Romanian Revolutionaries, the 'Specter of Communism'

chapter 1 ‘The Land is the Country’: Romanian Revolutionaries, the ‘Specter of Communism’, and the ‘Terrible Specter’ of Russia ‘We, however, pioneers of the future, must move forward, and even when we are depressed or tired, we must keep on and work as we can and through anyone we can’. Ion Ionescu, letter to Ion Ghica, 14 March 1865 A Revolutionary Agronomist In September 1848, Ottoman troops crossed the Danube and stopped just before entering Bucharest. Mehmed Fuad Pasha, a protégé of the reformist Grand Vizier Mustafa Reshid Pasha, and member in the Council of the Tanzimat, was the appointed High Commissioner of the Sublime Porte in Wallachia.1 On 13 September he addressed a proclamation to ‘the boyars and all the inhabit- ants of Wallachia, from all classes’. They were chastised for taking part in a re- bellion engendered by the ‘ghost of communism’, against whom all Europe was fighting. Communism threatened the security of the national institutions, the prosperity of all, the sovereignty of the Sublime Porte, and the friendly political relations with Russia.2 The specter of communism began its fateful wanderings in the Principalities, and the local revolutionaries, soon to be imprisoned or exiled, attempted both 1 The term Tanzimat [Reorganization] refers to a series of reforms in the Ottoman Empire, between 1839 and 1867, heavily influenced by European ideas. The changes implied the creation of a new secular school system, new army conscription methods, the creation of provincial representative assemblies, and the introduction of new codes of criminal and commercial law. Grand Vizier Mustafa Reshid Pasha was central in the design and implementation of the reform. See Hanioğlu, A Brief History, and Inal, ‘Ottoman Attempts’. 2 Fuad Effendi, ‘Proclamațiunea’, 319-321. ‘Socialism’ and ‘communism’ were ambiguous terms. By the early 1840s ‘communism’ had become common coinage in French political vocabulary, a term that referred to all political programs that proposed egalitarianism through the aboli- tion of private property. Socialism also acted as a synonym for sociology, understood as ‘the science of society’. A clearer differentiation between socialism and social science emerged only gradually, after the revolutions of 1848. See Schieder, ‘Kommunismus’ and Jurgen Herres, ‘Rhineland Radicals and the ‘48ers’, 17. © Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, 2020 | doi:10.30965/9783657704897_003 22 Part I to use and exorcize this specter. In this chapter, I look at three Romanian revolutionaries who struggled with this problem. The first, and most important in my argument, was a Moldavian revolutionary and agronomist who moved to Bucharest after the failed Revolution in Iași. In Moldavia, the revolution was short-lived. The population of the main city, Iași, had grown to around 70,000 by 1848, while the urbanization and com- mercialization of the economy rested on a still pre-modern rural infrastruc- ture. The new middle classes were very heterogeneous (ethnically, religiously, and socially), and plagued by conflicts between small merchants and produc- ers who both suffered from a chronic lack of capital. The ruling prince Mihail Sturdza, a reformer of sorts, played on these tensions, and, with the help of the Russians, was able to quell the opposition almost before it really became public.3 Wallachia had a more homogeneous middle class but the social inequali- ties were becoming more visible not only in the countryside but also in the growing cities – where approximately 20% of the population was formed of servants and gypsy slaves. The economic structures and the flow of cash crops to Western Europe were changing the shapes of both state and society. The big landowners were trying to get a firmer grip on the labor extracted from peas- ants through land allotment, village systematization, and the enforcement of a mixture of modern and pre-modern exploitation strategies. The revolutionaries were mostly small gentry and boyars, but also a small, strategically important, fraction of the old and high administration aristocracy joined their ranks. In June, the Revolution was victorious in Bucharest, attracting some of the remaining Moldavian revolutionaries.4 Ion Ionescu de la Brad (1818-1891) was born as Ion Isăcescu in a priest fam- ily, part of the small gentry of Moldavia. He went to school in the small town of Roman (where he learned Greek and changed his name to Ion Ionescu) and then moved to the Mihăileană Academy in Iași, where the teaching partly switched to Latin and French. During his school years, he befriended Charles Maisonnabe, the French head of the Moldavian Academy, and became his sec- retary. He began to translate from French and Latin into Romanian some liter- ary and historical texts. But his future career was not to be one in literature or translations – that were still mostly the domain of aristocrats or scions of wealthy families. In 1829, through the Treaty of Adrianople, the commerce on the Danube and the Black Sea was taken out of Ottoman control, and the grain 3 Giurescu, Contribuțiuni; Hitchins, The Romanians, 21. 4 Corfus, L’Agriculture en Valachie, 180-189; Hitchins, The Romanians, 226-227; Dobrogeanu- Gherea, Neoiobăgia..

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