1907 - The Course of the Romanian Uprising

In spring 1907 a devastating peasant uprising engulfed the fledgling Romanian 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). Although at its peak the uprising only lasted a couple of weeks, it engulfed the whole country, threatened to destabilize the state and saw extremes of violence perpetrated on the part of both the rebellious peasants and the repression army. The conflict was only suppressed by using heavy artillery against diehard peasant bands. 

This is a brief post musing on a historiographical commonplace about the uprising: that the troubles broke out in the north of the country, close to the Russian border. This was indeed the case, but with an important caveat. The set of maps above chart the course of the uprising on the basis of extant correspondence between regional and central authorities. The colour code is the following:

- BLUE denotes relative calm, no out-of-the-ordinary incidents (or at least no reports to this effect)

- PINK refers to inceptive unrest: demands, complaints, threats

- RED is for acts of physical violence: destruction of property, arson, beatings, killing

Even allowing for fragmentary evidence and archival bias, it is fairly clear that by February the whole country was in ferment. The fact that it was in the northern counties that the first acts of open violence were registered becomes in this context almost anecdotal. Given that the state of discontent reigning at the time among Romanian peasants was so high and so widespread, the spark could have occurred anywhere else with the same effect (in 1888 a similar uprising broke out in the south, but lack of synchronisation with the north of the country prevented it posing an equal threat). 

Why is it important to note this? Why does it matter where it all started if the outcome was the same? 

It matters because, by focusing on the north of the country, contemporaries and even some later historians came to endorse two myths: 

(1) that the uprising was a consequence of merciless exploitation by Jewish leaseholders. 

    

Lessees of Jewish faith did indeed dominate the land rental market in Moldavia, but a look at the leasehold system in Wallachia shows it to have been equally oppressive with almost no Jewish leaseholders.  As Prince Urusov, the governor of Bessarabia, once said about the similar leasehold system in the Tsarist province: it was not the Jews that were particularly exploitative, but the system itself, which was happily practised by all confessions alike. Moreover, it was in Wallachia, where there were hardly any Jews, that the uprising got particularly savage and not in Moldavia.

(2) that the proximity to the Russian border had something to do with the uprising: contamination, Russian revolutionary influence.

There is sporadic rumour in official correspondence of strangers, allegedly Russian agents, roaming the countryside, but no conclusive evidence exists of genuine Russian contamination. The Romanian authorities were convinced that foreign foul play was at work and that the peasants would never have risen of their own accord. This, just like the first myth, shows the disconnect of the authorities from the realities on the ground and is one of the reasons the uprising failed to be put down in its early stages: the government were barking up the wrong tree.