Vasile Gheorghe Cijevschi[1] (Russian: Василий Георгиевич Чижевский, romanized: Vasiliy Georgevich Chizhevsky; also credited as Cișevschi, Cijevschii, Cijevski, Cijewsky, or Tchizhevsky; October 17, 1880 – July 14, 1931) was a Bessarabian and Romanian politician, administrator and writer.

As the government-appointed Commissar, Cijevschi helped organize defense against leftist insurrection, but denounce Bolshevik infiltration of the Bessarabian troops, which had compromised his plan for action.

Turning to Russian-language journalism, and earning reputation as a polemicist and alleged blackmailer, he is also remembered for his endorsement of Bessarabian identity within Romania, while also still frequenting the nationalist club ASTRA.

[5] Activist Romulus Cioflec, who met Cijevschi in late 1917, recalls that he spoke "a poorly mastered, minimal but clean, Romanian language" (o românească greu mânuită și săracă, dar curată).

[5] He befriended Ion Pelivan, the emerging leader of Bessarabian Romanians; in June 1898, they heard songs by the "great patriot and true spiritual parent", Dionisie Erhan, at the monastery of Suruceni.

In 1902, he completed training at a cavalry school in Yelisavetgrad, Kherson Governorate, and was dispatched for guard duty on the Sea of Japan coastline (Primorskaya Oblast), at Vladivostok and Khabarovsk.

"[12] Caught up in a series of losing battles, Cijevschi was badly injured, and moved back into European Russia—advancing to battalion commander with the official rank of Major, he was honorably discharged on April 16, 1911.

[18] Cijevschi also issued orders for applying the ethnic criterion in education, setting aside funds for the "nationalization" of Bessarabian schools, and reprimanding the authorities of Akerman County for resisting this trend.

[21] Following the legislative election of 1917, Cijevschi became a representative of Bender[6][22] in the new regional assembly, called Sfatul Țării; his mandate officially began on the opening day of November 21, 1917, and saw him mainly active on the Legal and Drafting Commissions.

[28] The undertrained republican army could not ultimately deal with the raids carried out by Russian deserters, and Cijevschi resigned his commission on December 22;[29] the position itself had been made redundant by the creation of a Military Directorate.

[35] On March 14, signalling the Moldavian majority's steady accommodation of Romanian nationalism, Cijevschi was among the deputies who obtained that Pushkin Hall be assigned to Făclia, which had pledged itself to the creation of a Romanian-language theater.

[37] At the height of a Romanian military intervention in Bessarabia, Cijevschi's Sfatul Țării campaigning helped swing the vote in favor of union with Romania—as proclaimed by the legislative body on April 9, 1918.

Cijevschi was himself enthusiastic about that bargain, and "held a long and fiery speech in Romanian", pleading with his colleagues that Bessarabia now had an "extraordinary historic opportunity" of twinning national emancipation with social justice.

[43] According to Țurcanu, the reasons for this change of direction "are insufficiently known"—though they relate to the fact that Cijevschi, like Nicolae Alexandri, Pantelimon Erhan, and Ion Păscăluță, had only endorsed union with a preservation of regional self-rule.

Overall, Cijevschi, a man of "great conceit", seemed "partly detached from the ideals which inspired the more enthusiastic Bessarabian fighters, when it came to the full affirmation of the Romanians' national rights", as well as "dispassionate" about the Bloc's projected land reform.

Cijevschi now openly supported a return to regional autonomy: with Alexandri, Păscăluță, Vasile Ghenzul, and several other Sfatul members, he issued a formal protest against the state of siege and demanded the reintroduction of Russia's Civil Code.

[45] In April of that year, he joined the Romanian League, formed around the conservative Vladimir Herța; it attempted to mount opposition to the more left-wing Bessarabian Peasants' Party (PȚB), but finally presented no candidates in the general election of November 1919 (except in Cahul County).

Under his watch as head of the local Fine Arts Society (1921–1926),[45] the school was presided upon by sculptor Alexandru Plămădeală;[2] it employed educators who were frowned upon in Romania for their alleged Bolshevik sympathies.

[57] Physician I. Duscian made similar claims in Universul paper, adding allegations that Cijevschi was forcing inmates of public orphanages to only speak Russian.

[47] Cijevschi was also editor of the newspaper Nasha Mysl (1924–1925),[45] but, according to claims aired by Universul, its actual managers were two prominent figures of the National Liberal caucus in Chișinău: Erhan and Vitalie Zubac.

[60] On December 7, 1924, the Sanielevici scandal was taken to the Russian Journalists' Syndicate, with most members reportedly positioning themselves against Cijevschi, whom they depicted as a tool of the deposed Mayor, Vasile Bârcă, and an immoral "Hottentot".

He assessed that there was no real threat of a communist insurgency, since the region's core population were "Moldavian peasants, gentle and hard-working"; in his view, the Romanian public was wrong to demand a ban on Chișinău's Russian-language press, noting that local Russian newspaper were generally anti-communist.

Its publication was followed with concern by Romania's secret police, the Siguranța, which made note that one of Cijevschi's employees, Simon Ocner, had been sentenced as a Soviet spy; the report also assessed that Bessarabskoye Slovo had a readership of 40,000, many of whom were Russophiles and Bessarabian Jews.

[65] During his final decade, Cijevschi dabbled in fiction writing: the short story Unei prietene ("To a Lady Friend") was published by Viața Basarabiei magazine in 1934,[6] allowing readers to discover him as a "subtle writer of prose.

"[67] As noted in October 1932 by journalist Romulus Dianu, Cijevschi had become an "obscure hero of the Union [...], not granted any honors when he was performing his deeds, nor when he was being laid to rest in that ground he had brought to life".