Social-Democratic Party - Early Years
The task of the early labor movement in Roumania was a difficult one. As late as 1915 seventy-five per cent of the Roumanian people were illiterates. The population, chiefly farmers, were absolutely dominated by a feudalistic form of government. In this country medieval serfdom existed until l864, and 59 per cent of the soil is still held by 4,0OO landowners. The remaining 41 percent was held by a million peasant proprietors, who were without capital and lived under the most wretched conditions. They express themselves politically in the form of Jacqueries, so terrible that it is difficult to say which is the more ferocious, the revolt or the repression.
The Socialist movement was regarded with suspicion in working-class circles, because of unhappy mistakes made in the first stages of the movement. This made the work of the Party, which was founded in 1910, still more difficult. The main difficulty the Social-Democratic Party had to face from the very beginning was that of its social basis. Members of the clubs were workers, students, craftsmen and small entrepreneurs.
In Romania, just like in any other country lagging behind Western states in economic terms, socialism emerged in intellectual circles in the second half of the 19th century. The working class that socialism targeted was rather weak in the Romanian society. Industry basically meant manufacturing, and the entire economy was mainly agriculture-based. East-European societies were just living the euphoria of Romanticism, and Romanians were only getting used to the state newly formed in 1859. The first experiment in Utopian socialism in Romania occurred in 1834 and was conducted by Teodor Diamant, an engineer who followed the French model of Charles Fourier. The first prominent intellectual to have promoted socialist ideas was Nicolae Balcescu, a leading 1848 revolutionary.
After 1859, socialist ideas grew stronger in Romania, with Bucharest and Iassi boasting the most active socialist centers. In Iasi, the Russians and Bessarabians who had taken refuge in Romania, as they were persecuted by the Tsarist regime, initiated the Socialist movement in Iassi. "Bessarabia" was the first socialist newspaper. The two socialist trends were anarchism and Marxism, with physician Nicolae Russell and Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea as their main theorists.
In the 1890's there was organized in Roumania a Socialist Party whose leaders were exclusively students, lawyers, doctors and other professionals and who had been educated in the universities of Western Europe. These ambitious gentlemen, whose Socialistic views were at best cloudy and confused, suddenly in 1899 left the Socialist movement, which did not progress fast enough to fulfill their expectations, and joined the Liberal Party. Here they became members of the Ministry and other high office-holders and made splendid careers. Even by 1915 the majority of the leading men of Roumania were former Socialists. The effect on the Socialist movement itself was that it became too weak to come before the public and thus degenerated into a number of study classes.
It was due to the splendid work of Dr. C. Rakowsky that there was in Roumania a proletarian Socialist movement. He and C. Dobrogeanu-Gherea, a famous writer and economist, took the movement in hand and succeeded in reorganizing and building up the remnants of the first unfortunate venture. They founded Socialist clubs all over the country, published the first Socialist newspaper, Romania Municitoare, in Bucharest and arranged for a national convention, which resulted in a loose organization of the existing Socialist forces. The new movement, even before it became a political party, went through a severe crisis. The farmers' revolt of 1907 was followed by a period of governmental persecution.
All clubs were dissolved, their money confiscated and about a thousand Jewish Socialists - four-fifths of the 289,000 Roumanian Jews were proletarians - were banished from the country as foreigners. Particular efforts were made to banish Rakowsky, who was also denounced as a foreigner. Several years passed, before he was permitted to prove, in court, that he was a citizen of Roumania. A still more critical period came for the Party in 1913, when the Balkan War whipped high the waves of nationalist feeling. Two influential Socialists, the lawyers Cocea and Dragu, endorsed the expansion policy of the government, although the Party itself protested emphatically against it. The former were expelled from the Party together with a number of extreme opportunists.
Then began a genuine Socialistic movement in Roumania. The Social-Democratic Party agitated unceasingly for peace since the outbreak of the Great War. It demanded the preservation of Roumanian neutrality, and was an important factor against the outbreak of war. Huge Socialist peace demonstrations were held in Bucharest, Jassy, Galatz, etc., in June, July and August, 1915; altogether 284 meetings were held attended by thousands of people and 495,920 anti-war leaflets were distributed. At a number of these meetings there were clashes with the police and soldiery; in Bucharest 40 comrades were arrested and 20 wounded.
A Party convention held on November 7-9, 1915, as the first order of business, adopted a resolution of sympathy with those comrades "who remained true to the spirit of Internationalism and have refused to make common cause with their governments." It approved the resolutions of the Zimmerwald Conference against war. for the triumph of international Socialism, and promised material and moral support to the International Socialist Agitation Committee in Berne. After these declarations had been adopted by the convention, government persecution of the Socialist press and organizations was conducted with renewed vigor.
The Party was not yet well organized. The fourth Convention reported a membership of 2,980, mostly residents of Bucharest and a few industrial centers. The Socialist vote - there were candidates nominated in seven cities only - was 1,557 in 1910 and 2,047 in 1914. Electoral and especially agrarian reforms are the chief features of the party program. The Federation of Trade Unions worked in utmost harmony with the Socialist movement. In 1914 it had 14.000 members. By the first of October, 1915, this number had risen to 16.700. The waiters, metalworkers, railway workers, textile workers and woodworkers are fairly well organized. Each of these possesses a monthly publication. Public employees were prohibited from joining the Federation.
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