Comments on the show trial of Vasile Luca

Abstract

Vasile Luca was a communist movementist who fought in the Soviet army in World War II, then became a leader in the Romanian Communist Party and was Romania's finance minister at the beginning of the Soviet-style dictatorship. He was set aside in a power struggle within the party and was sentenced in a show trial to death by verdict and life imprisonment by pardon. His activities cannot be seen in a positive light: he was a servant of the dictatorship. Even so, the sketchy account of his life and his show trial offers a number of lessons about the constant pitfalls of minority politics in Romania and the still-emerging disorder in Romanian-Hungarian relations.