Constantinescu, Alexandru

Born Mar. 10, 1873, in Bucharest; died there Mar. 28, 1949. Rumanian labor figure. The son of a worker.

Constantinescu joined the Rumanian Social Democratic Labor Party in 1896. In 1905–06 he helped organize Rumanian trade unions and took part in the movement of solidarity with the proletariat of Russia. In 1906 he was elected secretary of the General Commission of Trade Unions. He was a delegate of the Rumanian trade unions to the Stuttgart (1907) Congress of the Second International. In the winter of 1917, he was in Moscow to establish contacts with the Bolshevik Party. He took part in the creation of the first Communist groups in Rumania (1917–20) and helped in their unification into a single party. From 1921 on, he was a member of the Communist Party of Rumania. He was arrested a number of times and was twice (in 1918 and in 1920) sentenced to death in absentia. He lived in exile in Bulgaria and in the USSR from 1920 to 1925, in France from 1925 to 1936, in the USSR in 1936–37. Returning to Rumania in 1937, he was arrested, but he was freed from prison by popular pres-sure on the government. During World War II, he was in concentration camps. After the country was liberated, he participated in the work of the Communist Party of Rumania.