Ecaterina Arbore - Persecution and Murder

Persecution and Murder

As a rather old member of the movement, she was a natural target for Joseph Stalin's repression. Viewed as a partisan of Trotskyism, she was marginalized and stripped of all political decision. This is the time when she was paid a visit by Romanian author Panait Istrati, during the latter's revelatory journey to the Soviet lands (as described in his The Confession of a Loser). Istrati praised the work carried by Arbore in the Health Department of the Republic, and likened her to the wife of the legendary architect Meşterul Manole (Manole's wife, according to myth, was walled in the monastery by her husband, who believed this to be the only thing able to prevent the building from collapsing; this is a reflection on the terror that was mounting in the Soviet Union, as a direct consequence of the state not being able to live up to its promise).

She was arrested during the Great Purge, and died in 1937 (it is not known whether this meant she was executed straight away, or whether her death was preceded by a stay in the Gulag). She was rehabilitated by Soviet authorities during the De-Stalinization process, and by Romanian ones a while after the rise of Nicolae Ceauşescu, during the condemnation of Soviet policies in 1968 (she was exonerated together with most Romanian communist victims of Stalin's purges).