Democratic Peasants' Party (Bukovina)

Foundations

The PȚD existed during the final stages of Austrian Bukovina, when the "extreme ethnic fragmentation" created various rivalries or alliances between its main ethnic groups: the large and rural communities of Romanians and Ukrainians (or "Ruthenians"), and the mostly urban German and Jewish minorities. From his early years, Onciul was separated from the mainline currents of Romanian nationalism in Bukovina, represented at first by the local Concordia Society (or "National Romanian Party"). Although he did preserve contacts with its conservative wing, he was more interested in the rival PNPR (or "Radical Nationalist Party"). However, as historian Vlad Gafița notes, his attempt to participate in the latter was hampered by his professional work: for a while, he worked as a bank clerk in Moravia. Onciul had antagonized other Romanians by taking sides with the Austrian officials, in turn accused of playing community leaders against each other, or of "Machiavellianism".

According to scholar Irina Livezeanu, the "relative liberalism" of the Austrian administration promoted an "accommodationist" climate, in which the elites were less tempted to group on competitive national bases—Onciul illustrated such a spirit. Historian Teodor Bălan believes that Onciul's ascendancy was directly owed to the new Governor of Bukovina, Konrad zu Hohenlohe, who wished to calm the situation after a season Romanian–Ukrainian political battles. For this, he needed "a political program with economic demands, which would exclude the national question" and "replace political romanticism with realism."

Onciul first took a seat in the Austrian House of Deputies during the 1901 election, which he contested at Czernowitz. The PȚD was formally established in early 1902, but took almost a year to emerge as an organized group: in January 1903, it published its "Democratic Program", and on February 2, held its first congress, as "the Political Society Unirea or Democratic Peasants' Party". Onciul, who was the party president, made his entry into politics at an inauspicious time, when the Concordia Conservatives and the PNPR had agreed to merge back into a single party, headed by Iancu Flondor. This challenge guided the PȚD unorthodox strategy, including its alliances and its attacks on other Romanian leaders. The latter were carried in the two party newspapers, Privitorul ("The Onlooker") and Voința Poporului ("The People's Will"), both of which had been founded in 1902. Onciul's brother in law, the Conservative Florea Lupu, came out in support of these attacks. Together with his refusal to accept the PNPR merger, this stance caused him to be expelled from the party—although he held on to his seat in the House.

In its propaganda, the PȚD accused the "boyar" elite of having exploited the peasant class and the rural intelligentsia, claiming to expose elitist nationalism as a scheme; it advocated its populist nationalism of a distinctly left-wing hue. According to Gafița, Onciul and his followers saw themselves as emancipated progressives: "profoundly loyal" to the House of Habsburg-Lorraine, capable of seeing beyond national divisions, and even open to the idea of a trans-ethnic, Austrian nationalism. Gafița also sees Onciul as employing "doublespeak" on this issue, and of willingly fashioning himself to be the diametrical opposite of Flondor. Historian Ioan Cocuz, one of Onciul's staunchest critics, describes him as "wholly unscrupulous", as well as "anti-national", "a loyal Austrian". However, Onciul firmly believed that Austria had federated the small peoples of East-Central Europe, and that this had protected them from being absorbed into the Russian Empire. His ideas on the topic were overall similar with the "United States of Greater Austria" designs of Aurel Popovici, as acknowledged by Popovici himself. A scheme proposed by Privitorul around 1902 was to solve the national issue of Romanians being divided over several states by somehow incorporating the Kingdom of Romania into Austria.

Freisinnige Verband

As Livezeanu observes: "Aurel Onciul's National Democratic Party [...] brought together liberal Romanians who favored ethnic compromise and opposed the social conservatism of the National Party." Cocuz suggests that Onciul and Lupu also relied on an "incitement" tactic: "setting the class of Romanian schoolteachers against the national Romanian parties". The party's original manifesto argued:

For ten years now, we have repeatedly tried to reason with our boyars into giving the people its fair share of public life, but all our attempts have been in vain. The boyars never ceased confiscating the people's electoral right, and to abuse it in order to grow rich and occupy for themselves offices on the people's money and for the people's perdition. Given this, we have no other road left but the fight against boyars in order to gain our electoral liberty and with it the people's legitimate influence over its own destiny. [Unirea Society is] a point of convergence for honest, national and democratic, Romanian politics.

The effect of this discourse is assessed by Gafița as follows: "The democrats' orientation toward predominantly social demands, as opposed to those of a national-political substance reaped momentary electoral gains, but also numerous losses for the Romanian emancipation movement as a whole. The latter was submerged and weakened by a climate of internal conflict, but also by the spread of left-wing concepts, such as the class conflict of peasants and boyars, inside the Romanian camp."

Onciul and Lupu were elected to the Diet of Bukovina in the by-elections of June 1903, allegedly with a mixture of Romanian and Ukrainian votes. Also in 1903, the PȚD leader established in Vienna a trans-ethnic League for Electoral Reform, which became in June 1904 the Liberal Alliance or Freisinnige Verband ("Freethinkers' Alliance"). Its other leaders were: Staucher, the German Arthur Skedl, the Romanian Ukrainophile Nikolai von Wassilko, and the "Young Ukrainian" Stepan Smal-Stotskyi. This act remains one of enduring controversy among Romanians: Cocuz argues that Smal-Stotskyi intended to use the Verband as an advancement tool for the Ukrainians. According to Smal-Stotskyi, his group was a "subjugated nation", which could succeed "only within the titular nations." Cocuz speculates that this policy was suggested to Onciul by Hohenlohe, in a bid do undermine the PNPR.

Beginning in autumn 1903, Onciul approached Flondor and the Conservatives to discuss the issue of democratizing the election process, as proposed by the Jewish politician Benno Straucher. Both negotiated with Hohenlohe and with the Austrian Minister-President, Ernest von Koerber. The agreement between the groups also included their future merger into a "Unitary Romanian Party", its ideological stance to be decided by grassroots democracy. Eventually, the electoral reform project had lost Flondor's support, which also caused the merger project to unravel. It remains poorly understood why Flondor opted to back out. Flondor may have reactivated his Concordia nationalism, as the electoral reform unwittingly gave electoral leverage to the urbanized German and Jews. Moreover, Cocuz claims that the merger deal was suspicious, and that the PNPR never truly accepted it as such. He also believes that Onciul was being hypocritical, offering the merger but still caucusing with the Ukrainians, "the Romanians' most bitter ethnic enemies", and refusing to tone down his attacks on Flondor.

Progressive Peasants' Fellowship

The perceived anti-reform attitude of Flondor and the PNPR pushed the PȚD into a near-complete isolation. On November 10, Onciul, Straucher, Smal-Stotskyi, Wassilko, Hierotheus Pihuliak and Theodor Lewicki signed a manifesto condemning the Romanian parties in exceptionally harsh terms, accusing them of having stalled democratic progress. The party intensified its outreach efforts toward the Ukrainian, German and Jewish politicians, coordinating attacks on Flondor—during what became known as the "Flondor Affair", anti-PNPR forces in the Diet accused Flondor of spreading antisemitism, and forced his resignation. In the Diet, Onciul also accused Flondor of secretly sabotaging his electoral campaign; he was in turn accused by his adversary of being an "international agent". Trying to forge a lasting alliance with Smal-Stotskyi, he also challenged in Privitorul the core theses of Concordia nationalists. He suggested that German colonization in Bukovina could only benefit the local Romanians, and help them learn new trades. From the Diet rostrum, Lupu also praised the Germanic talent for administration, seemingly with his brother-in-law's acquiescence.

Onciul's other essays denied the existence of Ukrainization in northern Bukovina, claiming that the Cheremosh Valley had always been a Ukrainian heartland; this stance was immediately challenged from within the party by Zaharia Voronca. Condemned as "anti-Romanian", Onciul and Lupu found themselves expelled from the cultural society România Jună in 1904. During the polemic that followed, PȚD men dismissed România Jună as an instrument of "the boyars" and a "herd of bovines". A pro-Onciul wing of the club broke off as Dacia Society, which counted Filaret Doboș and George Tofan among its leading members.

During the political realignment that followed Flondor's resignation, Ociul was able to succeed with his policy of alliances outside his ethic group, creating a tight alliance around the 1903 League. This "Progressive Peasants' Fellowship", presided over by Onciul, together with Skedl, Smal-Stotskyi and Georg Graf Wassilko von Serecki, took the majority vote (17 out of 31 seats) in 1904 elections for the Diet; the PNPR had dissolved itself, and a Conservative (or "Pactist") Party, under Ioan Volcinschi, took 4 seats. Onciul, Graf Wassilko and Lupu all won seats in this arrangement, as did their PȚD colleagues Teofil Simionovici and Alexandru Buburuzan; a sixth was won when the front-runner Varteres von Prunkul, an Armenian, renounced in favor of the PȚD man Tit Onciul. An inner-Fellowship agreement prevented the PȚD from putting up candidates in the six majority-Ukrainian constituencies, and in turn guaranteed Ukrainian votes in the majority-Romanian ones.

As a result of this reshuffling, Graf Wassilko became Landeshauptmann, with Smal-Stotskyi as his lieutenant. Their arrival to power brought with the adoption of Straucher's democratic reform. There followed liberal and nationalist bills (including the establishment of a state bank, the lifting of propination laws, and the creation of a Romanian History Chair at Francis Joseph University), but the more radical measures proposed by the PȚD were vetoed by Koerber. Soon after, the Fellowship began rupturing around ethnic lines. This had been a backup option for Onciul, who had vetoed Graf Wassilko's proposal to fuse the distinct Fellowship clubs into unitary, non-ethnic, sections.

As the PNPR reconstituted itself around Dorimedont Popovici and the paper Apărarea Națională, Onciul began pressing for Flondor's return to politics, and for a reunification of Romanian nationalists. The party exposed anti-Romanian sentiments expressed by the other Fellowship partners (in particular by Smal-Stotskyi) and Ukrainian attempts to control the regional bank, and won instead support from various German deputies. Onciul became expressly committed to economic nationalism and nativism, and more critical of Austria's internal colonization policies. Privitorul claimed that: "Mass auctioning of both peasant granges and large-scale properties has steadily brought down the number of our settled population. It is being replaced by legions of foreigners who share neither our custom nor our language, and the pitiful Romanian people, sucked to its marrow by the tolerated usurers, is driven to all corners of the Earth by the indifference of present-day potentates." Its interval in power also saw the creation of Romanian paramilitary and self-help units, called the Arcași ("Bowmen"), identified by their white shirts.

Christian Social Party and re-foundation

On May 28, 1905, the Fellowship was denounced by the PȚD, and ceased to exist. On July 17, it merged into Modest Grigorcea's reconstructed National Romanian Party (PNR), but continued to function informally as a Democratic wing, still putting out Voința Poporului to October 1908. Running on PNR lists for the by-elections of Chernowitz—Sereth—Storozynetz, Onciul easily won a seat in the Austrian House of Deputies, and was reelected at Gura Humora in the full-term elections of 1907. At the time, the faction drew its funds from corrupt practices, taking over control of the local Raiffeisen credit union, which Lupu, as president of the public bank, used for high-risk investments in the forestry business.

Tensions were again running high between the Romanians and the Ukrainians, with the latter openly calling for Bukovina to be merged into Galicia-Lodomeria as a single "Ruthenian province". Reversing the Ukrainian political ascendancy, Onciul and other PȚD figures undermined Smal-Stotskyi's constituency by joining hands with the mainly Orthodox Ukrainian Russophiles against the Greek-Catholics. However, former associate N. Wassilko sponsored Lupu with money for the regional bank, receiving instead guarantees that opponents of Wassilko's would not find themselves in eligible positions. Onciul began advocating electoral reform in Cisleithania, advocating the over-representation of Germans, Italians and Romanians as a counterweight to the Slavic vote. Voința Poporului also embraced economic antisemitism during the peasants' revolt in neighboring Romania, indirectly criticizing the Jewish middle class in Bukovina.

In October 1908, the PNR, including its Democratic wing, merged with the Apărarea Națională group to form the Christian Social Romanian Party of Bukovina (PCSR). It offered its presidency to Flondor, who (despite having qualms about the presence of a PȚD group) accepted. Although claiming to represent, above all, the local interest of the Romanians, the new party also functioned as a Bukovinan simile of Austria's Christian Social Party, fully adopting its antisemitic theses. On January 31, after co-opting various other factions, it took the name of "Romanian National Party", with Flondor reconfirmed as leader—essentially a reunion of Concordia. Despite being one of the party's two vice presidents, Onciul continued to antagonize his colleagues, preserved the Democratic wing as an informal party division, and was suspected of conspiring against Flondor. The party was able to coalesce again in April 1911, when its candidates, including Onciul, Lupu and Simionovici, won seats against a rising left-wing threat, the Social Democratic Party of Bukovina—this was celebrated in the party press as a victory of "nationality and law" against "international socialism".

Nevertheless, on June 20, 1911, the party effectively split, following a publicized row between Onciul and Popovici. During the House election of July 1911, Lupu was defeated at Bojan by Constantin Isopescu-Grecul, who claimed that the Raiffeisen scheme had been intended to destroy the Bukovinan Romanian banks. The relaunched Democrats (also "Democratic Peasantists", or "National Peasantists"), putting out a newspaper Foaia Poporului ("People's Sheet"), resumed their attacks on the Cocordia establishment, this time claiming to represent the true voice of Romanian nationalism in a populist and anticlerical variant. Depicting the PNR as party "of parsons and kikes" acting "on government orders", it was depicted by the latter as a "sellout to Jewish finance". At this stage, Onciul was again open to collaboration with the Ukrainians, by proposing that the contested Orthodox Bishopric of Bukovina be informally split between the Romanian and Ukrainian churchgoers. He also hoped that, through promises of debt restructuring for Ukrainian credit unions, who would obtain the establishment of a regional credit cooperative, to be presided upon by him.

The PȚD reemerged formally at Czernowitz on April 26, 1914, under the name of "Peasants' Party", and with Onciul reconfirmed as president. Its other leading members included Lupu, Buburuzan, Doboș, and Mihail Chisanovici. Onciul and Simionovici held the party's two of the five Romanian seats in the House, which were collectively grouped as a "Romanian Club" caucus; the three other seats were held by Isopescu-Grecul and Gheorghe Sârbu of the PNR, and by Alexandru Hurmuzachi, an independent.

The group's generic populism was replaced with agrarianism: it claimed to have divorced from the intelligentsia, and to be focused on "ensuring that the peasants are happy"—according to Cocuz, this reinvention was "ridiculous" and "farcical". The party also restated its loyalism, declaring itself hostile to projects of union between Bukovina and the Kingdom of Romania. Onciul had a publicized row with Ion Grămadă and other young Romanian nationalists, whom he denounced as "irredentists". As Onciul put it at the time:

the squires' gazettes and the priests have this practice of wailing and grumbling against the Empire and of abasing [the Empire] in Romania's eyes. This wailing, grumbling and abasing had found a strong echo in Romania, ruining the friendship between that country and Our Empire, that which is harmful to both countries. Our hearts aching, we stood up to this cavalcade, and we asked those in the Kingdom to mind their own business and leave us to our own fate, and to stop meddling in our affairs.

World War I and termination

The Sarajevo Assassination of June 28 took Austria-Hungary into World War I, and meant the effective end of the party, which, Cocuz argues, had had no meaningful activity after establishing itself. Nominally, however, the Peasantist group continued to be represented in the House until late 1918, through Onciul and Simionovici. From the early stages of war, Onciul was more radical than the Concordia elites in supporting the Austrian cause, adopting the imperial slogan A.E.I.O.U.. Around that time, some former leading members of the party were growing reluctant of the Austrian project—Tit Onciul was arrested as a traitor by the Gendarmerie, and reputedly mistreated. During the Russian invasion of November, Aurel Onciul and Buburuzan formed defense units of "legionaries" among the Romanians, comprising up to 1,500 irregulars; N. Wassilko did the same among the Hutsuls. These largely peasant troops were notoriously untrained and under-equipped, wearing civilian clothes and black-yellow armbands, and were consequently decimated by the enemy.

For the following year, with Romania still neutral, Onciul supported schemes that would prevent her joining the war against Austria and the other Central Powers. Together with the Bessarabian Constantin Stere, he sought to obtain more collective rights for Romanians in Transleithania, and thus prevent Romania from having a casus belli; he believed that the best scenario was for Romania to fight alongside Austria, and receive Bessarabia as a reward, or even to be peacefully annexed by the empire. Onciul mediated between the Romanians of Transylvania and the Prime Minister of Hungary, István Tisza, asking Tisza to curb Magyarization polices, reform the electoral law, and give semiofficial status to the Romanian language.

When Romania declared war on the Central Powers, what remained of the PȚD was further split. Doboș deserted to the Romanian side, then helped organized Romanian political clubs and a Volunteer Corps in the Ukrainian People's Republic. In November 1917, he joined Sever Bocu and Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk at the Congress of Nationalities from Austria-Hungary, held in Kiev. As Romania experienced heavy losses and its capital fell, Onciul radicalized his opinions on the issue of irredentism. He argued for the annexation of Romania to fulfill Romanian unity under one crown; he also called for Austria to cede its Ukrainian regions to a Ukrainian state, and for West Galicia to fuse into a German-aligned Poland.

Throughout most of 1918, still a representative of Bukovina in the House, Onciul supported plans for the region's partition on an ethnic basis. On October 4, present at Czernowitz, he and Lupu were elected to the 50-member National Romanian Council, which rejected partition and also proposed merging the whole of Bukovina with Transylvania, to form an independent Romanian state. Alone among the Romanian intellectuals, Onciul refused to abide by this agenda, and, according to his adversaries, did everything in his power to obstruct their work. On November 6, as a self-appointed representative of the Romanians, he agreed to divide Bukovina with the West Ukrainian People's Republic, which was represented by Omelian Popovych.

The act, which validated the Ukrainian Galician Army (UHA) incursions into Bukovina, alarmed the other members of the National Council, who requested the intervention of the Romanian Army under Iacob Zadig and, eventually, Bukovina's merger into Greater Romania. Reportedly, Onciul welcomed the UHA and appointed himself governor al Moldovei de Sus ("Governor of Upper Moldavia"), then warned Zadig and his troops to stay out or risk being massacred by the Ukrainians. According to Cocuz, this period constitutes "full-blown treason" and a "deplorable end" to Onciul's career. Arrested for a while by the Romanian authorities, then released, Onciul dedicated his final years to drafting plans for a large-scale land reform. He died in Bucharest, where he ran his own law firm, on September 30, 1921.

The white-shirted Arcași groups were revived as independent paramilitary associations, and, reorganized by folklorist Valerian Dugan-Opaiț, had some 500,000 members and over 55 sections in 1926. Some of their sections were driven increasingly close to, and infiltrated by, the antisemitic far-right. From ca. 1923, they became sympathetic toward the National-Christian Defense League (LANC), and were in correspondence with its Bukovinan affiliate, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, ultimately splitting from Dugan-Opaiț's apolitical mainstream. The latter groups, supervised by Doboș (who was a member of the Senate of Romania), reorganized themselves in 1928, allowing "each member to engage personally in whatever sort of politics"; in 1930, some breakaway Arcași lodges became subsections of Codreanu's own Iron Guard. The Arcași movement and the Iron Guard were effectively banned in March 1937 by the government of Gheorghe Tătărescu, which made it illegal to wear political uniforms. By 1938, with Romania placed under a National Renaissance Front dictatorship, the Arcași had been revived as an auxiliary of the regime, with Doboș at their helm.