People of the Revolution and the USSR

Socialist Revolutionary Party (PSR/SR) Non-Bolshevik socialists 1884–1940 ○ Heart attack

Bessarabian politician who presided over Sfatul Țării and the Moldavian Democratic Republic and saw through its union with Romania

Born to a peasant family in Răzeni, Bessarabia, in 1884, he graduated from the Chișinău seminary and Saint Petersburg University and worked as a physicist at the Meteorological Observatory. After the February Revolution he joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party and sat in the Petrograd Soviet, and Kerensky sent him to Bessarabia as the Provisional Government’s representative. At first he said Bessarabia should remain part of Russia, but as president of Sfatul Țării and of the Moldavian Democratic Republic he steered the vote for union with Romania in April 1918. After the union he became Minister of State for Bessarabia; in 1923 he took his wing of the Bessarabian Peasants’ Party into the National Liberal Party, and he later served as minister of health, of the interior and of communications and as vice-president of the Council of Ministers. He died of a heart attack in 1940.

Socialist Revolutionary Party (PSR/SR) Non-Bolshevik socialists 1884–1971 ○ Died

Bessarabian Socialist Revolutionary who headed the first government of the Moldavian Democratic Republic and put land reform first

Born in Tănătari, Bessarabia, in 1884, he graduated from the Chișinău seminary and the Faculty of Letters in Saint Petersburg and taught. A Socialist Revolutionary, he returned to Bessarabia in 1917 with Inculeț at Kerensky’s urging and was elected chairman of the governorate peasants’ soviet and to the Russian Constituent Assembly. In December 1917 he became President of the Council of Directors General, the Moldavian Democratic Republic’s first government, and Director General for Agriculture, putting land reform first. His view that the republic should bear the majority people’s name prevailed; he put the entry of Romanian troops to a vote, yet protested their presence, fearing they would be used to block land reform. He voted for union but resigned amid charges of a pro-Russian stance, and later sat in the Romanian Senate. He fled to Bucharest in 1940 and died there in 1971.