Gheorghe Pintilie

Gheorghe Pintilie (born Panteley Timofiy Bodnarenko, ; also rendered as Pintilie Bodnarenco, nicknamed Pantiușa; November 9, 1902 – August 21, 1985) was a Soviet and Romanian intelligence agent and political assassin, who served as first head of the Securitate (1948–1958).

Born as a subject of the Russian Empire in Tiraspol, he was briefly employed as a manual laborer, and trained as a locksmith, before joining the Red Army cavalry and seeing action in the Russian Civil War.

The Bodnarenkos were from Tiraspol, in the Russian Empire's Kherson Governorate (now in Transnistria, Moldova), where Panteley was born on November 9, 1902.

They had a proletarian status: Panteley's father was a shoemaker; Panteley himself began working in a woodworking plant at the age of eleven, switching to a foundry some two years later.

In 1915, he had trained as a locksmith in Odessa, which remained his formal career until 1928.

The NKVD shortlisted him for espionage missions in the 1920s, and in 1928 sent him on for such clandestine work in the Kingdom of Romania.

Bodnarenko was apprehended there some nine years later, and sentenced to a twenty-years' imprisonment.

While at Doftana, he became the ringleader of imprisoned Soviet spies, together with whom he joined the Romanian Communist Party (PCR).

In the early 1920s, the Soviet NKVD recruited "Pantiușa" for espionage and sabotage actions.

From 1924 or 1925, he was directed toward his native Tiraspol, which was serving as capital for the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic.

Upon arriving there, he was trained to carry out subversion in the neighboring Kingdom of Romania.

The NKVD finally sent him across the Romanian border in 1928, when he crossed the Dniester into Bessarabia using falsified Romanian identity papers.

In the 1940s, communist propaganda suggested that Panteley was a participant in the October Revolution of 1917.

Before the age of twenty, he was fighting for the Red Army in the Russian Civil War—by various accounts, his was a cavalry unit answering to Semyon Budyonny.

A late rumor recorded by dissident communist Belu Zilber notes that young Bodnarenko specialized in murdering enemies of Budyonny "by his own hand".

Tatiana Pauker-Brătescu, who was acquainted with Bodnarenko in the late 1940s, recalls him being "a sinister figure": "To what measure, we got to see during one of his drunken exploits. He recounted then that, as a young man in the Komsomol, he would go after the kulaks, and was informed that priests were having meetings out in the steppe, in some pit-house. He got there in no time—this was in the Ukraine—and I don't know if he ever summoned them to get out, but in any case he covered the pit-house in earth and killed them by suffocation."

Staging a walk-out from Caransebeș Prison just after the coup of August 23, 1944, Bodnarenko was integrated by the Patriotic Combat Formations and the Siguranța police, while also reuniting with Soviet intelligence and joining a special unit of the SMERSH.

In 1946, he personally killed and buried three of Gheorghiu-Dej's rivals, including Ștefan Foriș, the former PCR General Secretary.

From August 1948, Emil Bodnăraș tasked him with forming the Securitate and leading its General Directorate (DGSP), thus ensuring Soviet control over Romania's intelligence agencies.

Under the newly formed communist regime, Bodnarenko was exclusively known as "Gheorghe Pintilie", being promoted directly to Lieutenant General, and serving in the Great National Assembly.

Participating in the country's communization, he spearheaded the violent campaigns against the perceived class enemies—conceptualizing "reeducation" through penal labor on the Danube–Black Sea Canal, and initiating the first-ever Bărăgan deportations.

Pintilie and his adjutant Alexandru Nicolschi also played a part in the Pitești Experiment, which introduced extreme violence with the goal of brainwashing inmates (primarily those detained for their past in the Iron Guard)—though it remains unclear whether they willingly stoked such violence, or just allowed it to happen.

In engineering the DGSP, General Pintilie surrounded himself with men of working-class origin, who became notorious for their brutality, but also their overall incompetence—particularly in dealing with the anti-communist guerillas.

Both inside and outside the PCR, Pintilie himself was remembered as an uneducated alcoholic; his preference for orality ensured that the more compromising orders he gave remained unattested.

Deletant also writes: "According to one source, the October Revolution brought to the surface a sadistic streak which characterised his direction of the Securitate after 1948."

He expressed his loyalty toward Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, the jailed communist and emerging factional leader; their tight political camaraderie lasted into the late 1950s.

Especially during the early 1950s, he assisted Gheorghiu-Dej in the inner-party struggles, helping to topple Ana Pauker and Vasile Luca, and simultaneously framing, then executing, Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu.

Witnesses of these purges remain divided as to Pintilie's exact role, with some reporting that he vacillated when it came to exercising full repression, and others suggesting that he exacerbated the violence, beyond what was required of him.

In the late 1950s, his projects were being vetoed by the PCR Central Committee, just as Gheorghiu-Dej was proceeding with Romania's emancipation from the Soviet sphere.

In 1959, Pintilie lost his Securitate offices and was assigned to lead the Miliția, a more civilian-controlled component of the national police force.

Pushed into full retirement during the anti-Soviet backlash of 1963, Pintilie then watched as Gheorghiu-Dej's posthumous successor, Nicolae Ceaușescu, proceeded to expose some of the crimes committed by Securitate personnel in previous decades.

He cooperated in the investigation, openly discussing some of his individual crimes, but was never questioned regarding his involvement in mass purges; the only repercussions he faced were political, leading to his expulsion from the PCR in 1968.

Though his wife Ana Toma was allowed a return to the forefront of political life, Pintilie himself lived the remainder of his life in relative obscurity.

The Ceaușescu regime still bestowed him with the Order of Tudor Vladimirescu, and granted him military honors upon his death in 1985.

According to a 2005 piece by historian Marius Oprea: "Pintilie Gheorghe, aka Pintilie Bondarenco, aka Pantelei Bodnarenko, aka Pantiușa is the most important figure in the hierarchy of the communist secret police during the first years of the communist regime, although his biography is the hardest to reconstruct."

Another historian, Dennis Deletant, reports that Pintilie and a number of other senior Securitate officers were officially presented as Romanians, but notes that all such cases deliberately concealed from the public their true ethnicity.

Bodnarenko is colloquially described as a Russian, though he is generally assumed to have been an ethnic Ukrainian.

Historian Cristian Troncotă suggests that the future Gheorghe Pintilie was born Jewish Ukrainian, while Securitate officer Nicolae Pleșiță describes him as a Bessarabian Jew.

Oprea disputes such claims, noting that there is "no evidence to back them", and describing cases in which Bodnarenko vented his antisemitism.

Overall: "We can lend more credence to opinions that describe him as a Ukrainian or a Russophone Bessarabian."