Holy Legionary Youth

Fascist Activism in Interwar Romania

Roland Clark

• Editorial: Cornell University Press
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780801456336
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: Eastern European History

Founded in 1927, Romania's Legion of the Archangel Michael was one of Europe's largest and longest-lived fascist social movements. In Holy Legionary Youth, Roland Clark draws on oral histories, memoirs, and substantial research in the archives of the Romanian secret police to provide the most comprehensive account of the Legion in English to date. Clark approaches Romanian fascism by asking what membership in the Legion meant to young Romanian men and women. Viewing fascism "from below, " as a social category that had practical consequences for those who embraced it, he shows how the personal significance of fascism emerged out of Legionaries' interactions with each other, the state, other political parties, families and friends, and fascist groups abroad. Official repression, fascist spectacle, and the frequency and nature of legionary activities changed a person's everyday activities and relationships in profound ways.

Clark's sweeping history traces fascist organizing in interwar Romania to nineteenth-century grassroots nationalist movements that demanded political independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It also shows how closely the movement was associated with the Romanian Orthodox Church and how the uniforms, marches, and rituals were inspired by the muscular, martial aesthetic of fascism elsewhere in Europe. Although antisemitism was a key feature of official fascist ideology, state violence against Legionaries rather than the extensive fascist violence against Jews had a far greater impact on how Romanians viewed the movement and their role in it. Approaching fascism in interwar Romania as an everyday practice, Holy Legionary Youth offers a new perspective on European fascism, highlighting how ordinary people "performed" fascism by working together to promote a unique and totalizing social identity.

1

THE ROOTS OF ULTRANATIONALISM

One of the most popular songs among antisemitic student activists during the 1920s was “Deşteaptă-te, române” (Wake up, Romanian). Students sang it during street protests, when disrupting lectures and assaulting other students, or when throwing Jews off trains.¹ The words blamed foreign oppressors for the inert and apathetic state of ethnic Romanians and called on the latter to rise up as a people to overthrow the yoke of tyranny:

Wake up, Romanian, from the sleep of the dead,
Into which tyrannous barbarians immersed you
Now or never, create your own fate,
At which even your harshest enemies should bow.

The lyrics to “Wake Up, Romanian” were originally written by Andrei Mureşanu (1816–1863) during the 1848 revolution, when Romanians in Transylvania demanded autonomy for Romanians within the Habsburg Empire. Within weeks it was being sung in Bucharest and Iaşi against the Ottoman and Russian empires.² Today this song is the official Romanian national anthem, but to the antisemitic students of the 1920s it represented decades of nationalist struggle to claim the land for ethnic Romanians. This was a holy struggle, the anthem claimed, blessed and patronized by the Orthodox Church:

Priests, lead with your crucifixes! Because our army is Christian,
The motto is Liberty and its goal is holy,
Better to die in battle, in full glory,
Than to once again be slaves upon our ancient ground!

The song divided the world into Romanians and foreigners, friends and foes, and portrayed the nationalist movement as a battle for “freedom or death!” It spoke of brotherhood and camaraderie, traitors, and a widowed mother evoking supernatural powers to curse her son’s enemies. This anthem located the students within a tradition of patriotic warriors who were accepted as heroes by the state and by Romanian society at large. It provided legitimacy for their fight against Jews and “Judaized” politicians and affirmed the special calling of “elders, men, youths and boys, from mountains to the plains” to be defenders of the Romanian nation.

The belief that nations exist and are valid and meaningful collectivities deserving of allegiance is known as nationalism. Benedict Anderson describes nations as “imagined communities” similar to religions or kinship groups—collectivities extending through space and time that people identify themselves with.³ The song “Wake Up, Romanian” commanded the students to “raise your broad forehead and look around you / Like fir trees, hundreds of thousands of heroes are standing tall.” These heroes belonged to the feudal armies who defended the patrimonies of medieval princes, but nationalist propagandists claimed that they were simultaneously fighting for the modern Romanian nation. Mureşanu called on “Romanians from the four corners, now or never / Unite in thought, unite in feeling,” as if a noblewoman from Timişoara would sit down together with a locksmith from Galaţi and a serf living on the outskirts of Siret. Anderson suggests that people feel solidarity with other members of their nation even though they will never meet them because technologies such as languages, maps, newspapers, and common time zones remind them that their basic everyday experiences are shared by other people who also identify with their nation. Nationalism is therefore closely connected to literacy and channels of communication. Rituals, myths, and symbols such as national histories, anthems, flags, and state weddings and funerals intensify that solidarity through moments of collective focus on the national community.

Over the past two hundred years the idea of nations has been used to justify territorial claims, so cultural artifacts like history and language have taken on important political and geopolitical functions. The idea of nations is so important politically, in fact, that nationalists like Andrei Mureşanu began speaking about “the Romanian nation” at a time when nationalism was only a literary idea. Mihail Kogâlniceanu observed in 1891 that most peasants identified themselves according to the region or social class they came from instead of as Romanians, and in 1905 the ultranationalist activist A. C. Cuza (1857–1947) complained that “the popular masses are unaware even of their nationality.”⁴ For this reason, Rogers Brubaker has argued that nationalist discourses are not really based on nations at all but are actually political stances used by social actors for their own goals.⁵ As those goals changed, so too did the purpose of speaking about nations: A discourse that in 1848 was used to justify a revolution became a war cry in 1916 and an excuse for antisemitic violence in 1922. When Mureşanu wrote that “the Danube is stolen / Through intrigue and coercion, sly machinations,” he was referring to Hungarians, Russians, and Turks. But antisemitic propaganda of the late nineteenth century had connected words such as intrigue, coercion, and slyness with Jews and by the 1920s it was easy to apply Mureşanu’s lyrics to a political platform seeking to limit Jewish influence in Romanian public life.

Jews and Foreigners

The historical context in which Romanian nationalism developed meant that nationalists frequently expressed anxieties about their identity, collective national purpose, and place in Europe through attacks on Jews and foreigners (străini). The territory of present-day Romania was ruled by the Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman empires until these empires collapsed in the early twentieth century. Despite frequent rebellions, Wallachian princes (domni or domnitori) began paying tribute to the Ottomans in 1390 and the Moldavians did the same during the 1450s. In return they received self-governance, were spared the settlement of Muslim landowners in their territories, and princes generally had a strong say in the appointment of ecclesiastical officials.⁶ The power of the native domnitori declined in the eighteenth century and they were replaced with Greek rulers known as Phanariots, who also owed their positions to the Ottoman sultan. Those regions of Moldavia that were not governed by the Ottomans—Bukovina and Bessarabia—fell under Habsburg and Russian control. Anti-Phanariot sentiment grew among the Romanians in these principalities and culminated in 1821 when Romanian forces supported the Ottomans against the attempt by Alexander Ipsilantis (1792–1828) to resurrect the Byzantine Empire, which was to include Wallachia and Moldavia.⁷ Although technically still governed by the Ottomans, Wallachia and Moldavia both fell under Russian military occupation in 1826. Russian armies occupied the principalities eight times between 1711 and 1854, but this occupation involved thoroughgoing and unpopular agrarian reforms, the introduction of a cash economy, the subordination of the church to the state, and the consolidation of the legal rights of the Romanian boyars to their estates.⁸ Even though they were officially under foreign rule, intellectuals in the Romanian principalities had the liberty to develop Romanian culture in relative freedom while being able to blame the region’s economic and social problems on a litany of foreign invaders.

The principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia had their own national movements, and individuals claiming to be “working for the benefit of the Romanian nation” appear in the sources as early as the eighteenth century.⁹ These national movements were facilitated by newspapers and a growing literary scene influenced by French intellectual culture and the rise of liberal nationalism throughout Europe and encouraged by the Romanian Orthodox Church. But the influence of nationalism was limited because it was rarely discussed outside elite circles—the leaders of the Romanian national movement in Transylvania during the later half of the nineteenth century were predominately bourgeois males or high-ranking clergymen.¹⁰ Many Romanians in Transylvania were legally serfs up until the 1854 emancipation, and even then they remained in an economically subordinate position vis-à-vis their Saxon or Hungarian neighbors.¹¹ Similarly, most Romanians in Wallachia and Moldavia were impoverished and illiterate peasants who had little hope that they would benefit from the wave of nationalist uprisings that rocked the Balkan provinces of the Ottoman Empire during the first part of the nineteenth century. The abolition of serfdom in the principalities followed by the rise of a nascent capitalism left many former serfs without cultivatable land and in a position of dependency on the large landholders, creating a rural proletariat who remained in a state of “neo-serfdom.”¹²

Imperial administrators and western European travelers categorized Romanians as backward and barbaric, and in turn Romanians classified Others according to how they, as a group, benefited from the imperial system.¹³ As long as Romanians lived within multiethnic states, foreigners were neighbors as often as they were outsiders. The Romanian word străin referred equally well to Phanariot or Russian administrators, Turkish or Jewish traders, and Hungarian or German peasants, all of whom lived in the same towns and villages as Romanians. Nationalists used negative stereotypes about Roma—whom they called ¸tigani (gypsies)—as uncivilized people in need of wise rulers to justify their claim that Romanians were worthy of a nation-state, and they spoke about Jews and străini as a way of emphasizing that Romanians were not yet in full control of their own country.¹⁴ With the gradual success of the national movement, Romanian nationalists slowly lost interest in Phanariots and Turks and came to see Jews as their most immediate enemies, closely followed by those Romanian elites who collaborated with Jews.

Jews had lived in the territory of present-day Romania since at least the late Middle Ages, but modern antisemitism in Romania dates to the wave of Jewish immigration from Polish Galicia during the eighteenth century. Phanariot princes gave the new immigrants a hostile welcome, and Greek and Bu...