Fundo, Lazar

Born in the family of a merchant, Vlach- born. In his youth, he was sent to the French Lyceum in Thessaloniki , and then to France , where he studied law in Paris . There he became the head of the circle of Albanian students - Marxists , which included Enver Hoxha ^[1] .

Upon returning to Albania, he became a member of the revolutionary democratic organization Avni Rustemi and assumed leadership after the assassination of Rustemi by agents of Ahmet Zogu on June 10, 1924 . Lazar Fundo participates in the overthrow of Akhmet Zog and the exile provoked by this event and supports interim Prime Minister Theofan Stilian Noli , an Orthodox bishop of progressive views.

After the fall of the Noli government, Lazar Fundo is forced to emigrate to Austria . In Vienna, he establishes relations with representatives of the Balkan Communist Federation , after which he arrives in the USSR , where he becomes a leader of the Comintern and a representative of Albania in the MPRD (International Organization for Assisting the Revolutionary Fighters ). In 1928, he helped organize the Albanian Communist Group in Korca ^[2] , and in 1929, at the VIII Congress of the Balkan Communist Federation, he advocated the creation of the Communist Party of Albania . For some time, his candidacy was considered by the leadership of the Comintern as a promising leader of such a party.

In 1930 he became a journalist for the Vienna newspaper of the Balkan Communist Federation. In 1933 , while in Weimar Germany , he became a columnist for events such as the burning of the Reichstag and the Leipzig trial , at which his friend Georgy Dimitrov was tried, after which he returned to Moscow . With the outbreak of the civil war in Spain , organizes the sending of Albanian volunteers to inter-brigades . At the same time, his divergence with Stalinist foreign and domestic politics begins: Fundo defends the Bukharinites and takes the side of the Trotskyists (in Albania itself the Trotskyist group, led by Aristide Kendra, had ceased to exist by that time).

In 1938, he was charged with “ bourgeois deviation” and the sabotage of sending volunteers to the Spanish Civil War ^[3] , removed from all posts and arrested . Sentenced to death , but pardoned as a result of personal intervention by Dimitrov ^[1] .

In 1939, Lazar Fundo returned to Albania , where he was exposed by the Stalinists as a “deviator” and Trotskyist ^[4] and during the Italian occupation of the country became a teacher in Korca . In 1941 he was arrested for clandestine activities and sent to the island of Ventotene . There he meets several other Albanian anti-fascists, including the founder of the ballistic movement, Safet Butka , and meets with Altiero Spinelli and Alessandro Pertini , with whom he takes part in the Italian Resistance movement . Spinelli subsequently described Fundo in his memoirs.

In 1942, Josip Broz Tito sent a letter to the CPA Central Committee about the need to re-expose the activities of Zai Fundo ^[5] . With the fall of the Italian fascist government in 1943 and the liberation by allies of political prisoners from the camps, Fundo, along with other prisoners of the island, the brothers Ghani and Hassan Krueziu, gets the opportunity to return to Albania and go to the highlands to the partisans.

In September 1944, he was captured in Kosovo by the Yugoslav partisans and transferred to their Albanian comrades. Enver Hoxha later claimed in his memoirs that the Albanian partisans themselves took him in the north of the country, where he acted in the partisan couple of Gani Krueziu ; and the Yugoslav side, having received a message about his arrest, demanded that Lazar Fundo be extradited to them ^[5] , but was refused, and he was executed on charges of Trotskyism and work for British intelligence ^[6] . In 1995, Albanian President Sali Berisha awarded Fundo the title of “martyr for democracy.”