The Rumanian Communist Leadership

Abstract

I The clash of Eastern and Western influences, which was of particular significance in the history of the Rumanian people,' could not fail to leave its imprint also on the Rumanian Socialist movement. Socialism was first introduced into Rumania in 1874 by some Rumanian intellectuals who had fled from Bessarabia,2 a province of Tsarist Russia. Marxian ideas, in their more extreme form, were brought to Rumania in 1875 and following years by Nathan Katz (Dobrogeanu-Gherea) and other Russian political refugees who had established themselves in Ia? i,3 the capital of Moldavia. But the political maximalism and the internationalist orientation of these refugees soon met the opposition of the more moderate and nationally inclined Rumanian intellectuals, who had been educated at Western universities and were influenced by the reformist ideas of the Social Democratic movement in the West. At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, the development of industry and industrial labor in Rumania was in its infancy, and the Socialist movement was limited mainly to small sections of the intelligentsia. The movement failed to appeal to the middle classes and the peasantry because a spirit of nationalism was beginning to grow among them. In addition, the Rumanian Socialist movement was paralyzed by internal ideological disputes and by personal feuds among its leaders. After World War I, in a territorially enlarged and industrially developing Rumania, with a large percentage of national minorities in its population,4 the social base of socialism was enlarged. As a result