International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest

Extract

Dwarfed by nationalist and fascist movements on the right and communism and socialism on the left in a country caught between European and Asian empires, anarchism has not played a significant role in Romanian history. Indeed, it appears not to have been a native growth, instead imported to the country by Russian and Bulgarian political refugees in the late nineteenth century ( Muñoz 1981 : 1–2). One of the latter, the exiled Bulgarian nationalist Hristo Botev (1847–1876), founded what may have been the first anarchist group in the Romanian port city of Galatz in 1871, issuing a proclamation of solidarity for the Paris Commune of that year ( Relgis 1959 : 66). Errico Malatesta , too, made a sojourn in Romania in 1879, as did Elisée Reclus in 1884. Shortly thereafter, anarchist works began to appear in Romanian translation, for example, Mikhail Bakunin 's God and the State ( Dumnezeu şi Statul , 1884), Peter Kropotkin 's Appeal to the Young ( Catra tineri , 1886), Jean Grave's Society on the Day After the Revolution ( Societa dupa revolutie , 1887), Reclus's Evolution and Revolution ( Evolutie si revolutie , 1885), and Malatesta's Among Peasants ( Intre ţarani , 1891) ( Nettlau 1897/1968 : 47, 70–1, 74, 90, 94, 125–6). In Bucovina, a multi-ethnic province claimed by the Austro-Hungarian empire until 1919, works by German anarchists such as Erich Mühsam, Gustav Landauer ... log in or subscribe to read full text