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Eugen Fried (13 March 1900 – 17 August 1943) was a Czechoslovak communist who played a leading role in the French Communist Party in the 1930s and early 1940s as the representative of the Communist International. He ensured that the party leaders were loyal to Joseph Stalin and followed the instructions of Moscow. He was ruthless but discreet, and stayed out of the public eye.
After his release Fried was assigned to Liberec in Bohemia, in the west of the country, since he was too well known in Slovakia . He had become a professional revolutionary and an admirer of Stalin. Dmitry Manuilsky, one of Stalin's representatives in the Comintern, noticed Fried and gave him increasingly responsible tasks. By June 1928 Fried was responsible for purging the KSČ of leaders who were not sufficiently obedient to Moscow. In December 1928 he was assigned to the KSČ Secretariat and given the task of imposing a leadership loyal to Stalin. He left his wife in 1929 when Dmitry Manuilsky called him to join the Comintern in Moscow. He was accused of leftism by the Comintern in December 1929 but was restored to favor after writing a self-criticism.
The Cadre Commission ( commission des cadres) was set up to "verify" comrades and ensure "that a thing was what it was supposed to be" – to root out informers and politically unreliable members. One technique was to require that all PCF members fill out an autobiographical questionnaire, which could then be analyzed. Early in 1933 Maurice Tréand was made secretary of the PCF's Cadre Commission. The Cadre Commission was somewhat secretive, and worked directly with Fried, Thorez and the Comintern's agencies. In 1934 Fried removed Jacques Doriot, whom the Soviet Union thought had been too hasty in denouncing the growing Nazi threat in Germany. However, within a year the PCF was supporting the Comintern's Popular front program. After the 1936 French elections Fried directed the PCF to support the government of Léon Blum without participating in it. He downplayed the Stalinist purges of the late 1930s, and explained the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact between Germany and the Soviet Union to the party leaders.
In May 1940 the Germans invaded France, which agreed to the armistice of 22 June 1940. That day Fried received a detailed directive from Comintern leader Georgi Dimitrov and Thorez on what could be done to resist the German occupying forces. Immediately after the occupation, some of the French communists tried to obtain permission from the Germans to legally publish their journal, l'Humanité. It was not until early August 1941 that Fried was directed to break off all contact with the German authorities. The leadership of the French Communist Party in the period between the occupation of France and the German invasion of Russia on 22 June 1941 was divided between three locations. Secretary-general Maurice Thorez was in Moscow with André Marty. In Paris the clandestine party was directed by Benoît Frachon, aided by Arthur Dallidet. In hiding in Brussels were Jacques Duclos, who became the political leader of the party, and later the leader of the Communist Resistance, Maurice Tréand and Eugen Fried.
After Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Fried received cipher communications in which communists in Western Europe were told to "use all ways and means to make the people rise up and fight the occupiers" including demonstrations, strikes and sabotage. The Red Orchestra was a major Soviet intelligence network that operated throughout Western Europe. In December 1941 Dimitrov gave Fried instructions to contact the Red Orchestra head, Leopold Trepper. The meeting fell through since the Gestapo had taken the radio station of the Red Orchestra in Brussels and Trepper had fled to Paris. Further arrests took place in July 1942, and several agents were betrayed. Eugen Fried was assassinated in Brussels by unknown assailants on 17 August 1943. His true identity was not known at the time. After his death the post-war French communist leaders largely ignored the role he had played.
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