People of the Revolution and the USSR

Nationalism 1876–1954 ○ Died in prison

Veteran of the Bessarabian national movement who, as foreign minister of the Moldavian Democratic Republic, championed union with Romania

Born in Răzeni, Bessarabia, in 1876, he graduated from the Chișinău seminary in 1898 and in law from the University of Dorpat in 1903. Arrested as a student for founding an association of Bessarabian students, he later worked as a deputy judge in Bălți and created the town’s first national group. He joined the National Moldavian Party in 1917 and initially won a majority for president of Sfatul Țării, but the post went to Inculeț. As foreign minister in the Erhan and Ciugureanu cabinets in 1917–1918 he sought military aid from Shcherbachev in Iași and campaigned for union. He then served as Minister of Justice under Vaida-Voevod, worked in Paris, London and Geneva for recognition of the union and sat in parliament for the National Party and the National Peasants’ Party. Arrested by the communist authorities in 1950, he died in Sighet Prison in 1954.

Nationalism 1883–1954 ○ Natural causes

Hegelian legal philosopher who deemed October a 'national catastrophe' and became a White émigré ideologue

In On Resistance to Evil by Force (1925), he summoned the courage to 'arrest, condemn, and shoot' — what Maxim Gorky called a 'gospel of revenge.'

A Russian legal philosopher who earned both graduate degrees at Moscow University with a landmark Hegel commentary and became a professor there. Starting as a radical in 1905, he came to regard the October Revolution as a 'national catastrophe,' turned into an anti-Bolshevik theorist, and was expelled on the 'Philosophers' Ship' in 1922. In exile he advocated forceful resistance in On Resistance to Evil by Force (1925) and defended fascism as a 'healthy phenomenon' against Bolshevism. His posthumously published writings became a bedrock of Russian nationalist and authoritarian discourse, influencing figures from Solzhenitsyn to Putin.