Thread by @atharavesta

Panteley Timofiy Bodnarenko (a.k.a. "Gheorghe Pintilie") born in Tiraspol, Transnistria was an NKVD assasxin and secret agent who was installed by the Red Army as the first director of the Comunist "Securitate" in Romania. He was never punished for any of his crimes.

Born in 1902 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 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). He expressed his loyalty toward Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej.

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.

Pintilie and a number of other senior Securitate officers were officially presented as Romanians, but all such cases deliberately concealed their true ethnicity. Bodnarenko is colloquially described as a Russian, though he is generally assumed to have been a Russified Ukrainian.

In Russia, young Bodnarenko specialized in murdering enemies of Semyon Budyonny (under whom he served in the Red Army) "by his own hand".

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semyon_Bu…

"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 in Ukraine. He got there in no time and [...] covered the pit-house in earth and killed them by suffocation."

In 1948, Emil Bodnăraș tasked him with forming the Securitate and leading its General Directorate (DGSP), thus ensuring Soviet control over Romania's intelligence agencies. He was promoted directly to Lieutenant General and served in the Great National Assembly.

"He spearheaded the violent campaigns against 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 were involved in the Pitești Experiment, which introduced extreme violence with the goal of brainwashing inmates"

"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."

"Both inside and outside the PCR, Pintilie himself was remembered as an uneducated alcoholic. In the early 1950s, he assisted Gheorghiu-Dej in inner-party struggles, helping to topple Ana Pauker and Vasile Luca, and simultaneously framing, then executing, Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu."

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

He was pushed into retirement during the anti-Soviet backlash of 1963. The only repercussions he faced were political, leading to his expulsion from the PCR in 1968. Ceaușescu bestowed him with the Order of Tudor Vladimirescu and granted him military honors upon his death in 1985

Here is one the victims of Securitate -- a peasant who was killed in 1949 for resisting forced collectivization.

Pintilie's final decades were spent in "solitary, drunken stupor." In his new home on Kiseleff Road [a luxury area of Bucharest], he fell back into a "state of prostration, alcohol-driven apathy and feigned amnesia". He died in 1985.

Here you can find more information about this "fighter for the rights of the oppressed" -- a typical exponent of the "high humanitarian ideals of communism":

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gheorghe_…

adevarul.ro/stiri-locale/h…

*assassin*, *communist* etc.

Here you can read about the "Pitesti experiment", one of the most inhumane instances of communist torture and dehumanization.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pite%C8%9…