Constantin Stere
Constantin G. Stere or Constantin Sterea was a Romanian writer, jurist, politician, ideologue of the Poporanist trend, and, in March 1906, co-founder of the literary magazine Viața Românească. One of the central figures of the Bessarabian intelligentsia at the time, Stere was a key actor during the Union of Bessarabia with Romania in 1918, and is associated with its legacy.
Constantin Stere was professor of Administrative and Constitutional law at the University of Iaşi, serving as its rector between 1913 and 1916. He is also remembered for his partly autobiographical novel În preajma revoluției.
Biography
Early life
He was born in Horodiște, Soroca County, to a family of boyar origins from Ciripcău, Bessarabia — which was part of the Russian Empire at the time. Stere was one of the three sons of a couple of Russian citizens: Gheorghe or Iorgu Stere, an ethnic Greek landowner whose family was originally from Botoșani County in the Romanian part of Moldavia, and Pulcheria, a member of the impoverished gentry in Bessarabia. He spent most of his early years, until the age of eight, in Ciripcău, where the family manor was located.Around 1874, he graduated from a Chișinău private school where 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. It was also around this time that he became acquainted with progressive, utopian socialist, and Darwinist ideas. Stere later indicated that, before the late 1870s, he could not spell the Romanian alphabet, which had just been adopted over the border, and had to rely on a few books smuggled into Bessarabia for getting a sense of literary Romanian.
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. The group was affiliated with Narodnaya Volya, and Stere was responsible for multiplying and distributing locally the manifesto issued by the latter after it had assassinated Emperor Alexander II. 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.
He was first arrested in late 1883, after Okhrana units decapitated the Bessarabian wing of the Narodnaya Volya. Detained in Odessa, 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 meant to help her become free from parental tutelage. Stere agreed, and they were married in the prison chapel.
Siberia
In 1885, he was deported to Siberia, serving a three-year term. Briefly kept in Tyumen prison awaiting transport further east, he was sent to Kurgan in the custody of two gendarmes. He was joined there by Maria, who gave birth to their son Roman in 1886. 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 a raid by authorities. 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 in a Khanty canoe, and was then settled in Beryozovsky District, only to be arrested again and sent back to Tobolsk in the autumn of 1888.He was tried for his activities in Turinsk, based on evidence collected by the Okhrana. 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. According to most accounts, he had attempted suicide. 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."
Instead, he became familiar with neo-Kantian philosophy, expanding on his interest in Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. It was at this time that Stere began writing.
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 after Stere. His other claim to have met and befriended Józef Piłsudski, future head of state of Poland, was confirmed by Piłsudski himself in 1927.
''Datoria'' and ''Evenimentul''
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. He studied law at the University of Iași to amend its proletariat-focused policies, and, in 1893, to found the student society Datoria, which preserved the Narodnik focus on educating peasants. He and his followers nevertheless continued to rely much of their thesis on Marxist concepts, coupled with an interest taken in the reformist socialist way advocated by Eduard Bernstein.After debuting as a journalist for the liberal-inspired Evenimentul in 1893, Stere also sent substantial contribution to Adevărul, a tribune of various left-wing trends that was being published in Bucharest under the direction of Anton Bacalbașa. Later in 1893, he took part in founding Evenimentul Literar, the literary supplement of Evenimentul.
He joined in the socialists Bacalbașa and Ibrăileanu in a cultural polemic with the poet Alexandru Vlahuță and his magazine Vieața. Vlahuță, who had sided with Dobrogeanu-Gherea during the latter's conflict with Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu, nonetheless clashed with the leftists over the issue of "art for art's sake", arguing that the interest his adversaries took in didacticism was harming literature. This exchange of replies soon involved the former socialist Eduard Dioghenide, who attacked Evenimentul Literar with Antisemitic language, contending that Stere was "an employee of the little kikes" and had "lost his soul to the Jews". At the time, Stere's activity with Datoria also came under attack from various student societies — most of them associates of the Conservative Party.
During the late 1890s, he had begun making use of the Șărcăleanu alias in his polemic articles, which became a particular topic of dispute after his confrontation with Dioghenide. Dioghenide's supporters, editors of the newspaper Naționalul, consequently pressured Stere to indicate who Șărcăleanu was. Similar calls were voiced by Vieața, who alleged that Stere himself was a Russian Jew.
Winning the support of several Conservative politicians, Stere successfully applied for Romanian citizenship in February 1895, obtaining naturalization through a special law, as "a Romanian from Bessarabia".
In 1897, Stere obtained a licensure with a thesis on legal entity and individualism, one which drew criticism from the influential Conservative-inspired group Junimea, on the assumption that it had been partly inspired by Marx. At the time, he also published an incomplete series of philosophical essays centered on the works of Wilhelm Wundt. After graduation, Stere, who was by then the father of four, lived for a while in Ploiești, and afterwards joined the Bar association in Iași as a practicing lawyer. During the period, he met and befriended the influential writer Ion Luca Caragiale.
Birth of ''Poporanism''
By 1898, Stere, who had continued to acquire influence with Iași-based socialists, became involved in disputes over the future of the Romanian Social Democratic Workers' Party and Vasile Morțun's call for a merger with the National Liberal Party — Morțun's camp, which also included Alexandru G. Radovici, became known in time as "the generous ones". According to Constantin Titel Petrescu, Stere, despite his own polemics with Dobrogeanu-Gherea, sided with the latter and against Morțun. Nevertheless, during merger talks between the "generous ones" and the left-wing of the National Liberals, Stere was approached by the latter's Ion I. C. Brătianu; Brătianu and Gheorghe Gh. Mârzescu, who were gathering supporters at a time when the PNL cabinet of Dimitrie Sturdza looked set to lose the general elections of 1899 to a strong coalition of Conservatives and former Liberals such as Petre S. Aurelian, proposed to Stere that he become a city councilor in Iași, and he accepted. During the period, he split with Evenimentul, as the paper became close to Liberal splinter groups and virulently criticized the contacts between the PNL and former PSDMR affiliates.Eventually, Stere entered the 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 industrialisation. This was the origin of Poporanism, a theory expanded upon in his influential 1908 essay Poporanism sau social-democrație?, "Poporanism or Social democracy?".
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 total number of taxpayers, 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, he also proposed that cooperative industries were to be created in the rural sphere, and that initiative agriculture could also rely in cooperative farms:
"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."
Despite its name, Stere understood the "peasant state" not 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, intended to accurately reflect the country's social realities. In an 1898 speech, he also stressed a loyalty for the King of Romania.
Stere notably rejected Karl Kautsky's support for capitalization in agriculture, arguing that it was neither necessary nor practical. He was not, however, opposed to modernization, and invested trust in the role of intellectuals as militants and activists, as well as building on Werner Sombart's theory that agrarian economies were facing new and special conditions. Stere observed changes occurring 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. 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.
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, 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.