Early life Born to a
Jewish family in
Tiraspol, on the eastern bank of the Dniester river (part of
Russian Empire at the time), he was the son of Alexandru Grünberg, a miller. In 1932, he joined the local section of the Romanian
Union of Communist Youth, a wing of the
Romanian Communist Party (PCdR); in 1933, due to his political activities, he was arrested and held for two weeks by the Romanian
secret police,
Siguranța Statului. Later in the 1930s, as associates of
General Secretary Vitali Holostenco, he and
Vasile Luca were elected to the internal
Politburo (which was doubled by a controlling body inside the Soviet Union). In 1937, he joined the ranks of the Moscow-controlled PCdR. He did his military service in the Signals Regiment of
Iași in 1937–39, being discharged with the rank of
corporal. He subsequently worked for the telephone exchange in
Chișinău. joined the
NKVD, and trained as a spy in
Chernivtsi (Cernăuți). He was sent undercover into Romania on May 26, 1941, carrying papers with the name
Vasile Ștefănescu, in order to report on
Romanian Army movements in preparation for
Operation Barbarossa (the invasion of the Soviet Union by
Nazi Germany, in which Romanian troops, under the command of
Marshal Ion Antonescu, participated;
see Romania during World War II). He was apprehended by Romanian border guards after just two hours (according to subsequent reports, he was given away by the fact that he could not express himself in
Romanian). He was sent to prison in
Ploiești, and then
Aiud, where other Soviet spies, such as Vladimir Gribici and Afanasie Șișman, were also held. In October, Nicolschi was incorporated into the
police force, becoming an
inspector, while, in parallel, he rose rapidly through the ranks of the PCR. On April 9, 1946, it was he who signed the release papers when these prisoners were taken back to Romania by Soviet Lieutenant Colonel Rodin to face trial. Petrașcu, who had just been arrested, offered his subordinates' support for the National Democratic Front, which was an alliance controlled by the Communists (in the process, he avoided a direct mention of the Communist Party, and later carried on parallel negotiations with the opposition
National Peasants' Party, PNȚ). Georgescu and Nicolschi agreed to the deal, and allowed Iron Guard's affiliates (the Legionaries) to emerge from the underground, awarding them identity papers and employment on the condition that they disarmed themselves. the minister later confessed that this was done on suspicion that the Iron Guard would otherwise provide support for the National Peasantist leaders: "The PNȚ's attempts, successful up to a certain extent, of attracting Legionaries into their party, [thus] giving them a legal possibility to act against the regime". According to Georgescu, as a direct result of the understanding, as much as 800 Iron Guard affiliates applied for recognition, including a number of people who had "returned from
Germany after
August 23, 1944, having diversion as their [original] purpose". In autumn 1945, the two Communist representatives intervened to have sizable groups of Iron Guard members set free from various labor camps, while Petrașcu was awarded a degree of liberty in resuming political contacts. On Georgescu's orders, Nicolschi drew up a list of Legionaries who had been imprisoned for lesser crimes under
Ion Antonescu's regime, a document which formed the basis of pardons. Most of the newly released persons were subsequently kept under surveillance by Nicolschi and his Detective Corps.
Mobile Brigade Nicolschi was later assigned General Inspector of the traditional
secret police,
Siguranța Statului, where he and
Serghei Nicolau led the will-to-be communist security force "Mobile Brigade", entrusted with silencing political opposition. The unit, which was to become an embryo for the "
Securitate", comprised an active cell of Soviet
MGB envoys. At the time, Nicolschi himself rose to the rank of
colonel in the MGB. Together with
Alexandru Drăghici, Nicolschi ordered a wave of arbitrary arrests in 1946–1947, which – according to some sources – came to mark the lives of as many as 300,000 people. it was Nicolschi who ordered Foriș' mother to be drowned in the
Crișul Repede. In 1967, he indicated that one of his subordinates, a certain "comrade (Gavril) Birtaș" of the
Oradea section, had taken the initiative: Comrade Birtaș had received the indication to talk to her and get her to return to Oradea and admit herself into an old people's home. Details of how Comrade Birtaș has accomplished the mission are not known to me. In late 1947, after the PCR forced
King Michael I to
abdicate, Nicolschi escorted the latter out of the country and as far as
Vienna.
Securitate crimes After the founding of the Securitate on August 30 of that year,
Lieutenant General Gheorghe Pintilie (Pantelei Bodnarenko) became the first Director of this organization. The positions of Deputy Directors went to two
Major Generals Nicolschi and Vladimir Mazuru, both of whom were at the same time Soviet KGB officers; nobody could be appointed to the Securitate's leadership without their approval. Together, they oversaw the creation of the massive Communist Romanian penal system and communist terror apparatus, starting in February 1950. As historian
Vladimir Tismăneanu argues, this was made possible by the Soviet agents and their relations with the group around emerging Communist leader
Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej: "if one does not grasp the role of political thugs such as the Soviet spies Pintilie Bodnarenko (Pantiușa) and Alexandru Nikolski in the exercise of terror in Romania during the most horrible
Stalinist period, and their personal connections with Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej and members of his entourage, it is difficult to understand the origins and the role of the Securitate". Upon introducing the new Securitate policies, Nicolschi presented a series of ideological imperatives, resumed in sentences such as: The rust of
bureaucratism has begun to gnaw at us [that is, the Securitate]. Our apparatus cannot be gnawed at, but this is an aspect [of things turned wrong]. Involved in the interrogation of
Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu, he ensured Soviet intervention in the proceedings, he encouraged
Eugen Țurcanu to carry out the task and carried out regular inspections, during which he would ignore evidence of
torture. During that time, Nicolschi also supervised the
re-education of hundreds of minors at
Târgșor Prison; these minors (some as young as 12) were subjected to psychological experiments and beaten with the intention of being trained in the spirit of the "
Communist new man". In the inquiry preceding the
show trial for sabotage at the
Danube-Black Sea Canal, he led a squad of torturers that was entrusted with obtaining
forced confessions from Gheorghe Crăciun and other employees. As early as 1949, Nicolschi was arguably the first Securitate senior officer to become known for his brutality outside the
Eastern Bloc. According to a 1992 article for
Cuvântul, Nicolschi ordered the murder of seven prisoners (allegedly the leaders of an
anti-communist resistance movement) in transit from
Gherla Prison in July 1949.
Inner-Party conflicts and retirement Although an associate of
Ana Pauker's "Muscovite wing", Nicolschi maintained links with Gheorghiu-Dej, and relied on his NKVD-MGB credentials to survive political turmoil caused by the fall of Pauker,
Vasile Luca, and
Minister of the Interior Teohari Georgescu. Pauker was officially accused, among other things, of having welcomed the
Iron Guard into the Party, although her degree of involvement in the deal remains disputed (while Nicolschi is credited with having initiated it, it was also proposed that his Soviet superiors had played a part in the decision). He apparently rallied with Gheorghiu-Dej, and, despite the fact that he was still a Soviet citizen, he was decorated with the high distinction
Steaua Republicii Populare Române. At around that time, his suspicion towards Gheorghiu-Dej allegedly led him to
plant microphones in the latter's office. In 1961, after Gheorghiu-Dej began adopting anti-Soviet themes in his discourse, Nicolschi, promoted to Lieutenant General, was sidelined and forced into retirement, without being denied the luxuries reserved for the
nomenklatura. He lived through the
Nicolae Ceaușescu years, and died in
Bucharest, two years after the
Romanian Revolution of 1989, as the result of a
heart attack. The following day, he was incinerated at
Cenușa Crematorium. Alongside Pintilie and Mazuru, Nicolschi features prominently in theories that the early Securitate was controlled by
ethnic minorities (as notably voiced by the press of the ultra-
nationalist Greater Romania Party). Referring to this, British historian
Dennis Deletant claims that of the total 60 leaders of the Securitate Directorate, 38 were ethnically Romanian, while 22 were divided between 5 other communities (in this statistic, Deletant counts Nicolschi as an ethnic Russian). He concluded that "the numbers drawn from ethnic minorities, although disproportionate, do not appear to be excessive". Deletant also is of the opinion that, while there is indication that the ethnic origin of top officials was obscured, "there is no evidence to suggest the '
Romanianisation' of officers of other ethnic origins". ==Notes==