Peasant Violence and Antisemitism in Early Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe

Irina Marin

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319760681
• eBook ISBN: 9783319760698
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Eastern European History
• Index: History

This book is a transnational study of rural and anti-Semitic violence around the triple frontier between Austria-Hungary, Romania and Tsarist Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century. It focuses on the devastating Romanian peasant uprising in 1907 and traces the reverberations of the crisis across the triple frontier, analysing the fears, spectres and knee-jerk reactions it triggered in the borderlands of Austria-Hungary and Tsarist Russia. The uprising came close on the heels of the 1905-1907 social turmoil in Tsarist Russia, and brought into play the major issues that characterized social and political life in the region at the time: rural poverty, the Jewish Question, state modernization, and social upheavals. The book comparatively explores the causes and mechanisms of violence propagation, the function of rumour in the spread of the uprising, land reforms and their legal underpinnings, the policing capabilities of the borderlands around the triple frontier, as well as newspaper coverage and diplomatic reactions.

© The Author(s) 2018

Irina MarinPeasant Violence and Antisemitism in Early Twentieth-Century Eastern Europehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76069-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. A Peasant Uprising on the Edge of a Triple Frontier

Irina Marin¹

(1)

Augsburg University, Augsburg, Germany

End Abstract

Until 1878 three empires, the Ottoman, Habsburg and Tsarist, chafed at the borders between the Carpathians, the Black Sea and the Danube. Thirty years after the Treaty of Berlin of 1878 the Ottoman side of this triple frontier had morphed into several independent and quasi-independent Balkan states, each of them striving to modernize and to emulate Western European ways. Romania, which had come into being in 1859 through the union of the Danubian Principalities Wallachia and Moldavia, formerly under Ottoman suzerainty, was the biggest, most peaceful and, by all accounts and purposes, the most stable and flourishing of the fledgling states thus formed. The other states born from the European fringes of the Ottoman empire were convulsed by social and political violence: the Macedonian question raged between independent Greece and autonomous Bulgaria, Serbia waxed increasingly bellicose and went as ‘the land of assassinations, abdications, pronunciamientos, and coups d’état’;¹ Bulgaria resented the territorial stipulations of the Berlin Treaty and came to blows with Serbia in a short-lived war in 1885. By comparison, their neighbour north of the Danube came across, at its best, as a bastion of order and civilization in the quicksands of the Balkan Peninsula and, at its worst, in the words of British diplomat Sir Frank Lascelles , as ‘dull and uninteresting’.² Romania’s Hohenzollern King Carol I proudly proclaimed in 1905, while Russia was in the grips of revolution and Hungary in throes of constitutional and political deadlock:

Romania is the only country in which peace and order are reigning, while everywhere else around us menacing storm clouds are gathering and serious complications are in the offing. Europe should be grateful to me for governing this country with foresight and wisdom and keeping political passions in check.³

Fig. 1.1

Map of the triple frontier between Austria-Hungary, Tsarist Russia and Romania in 1907

Romania was a young state, a quarter of a century old: in 1866 Carol I of Hohenzollern came to the throne of the recently united Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia; in 1878 the country gained its independence from the Ottoman Empire, having taken part in the Russo–Turkish war of 1877–1878 and made a difference to the outcome of the hostilities. By 1906, the year of the royal jubilee celebrating 40 years of Hohenzollern rule over the country, there was much to be celebrated as the state had been virtually built from scratch. Apart from the usual eulogies, which were customary upon such occasions, there was good reason to be proud of the country’s achievements. The peasantry had been emancipated in 1864 and received land in several batches of land redistribution. More money than the young state could afford had been invested in railways, which by the beginning of the twentieth century extended to an impressive 3,500 kilometres.⁴ Industrial development (oil rigs, paper and sugar factories), heavily subsidized by the state and cocooned by protectionist tariffs, seemed to be taking off: thus before 1914 ‘Romania’s gross industrial output per capita was over twice those of Serbia and Bulgaria and probably Greece.’⁵ But perhaps the greatest statistical achievement of the new state was in the realm of agriculture, Romania being primarily an agrarian state, with a population made up of peasants in proportion of 82% and land tenure dominated by great landowners. Despite the fact that agriculture was conducted traditionally, without recourse to modern farming techniques, and also despite the agricultural crisis of the 1870s, the end of the nineteenth, beginning of the twentieth century saw a huge increase in Romanian grain production and export, so much so that ‘by 1910 Romanian wheat export value had climbed past that of the U.S. to fourth place in the world.’⁶ Grain represented up to 80% of Romanian exports until the First World War.⁷

The acquisition of independent statehood gave a boost to a feverish adoption of institutions and practices from the West, which were imported wholesale and uneasily grafted onto autochthonous mores and practices: Western, so-called ‘Frankish’ fashion flooded in and eventually replaced the Oriental style of dress; the Constitution of 1866, which was patterned on the Belgian constitution, was retained and added to; two universities came into being in Bucharest and in Iași; the army was built from scratch and a military academy followed shortly in an attempt to make up for the lack of qualified personnel; museums, academies and a literary canon were enthusiastically created from scratch. The capital city Bucharest underwent an architectural facelift, with French-style boulevards and buildings that had the locals praise the place as the ‘little Paris’, one of the many in the region.

As these imports could not be entirely and effectively absorbed by Romanian society at the time, this led to the formation, at its best, of cultural and political hybrids and, at its worst, of empty forms or forms without content, as a prominent Conservative Romanian politician, Titu Maiorescu, put it. This was also the case in the political sphere, where constitutionalism and parliamentarianism, being grafted onto a patriarchal, pre-capitalist society, created a mere façade of liberal practices and concealed clientelism behind a veneer of constitutionalism. The lynchpin in the political architecture of the state was King Carol I, who appointed the Prime Minister, under whose government parliamentary elections were called and usually won by the party thus forming the government. Two parties dominated the political scene and succeeded to power: the Conservatives, representing the interests of great landowners, and the Liberals, who brought together small landowners and the emerging professional classes (bankers, merchants). Voting was restricted to the wealthy few and peasants had no political say at all.⁸

All in all, by the beginning of the twentieth century the Romanian Kingdom seemed to be going full steam ahead on the path of, albeit imperfect, modernization. A lot had been achieved, a lot more was yet to be done.

In spring 1907 a devastating peasant uprising engulfed the fledgling kingdom, shook it up from its very foundations and made a mockery of its strenuous, decade-long efforts at projecting the image of a civilized modern state. The uprising was (and still is to date) the most violent and destructive episode in Romanian history ever to occur in peacetime. Not even the 1989 revolution killed as many and destroyed as much: by the Romanian government’s estimate at the time, which is generally thought to be a major understatement, the casualties were around 2,000 dead; by the bleakest of estimates, the death toll was 11,000. Destruction of property ran in the millions of Franks. Although at its peak the uprising only lasted a couple of weeks, it encompassed the whole country, threatened to destabilize the state and saw extremes of violence perpetrated on the part of both the rebellious peasants and the authorities. The troubles broke out in the north of the country, close to the Russian border, and were initially dismissed as nothing more than Jew bashing, they then rattled southwards with surprising celerity and savage, diehard violence.

The uprising started out as a conflict between peasants and the local leaseholder in the village of Flămânzi, county Botoșani, northeastern Romania. In pre-1914 Romania land tenure was dominated by the great property, the big landowners cultivating their land extensively and, increasingly towards the end of the century, by means of subletting their estates to leaseholders ( arendași ), who sought to maximize their profits at the expense of the peasants. Quite a few, though by no means all, of the leaseholders were ‘foreigners’ (Jews, Greeks, Armenians), who traditionally were in charge of trade and industry and increasingly came to be associated with the negative aspects of inceptive capitalism. The conflict was allowed to escalate through a combination of tardiness, empathy with the plight of the peasants and antisemitism on the part of the local and regional authorities.⁹

The uprising started on estates leased out to Jewish entrepreneurs. News of the uprising in Botoșani trickled down from one village to the next and electrified the entire Romanian countryside like a shockwave. The intensity and violence of rebellion was not the same everywhere, but the rapid spread and the unprecedented synchronization of events caught the authorities off guard and by the end of the day nothing short of all-out military repression served to redress the situation. Peasants moved from verbal protest and threats to devastation of property and arson, driving out the local leaseholders, driving out ‘foreigners’, stealing what could be stolen and destroying everything else, in several cases, savagely murdering administrators and estate employees with whom they had an axe to grind.

By mid-March the whole country was in uproar, the entire army had been mobilized and the reserves were called up. In the south of the country armed peasants gathered in paramilitary formations and struck back against the army. In the early stages of the uprising there were more cases of defection and insubordination among new peasant recruits than the army commanders cared to admit to. The change of government in mid-March brought to po...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. A Peasant Uprising on the Edge of a Triple Frontier
• 2. Rumour and Violence: The Making of an Uprising
• 3. Jews, Strangers and Foreigners
• 4. The Peasant Question
• 5. Eyes of the State
• 6. Paper Worlds
• 7. Diplomacy of the Uprising
• 8. Conclusions
• Back Matter