Finance minister of the "Muscovite faction", purged on the pretext of the 1952 currency reform and dead in Aiud prison, a Székely Hungarian communist
At the Central Committee plenum of 29 February to 1 March 1952 the "errors" of the currency reform were laid on Luca alone. Pauker and Georgescu, who had tried to defend him, followed the same road at the same table three months later.
Born László Luka to a Hungarian family in the Székely Land of Transylvania, he worked in a railway workshop, entered the Romanian labour movement after the Hungarian revolution of 1919 and joined the Communist Party in the early 1920s. Imprisoned repeatedly, he was in the Cernăuți prison in 1940 when the Soviet occupation of Northern Bukovina freed him; he became a Soviet citizen and was elected a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR. During the war he led the exiled Romanian communists in Moscow alongside Ana Pauker, and on his return in 1944 he joined the Politburo and the Central Committee Secretariat. As finance minister from November 1947 he ran the currency stabilization and the financing of nationalization, but the botched execution of the January 1952 currency reform became the pretext for denouncing him as a "right deviationist" at the plenum of early March, and he was arrested in August. Sentenced to death in October 1954 and commuted to life imprisonment, he died in Aiud prison in 1963. A party plenum under Ceaușescu rehabilitated him posthumously in 1968.
Career Timeline
- 1919Entered the Romanian labour movement
- 1920년대–1940Joined the Communist Party; imprisoned repeatedly
- 1940Freed from the Cernăuți prison; Soviet citizen and deputy of the Ukrainian Supreme Soviet
- 1944Returned to Romania; Politburo member and Central Committee secretary
- 1947–1952Minister of Finance
- 1952Denounced as a right deviationist; dismissed and arrested
- 1954Sentenced to death; commuted to life imprisonment
- 1963Died in Aiud prison
- 1968Posthumously rehabilitated