Eugen (Jenő) Fried was born on 13 March 1900 in Trnava, in what is now eastern Slovakia, to a family of Jewish small traders.

[2] He joined the Bolsheviks and from March to July 1919 participated in the revolution of Béla Kun that established the Hungarian Soviet Republic.

[1] Dmitry Manuilsky, one of Stalin's representatives in the Comintern, noticed Fried and gave him increasingly responsible tasks.

He removed Henri Barbé and Pierre Célor and advanced Maurice Thorez, Jacques Duclos, Benoît Frachon and André Marty.

[7] In 1934 Fried removed Jacques Doriot, whom the Soviet Union thought had been too hasty in denouncing the growing Nazi threat in Germany.

The Executive Committee of the Communist International communicated to the French and British communists parties through Fried explaining that the war was not one of democracy versus fascism, but was a war between imperialist powers, and "... the primary issue is the struggle against capitalism—the source of all wars—against the regime of bourgeois dictatorship in all its forms, and above all in your own country..."[8] On 26 September 1939 the government of Édouard Daladier outlawed the PCF.

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.

[10] 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.

[11] 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.

[13] 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.