Anarchism in Romania
After being released from prison for his participation in the activities of the narodniks in the Russian Empire during the 1860s,[2] the Bucovinian socialist Zamfir Arbore fled into exile in Switzerland, where he met Mikhail Bakunin, the leader of the anarchist faction in the International Workingmen's Association (IWA).
[6] Another forerunner of Romanian anarchism was Paraskev Stoyanov, of Bulgarian origin, born in 1871 (or 1874) in Giurgiu, where his father, an active campaigner for national liberation, had fled Turkish persecution.
[9] By 1884, most of the books in the Bucharest socialist library were anarchist works, from the likes of Mikhail Bakunin, Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis, Jean Grave, Peter Kropotkin, Élisée Reclus.
[12] He considered anarchism to be a "social disease" which would inevitably attracted criminal elements of society, concurring with the work of his contemporary, the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso.
[13] Among the anarchists that Nădejde purged from the organization was Panait Muşoiu, who subsequently left Bucharest for Galați, but he would be expelled from the local socialist club in that city as well.
The Romanian government itself was signatory to an anti-anarchist treaty, which set up a system for sharing information on the anarchist movement with other European states.
[18] By the early 1920s, the national liberal politician Nicolae Petrescu declared that a "proper movement of militant anarchism or anarchist theorists" no longer existed in Romania.
[19] In 1923, the Romanian pacifist Eugen Relgis founded the Mișcarea Umanitaristă (English: Humanitarian Movement), a non-doctrinal anti-militarist organization which brought together several anarchists, including Panait Muşoiu.
In 1928, the movement established a newspaper Umanitaristul (English: Humanitarianism), which had obvious libertarian influences, publishing the works of Han Ryner and Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis.
[24] While the Romanian individualists idealized the state of nature, they did not nostalgize the past, instead conceiving the rejection of contemporary mores as an affirmation of freedom.
One Valeriu Buja, who was particularly inspired by Thoreau, wrote a passionate defense of anti-statism from an individualist perspective:[26] “By what right am I bound between borders, between laws, when I want to be a brother to all men?
For bourgeois and children, he must have a fierce face, tousled hair, sometimes lavalier knotted like a noose, but always a bomb or at least a dagger in his pocket.
[30] Panait Mușoiu died a few months after the overthrow of the fascist regime and,[27] following the proclamation of the Romanian People's Republic in 1947, Eugen Relgis fled into exile in Uruguay, bringing an end to the second period of anarchism in Romania.
[32] In 1952, Relgis published the first comprehensive history of the Romanian anarchist movement in the French magazine À contre-courant, in which he publicly declared his own affinity for anti-authoritarianism for the first time.
[34] Relgis considered it important to develop an indigenous expression of Romanian anarchism, one that was equally capable of surviving repression by the new socialist regime, opposing the rise of reactionary elements and resisting recuperation in the case of a potential democratic restoration.
During this period, a number of monographs were published about anarchists such as Panait Mușoiu and Eugen Relgis, although these downplayed their libertarian tendencies, often failing to even mention "anarchism" by name.
[39] One report by the SRI declared that anarchism had been imported into Romania by "foreigners involved in drug trafficking and the dissemination of hard pornography.
[42] It was only in the 2010s that a comprehensive historiography of the Romanian anarchist movement emerged, with the publication of Vlad Brătuleanu's Anarhismul în România, the first historical study of anarchism in Romania since the 1940s.
[44] The German historian Martin Veith also contributed to this history with biographies on Panait Muşoiu and Ștefan Gheorghiu, which took a restorative approach to highlighting their libertarian tendencies, after this had been neglected by the studies of the 1970s.
