Born in Brașov, Vladimir Tismăneanu is the son of Leonte Tismăneanu, an activist of the Romanian Communist Party since the early 1930s, and Hermina Marcusohn, a physician and one-time Communist Party activist, both of whom were Jewish and Spanish Civil War veterans. His father, born in Bessarabia and settled in the Soviet Union at the end of the 1930s, worked in agitprop structures, returning to Romania at the end of World War II, and becoming, under the communist regime, chair of the Marxism-Leninism department of the University of Bucharest. Progressively after Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej acted against Ana Pauker, the Tismăneanus were sidelined inside the Romanian nomenklatura; in 1960, Leonte Tismăneanu was stripped of his position as deputy head of Editura Politică.