Constantin Stere

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Constantin Stere
Born June 1, 1865
Horodişte, Bessarabia, Russian Empire
Died June 26, 1936
Bucharest, Romania
Residence Chişinău
Iaşi
Bucharest
Political party Narodnaya Volya
National Liberal Party
Peasants' Party
National Peasants' Party
Occupation jurist
Religion Romanian Orthodox

Constantin G. Stere or Constantin Sterea (Russian: Константин Егорович Стере, Konstantin Yegorovich Stere or Константин Георгиевич Стере, Konstantin Georgiyevich Stere; Moldovan Cyrillic: Константин Стере; also known under his pen name Şărcăleanu; June 1, 1865 – June 26, 1936) was a Romanian jurist, writer, politician, ideologue of the Poporanist trend, and, in March 1906, co-founder of the Viaţa Românească literary magazine (together with Garabet Ibrăileanu and Paul Bujor — the latter was afterwards replaced by the physician Ioan Cantacuzino).[1]

Constantin Stere is also remembered for his partly-autobiographical novel În preajma revoluţiei (literal translation: "On the Eve of the Revolution" — in reference to the Russian Revolution of 1917).

Contents

[edit] Biography

[edit] Early life

He was born in Horodişte, Soroca County,[2] to a family of boyar origins[3] from Ciripcău, Bessarabia — which was part of the Russian Empire at the time. Stere was one of the three sons of an ethnic Romanian couple of Russian citizens: Gheorghe or Iorgu Stere (known as Yegor Stepanovich Stere, Егор Степанович Стере in Russian), a landowner whose family was originally from Botoşani County in the Romanian part of Moldavia,[4] and Pulcheria (Пулкерия), a member of the impoverished gentry in Bessarabia.[5] He spent most of his early years, until the age of eight, in Ciripcău, where the family manor was located.[6]

Around 1874, he graduated from a Chişinău private school were classes were taught German, and entered the school for dvoryane in the city, where he became close friends with Alexandru Grosu and Lev Matveyevich Kogan-Bernstein (who were the basis for the characters Saşa Lungu and Moise Roitman in Stere's novel).[7] It was also around this time that he became acquaited with progessive, utopian socialist, and Darwinist ideas (notably reading the works of Nikolai Chernyshevsky, Alexander Herzen, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Mikhail Bakunin, Ferdinand Lassalle, and Peter Lavrovich Lavrov).[8] Stere later indicated that, before the late 1870s, he could not spell the Romanian alphabet, which had just been adopted over the border (see Romanian Cyrillic alphabet), and had to rely on a few books smuggled into Bessarabia for getting a sense of literary Romanian.[9]

While still students, Stere and Kogan-Bernstein engaged in revolutionary politics as socialists and Narodniks, initiating a conspirative "self-instruction" cell of six inside their school.[10] The group was affiliated with Narodnaya Volya,[11] and Stere was responsible for multiplying and distributing localy the manifesto issued by the latter after it had assassinated Emperor Alexander II.[12] This was also the first moment when Stere declared his opposition to a Social democratic program, a Narodnik-inspired objection which would later form one of the tenets of his doctrine.[13]

He was first arrested in late 1883, after Okhranka units decapitated the Bessarabian wing of the Narodnaya Volya.[14] Detained in Odessa (during which time he read intensely),[15] Stere was frequently visited by Maria Grosu, the sister of Alexandru, who had fallen in love with him — a Narodnik and a feminist, she asked Stere for a marriage of convenience that was to meant to help her become free from parental tutelage (according to the laws of the Russian Empire, unmarried women were under their father's protection).[16] Stere agreed, and they were married in the prison chapel (1885).[17]

[edit] Siberia

In 1885, he was deported to Siberia, serving a three-year term.[18] Briefly kept in Tyumen prison awaiting transport further east, he was sent to Kurgan in the custody of two gendarmes (October).[19] He was joined there by Maria, who gave birth to their son Roman in 1886.[20] Moving to Turinsk, the Steres joined a group of revolutionaries in internal exile; Constantin Stere agreed to print copies of a Narodnik magazine, using a hectograph, and was exposed during an raid by authorities.[21] He was swiftly taken to Tobolsk, then shipped down the Irtysh to the place where it met the Ob; he traveled to the village of Sharkala (the northernmost part of Siberia he ever reached) in a Khanty canoe,[22] and was then settled in Beryozovsky District, only to be arrested again and sent back to Tobolsk in the autumn of 1888.[23]

He was tried for his activities in Turinsk, based on evidence collected by the Okhranka.[24] While in prison, Stere, who was beginning to distance himself from socialism and proletarian internationalism, argued in front of authorities that mention of his change in attitude was supposed to be kept by the court when passing the verdict. At the time, a physician who examined him noted that he had suffered a nervous breakdown, and had him moved to a prison hospital.[25] According to most accounts, he had attempted suicide (a gesture caused by either the death of one of his brothers, who had himself committed suicide,[26] or by the news that the Narodnik leader Lev Tikhomirov had become a supporter of the political establishment.[27] In hospital, Stere stated that:

"Quite a while ago have I begun to remove myself from the influence of political exiles and their tradition. Recent times, filled with major hardships for me, I have decided firmly and sincerely to break with these traditions, as well as with all things «illegal» in my past."[28]

Instead, he became familiar with Neo-Kantian philosophy, expanding on his interest in Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (which he was reading in Beryozovsky District).[29] It was at this time that Stere began writing.[30]

In March 1889, the court decided to extend his term of exile by three more years, and relocated him to the village of Serginsk, near Minusinsk. He much later claimed that, while passing through the prison of Krasnoyarsk, he met Vladimir Lenin, the future Bolshevik leader — this is unlikely, as Lenin passed through the city several years later.[31] His other claim to have met and befriended Józef Piłsudski, future head of state of Poland (and, at the time, a prominent member of the Polish Socialist Party), was confirmed by Piłsudski himself in 1927 (Stere's novel, În preajma revoluţiei, included Piłsudski as a character, under the name Stadnicki).[32]

[edit] Academia

In late 1891 or early 1892, having been set free, Stere returned to Bessarabia, and eventually sought political refuge inside Romania, crossing the border clandestinely.[33] He graduated in Law from the University of Iaşi, while continuing his leftist activism and quickly becoming an influential figure among the youth of Iaşi, and an acquaintence of socialist leaders such as Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea, Ioan Nădejde, Sofia Nădejde, Theodor Speranţia, Vasile Morţun, and Nicolae L. Lupu.[34] Later, a controversy erupted over Stere's academic credentials, as it was never consistently proven that he had passed his baccalaureate between being arrested and applying for law school.[35]

He became a prominent figure of cultural life in Iaşi during the first decades of 20th century, being appointed professor of Administrative and Constitutional law at the Faculty he graduated from, and serving as rector of the University of Iaşi between 1913 and 1916. For much of his university career, his assistant at the department was Nicolae Daşcovici.[36]

[edit] Birth of Poporanism

Main article: Poporanism

Stere break with Marxism led him to attempt persuading the newly-created Romanian Social Democratic Workers' Party (PSDMR) to change its proletariat-focused policies,[37] and, in 1893, to found the student society Datoria ("The Duty"), which preserved the Narodnik focus on educating peasants.[38] He and his followers nevertheless continued to rely much of their thesis on Marxist concepts,[39] coupled with an interest taken in the reformist socialist way advocated by Eduard Bernstein.[40]

He entered the National Liberal Party (PNL) as a left-wing radical and populist, supporting an original tactic that blended a Narodnik focus on the peasantry with a weariness towards capitalism and industrialization[41] — the origin of Poporanism, as illustrated in his influential essay Poporanism sau social-democraţie?, "Poporanism or Social democracy?"; he used the term for the very first time in 1894).[42]

In essence, Poporanism ceased to view socialism as a goal in countries such as Romania. Stere noted that the group to be defined as industrial proletariat accounted for ca. 1% of the toatal number of taxpayers (around 1907),[43] and argued instead for a "peasant state", which was to encourage and preserve small agricultural plots as the basis for economic development. Citing the example of Denmark (see Cooperative movement in Denmark), he also argued that cooperative industries were to be created in the rural sphere, and that initiative agriculture could also rely in cooperative farms:[44]

"The essential role of peasant cooperatives resides in that they, while keeping the small-scale peasant holdings intact, award them the possibility to make use of all the advantages of large-scale production."[45]

Despite its name, the "peasant state" was not meant as an actual hegemony of the peasantry, but as an immediate move from the census suffrage in the Kingdom of Romania to a universal one, thus accurately reflecting the country's social realities (see 1866 Constitution of Romania).[46]

Stere notably rejected Karl Kautsky's support for capitalization in agriculture, arguing that it was neither necessary nor practical.[47] He was not, however, opposed to modernization, and invested trust in the role of intellectuals as militants and activists,[48] as well as building on Werner Sombart's theory that agrarian economies were facing new and special conditions (as opposed to those that bore the mark of the Industrial Revolution).[49] Stere observed changes occuring in the developed world at the turn of the 19th century, and concluded that industrialization of backward countries was also being blocked by colonialism and the prosperity it had brought to the British Empire and the United States.[50] He argued that a new form of capital was being created at a larger, non-national, scale; he deemed it "vagabond capital", and viewed in it the source for the lack of accuracy in Marxist predictions over proletarian alienation (as it appeared that, in developed countries, the proletariat was growing wealthier).[51]

This was also the start of a polemic between him and the Marxist Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea. Although the two shared skepticism over the possibility of early socialist success in Romania (agreeing with Titu Maiorescu's verdict that it was one of the "forms without substance", and thus an ill-suited effect of Westernization),[52] Dobrogeanu-Gherea argued that Stere's program of basing Romania's economy on cooperatives and small-scale agricultural holdings could only lead to endemic underdevelopment.[53]

[edit] Viaţa Românească

Main article: Viaţa Românească

In its first editorial (1906), Viaţa Românească summarized the cultural guidelines of the Poporanist trend, ones to which Stere himself adhered:

"A 'national' culture with specific characteristics will only be born when the large, truly Romanian, popular masses will partake in creating and assessing cultural values — literary language, literature, ways of living — and this will only be possible when, through culture, enlarged political participation and economical uplifting, the peasantry will be awarded a social value in proportion with its numerical, economical, moral and national values, when we shall be one people, when all the social classes shall be of the same people [...]."[54]

Stere distanced himself from the competing and equally peasant-focused trend of Sămănătorul, which aimed to preserve the peasant way of life in front of modernization rather than enforce the peasant economy advocated by Poporanism.[55] He was notably involved in polemics with Sămănătorul's Octavian Goga.

In his 1910 Neo-Serfdom (A Social and Economical Study of Our Land Issue), Dobrogeanu-Gherea viewed the relation between left-leaning cultural circles in Romania and Stere's Narodnik focus as conjunctural, and made mention of competing trends inside Poporanism:

"[There is] the Poporanism established in this country around 15 years after [the Narodnik original] and from the very same source. Lacking the rigorous method of Marxism, this Poporanism shows itself in its entire original meaning and with all its utopianism in Mr. Şărcăleanu's[56] article written against the poet Goga. [...] In [Stere's other] articles, Poporanism appears to have being against Social Democracy as its sole attribute [...].
[There is also] our national, Romanian, Poporanism, as it has originated from the different and real circumstances of our country. This Poporanism is more practical than theoretical, and does not in fact have its own theory. Mr. Stere's effort to award it one was not at all successful. But this Poporanism has its own views and attitudes and — what's more important — its own praxis. And to this real praxis, influencing the real course of things in this country, all kinds of Poporanists have associated themselves in one way or another, including those who are under the influence of Russian [Narodnik ideas]. But even this national Poporanism is far, very far from being uniform. This can even be seen in those multiple groupings composing it, [...] which many times quarell with one another."[57]

The apparent heterogeneous character of Poporanism was also criticized by others, who noted that its discourse also featured nationalist rhetoric.[58] Nevertheless, PSDMR members other than Dobrogeanu-Gherea tended to refer to the magazine as "engaged in Sterist politics".[59]

[edit] Advocate of Bessarabia's union

Soon after the Russian Revolution of 1905, Stere and a group of his followers returned to Bessarabia, where they issued a magazine (Basarabia) of which he was editor (together with Ion Inculeţ, Teodor Inculeţ, Ion Pelivan, Alexei Mateevici, and Pan Halippa) attempting to profit from the political gains in Russia by calling for both in-depth social reforms and decentralization; their influence waned after reactionary politicians made electoral gains and, as the new administration, confiscated most of the magazine's issues (leading to its bankrupcy in 1907).[60]

In 1916, Stere strongly supported Romania's alliance with the Central Powers, arguing in favor of a policy focused on Bessarabia's recovery and against what he saw as Russian expansionism[61] - ultimately, this led him to split with the pro-Entente PNL upon the outbreak of World War I.[62] The socialist Ioan Nădejde commented on the fact that Stere had become rivals with members of the Romanian Social Democratic Workers' Party who had joined the PNL in 1899, and especially with their leader Vasile Morţun.[63] He joined his voice to a diverse intellectual opposition which also included the Conservative Party's Petre P. Carp and Alexandru Marghiloman, the left-leaning writers Tudor Arghezi, Dumitru D. Pătrăşcanu, and Gala Galaction, as well as the revolutionary socialist Christian Rakovsky.[64]

Following the occupation of Bucharest by the Central Powers, Stere remained in the city, in contrast with the mass the Bucharesters who followed the Romanian authorities' refuge to Iaşi. With financial support from Alexandru Vaida-Voevod, he began publishing his Lumina, a newspaper that was nevertheless, according to its editor, "supportive of the Romanian point of view"[65] and thus subject to censorship ("a German [censorship], for [views on] external politics [...] and for internal politics [the one] exercised by Petre P. Carp's men, who cut out my articles on expropriation [that is, land reform] and universal suffrage").[66]

In late March 1918, he represented the Alexandru Marghiloman government in Chişinău, during the time after the February and October Revolutions when Bessarabia had proclaimed itself a Moldavian Democratic Republic — he was charged with assisting Ion Inculeţ in proposing a union of Bessarabia and Romania in Sfatul Ţării, the republic's legislative assembly.[67] After prolonged debates, the vote was carried in favor of union on March 27 (see Greater Romania).

With the change in fortunes brought by the Armistice with Germany, Stere was charged with treason and imprisoned; never facing trial, he was eventually set free.[68]

[edit] Creation of the Peasants' Party

In the late 1910s, he became discreetly involved in the movement that led to the creation of the Bessarabian Peasants' Party (founded and led by Pan Halippa and Ion Inculeţ). In late 1918, most of it merged into Ion Mihalache's Peasants' Party (PŢ), of which he and Halippa and became high-ranking members[69] (Inculeţ disagreed with the political union, and led a smaller party that eventually merged into the PNL).[70]

Stere caused a scandal after running and winning elections for the Romanian Chamber of Deputies in Soroca (1921, under the Alexandru Averescu government), when all parties joined Nicolae Iorga in opposition to his appointment in office (Iorga considered Stere's anti-Entente past to be equivalent with treason).[71] Fears of Bolshevik appeal in Bessarabia led to widespread allegations that the former socialist Stere was "Bolshevizing" the region.[72] Speaking from the non-communist Left, Nădejde expressed concerns that Stere was radicalizing his message:

"[...] Stere aims to scrape together a socialist party, allied with the Peasants' Party, against all other social classes, and thus follows a policy out of which, in the end, we could only get Bolshevism."[73]

In 1919, Stere had shown his awareness of that he and his party were being criticised by various political groups claiming Marxist orthodoxy, far left included. Stating again his belief in the fragile and minority position of industrial proletarians in the landscape of Romanian economy of the period, he indicated that the latter class was destined to adapt its demands to the interests of the peasantry:

"[...] for a country such as Romania, it is obvious that the urban working class' fate is literally in the hands of the rural working class. [...]
In these conditions, would it not be an act of suicide from the industrial working class of Romania if it were to adopt a hostile attitude toward the peasantry?
And: it is obvious that, no matter what the political and social doctrine preached by the urban proletariat, it would become hostile toward the peasantry if it wanted to impose upon it a form of economic structuring rejected by the peasantry, such as, for one, the immediate and violent socialization of peasant agriculture.
A socialist worker expresses, in the pages of [a socialist journal], the fear that the Peasants' Party of Romania will follow the example of the peasant parties in Bulgaria [that is, the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union] and Serbia [that is, the Serbian Peasant Party], who, once in power, are said to have oppressed the workers.
But can this serve as an argument against the solidarity in interests of the workers in villages and cities?
In these murky times, we have also assisted to the spectacle of bloody repression, by a socialist government [formed by the Social Democratic Party of Germany], of the workers' movements in Germany.
Does this mean that there is a real conflict of interests between those elements of the German proletariat that are being led by the orthodox Social Democracy, and the elements that follow the banner of the Independent Party?"[74]

[edit] Scandal and dissidence

Stere's position in his party's leadership prevented it from entering a close union with the Transylvania-based Romanian National Party (PNR) in 1924, as the PNR's leaders resented his anti-Entente past.[75]

Two years later, however, he was admitted as one of the leaders of the newly-created National Peasants' Party, a fusion of the two groups that was partly aided by the attack of National Liberal agents on Pan Halippa and the government's refusal to punish the guilty.[76] Stere was the author of a legislation which aimed at providing for a degree of administrative decentralization and local initiative in government, passed in 1929 by the Iuliu Maniu executive.[77]

He soon clashed with the more conservative politicians who had been members of the PNR. In March 1930, the mention of his name during a public celebration provoked a number of Romanian Army generals to leave in protest; immediately after, the National Liberal group around Vintilă Brătianu began attacking Stere's party for harbouring him, and for causing a split between Army and political establishment.[78] General Henry Cihoschi, the Minister of Defense, was publicly criticized in parliament for not siding with his subordinates, and had to resign on April 4; Maniu appeared to support Stere's ousting.[79]

In reply, Stere again expressed his view that Romania's government had been wrong in 1916,[80] and left to create the minor Democratic Peasants' Party (not to be confused with the one created later by Nicolae L. Lupu), which he led into a union with Grigore Iunian's Radical Peasants' Party.

[edit] Legacy

Despite his dissidence, Stere's ideas remained highly influential inside the National Peasants' Party, and constituted a major influence on the doctrines of Virgil Madgearu.[81] Poporanism, alongside Marxism itself, was a contributing factor in Dimitrie Gusti's original theories on sociology.[82]

Stere's original ideas on economic development and Marxist topics were subject to censorship in Communist Romania; although works on him were published after the establishment of Nicolae Ceauşescu's rule, they generally avoided presenting and quoting his writings.[83] Described as a "reactionary" until the 1960s,[84] he was considered by revised official historiography to have taken a "radical-bourgeois position".[85]

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Stere, "Cum am devenit...", p.13
  2. ^ Ornea, p.28
  3. ^ Nădejde, in Gorovei
  4. ^ Ornea, p.23-25
  5. ^ Ornea, p.26-28
  6. ^ Ornea, p.27-29, 33
  7. ^ Ornea, p.36-37
  8. ^ Ornea, p.37-41
  9. ^ Ornea, p.44-45
  10. ^ Ornea, p.46-48
  11. ^ Hitchins, p.82; Ornea, p.48-49
  12. ^ Ornea, p.50
  13. ^ Ornea, p.56-59
  14. ^ Ornea, p.60-61
  15. ^ Ornea, p.61-67
  16. ^ Ornea, p.74-75
  17. ^ Ornea, p.75-76
  18. ^ Ornea, p.77
  19. ^ Ornea, p.80-86
  20. ^ Ornea, p.87-88
  21. ^ Ornea, p.90-93
  22. ^ Ornea, p.93-94
  23. ^ Ornea, p.93-96
  24. ^ Ornea, p.96-97
  25. ^ Ornea, p.98
  26. ^ Ornea, p.103
  27. ^ Ornea, p.104-106
  28. ^ Stere, in Ornea, p.98-99
  29. ^ Ornea, p.106-108
  30. ^ Ornea, p.108
  31. ^ Ornea, p.111-112
  32. ^ Ornea, p.113
  33. ^ Ornea, p.126-143
  34. ^ Ornea, p.147-149, 150-153, 156
  35. ^ Ornea,p.52-55
  36. ^ Ornea, p.54
  37. ^ Hitchins, p.83
  38. ^ Hitchins, p.83
  39. ^ Boatcă, p.18; Ionescu
  40. ^ Boatcă, p.15; Ornea, p.122-123
  41. ^ Boia, p.109-110; Boatcă, p.15; Hitchins, p.83, 85; Ionescu; Stahl
  42. ^ Hitchins, p.83
  43. ^ Boatcă, p.15
  44. ^ Hitchins, p.84-85; Stahl
  45. ^ Stere, in Stahl
  46. ^ Boatcă, p.15; Ionescu
  47. ^ Ionescu; Love; Stahl
  48. ^ Ionescu
  49. ^ Boatcă, p.17
  50. ^ Boatcă, p.18-19
  51. ^ Boatcă, p.19-20
  52. ^ Boatcă, p.15
  53. ^ Dobrogeanu-Gherea; Hitchins, p.87
  54. ^ Viaţa Românească, in Niculae et al., p.64 (italics as used in the original)
  55. ^ Hitchins, p.84-85
  56. ^ Stere was upset by the fact that he had become known as the person behind the Şărcăleanu alias. As he later admitted, he attempted to divert attention by making use of another alias, P. Nicanor & Co. (used before and after him by various Viaţa Românească contributors to the magazine's closing column), writing an article in which he claimed Stere and Şărcăleanu were not one and the same, thus maintaining the relative ambiguity until the early 1930s (Stere, "Cum am devenit...", p.14-15)
  57. ^ Dobrogeanu-Gherea
  58. ^ Boatcă, p.15
  59. ^ Nădejde, in Gorovei
  60. ^ Hitchins, p.251-252
  61. ^ Zbuchea
  62. ^ Zbuchea
  63. ^ Nădejde, in Gorovei
  64. ^ Boia, p.256; Zbuchea
  65. ^ Stere, in Coman, p.19
  66. ^ Stere, in Coman, p.19
  67. ^ Hitchins, p.278; Zbuchea
  68. ^ Slabey Roucek, p.85
  69. ^ Slabey Roucek, p.85-86
  70. ^ Niculae et al., p.12
  71. ^ Scurtu
  72. ^ Slabey Roucek, p.86
  73. ^ Nădejde, in Gorovei
  74. ^ Stere, in Niculae et al., p.93
  75. ^ Niculae et al., p.13; Scurtu
  76. ^ Slabey Rocek,p.91
  77. ^ Hitchins, p.409
  78. ^ Coman, p.20-21
  79. ^ Coman, p.20, 22
  80. ^ Coman, p.19; Zbuchea
  81. ^ Coman, p.23; Hitchins, p.320-321, 388
  82. ^ Vulcănescu
  83. ^ Boatcă, p.23
  84. ^ Boatcă, p.23
  85. ^ Coman, p.20

[edit] References

[edit] External links

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