under the name Mironov, Pătrășcanu clashed with the Comintern overseer Bohumír Šmeral, as well as with many of his fellow party members, over the issue of Bessarabia and Moldovenism, which was to be passed into a resolution stating that Greater Romania was an imperialist entity. Pătrășcanu argued: Moldovans