Ion Buzdugan

Ion Alion Buzdugan
Buzdugan, ca. 1914
Member of Sfatul Țării
In office November 1917 – November 1918
Constituency	Bălți County
Member of the Assembly of Deputies
In office November 1919 – May 1925
In office June 1926 – July 1932
Personal details
Born	Ivan Alexandrovici Buzdâga (1887-03-09)March 9, 1887 Brînzenii Noi, Bessarabia Governorate, Russian Empire
Died	January 29, 1967(1967-01-29) (aged 79) Bucharest, Communist Romania
Nationality	Romanian
Political party	National Moldavian Party (1917) Socialist Revolutionary Party (1917) Bessarabian Peasants' Party (1918) Peasants' Party (1921) National Peasants' Party (1926) Peasants' Party–Lupu (1927) Democratic Nationalist Party (ca. 1933) Romanian Front (1935)
Profession	Poet, folklorist, translator, schoolteacher, journalist, lawyer
Nickname	Nică Romanaș

Ion Alion Buzdugan^[1] (Romanian Cyrillic and Russian: Ион Буздуган, born Ivan Alexandrovici Buzdâga;^[2][3][4] March 9, 1887 – January 29, 1967) was a Bessarabian-Romanian poet, folklorist, and politician. A young schoolteacher in the Russian Empire by 1908, he wrote poetry and collected folklore emphasizing Bessarabia's links with Romania, and associated with various founding figures of the Romanian nationalist movement, beginning with Ion Pelivan. Buzdugan was a far-left figure during the February Revolution, but eventually rallied with the National Moldavian Party in opposition to the socialists and the Bolsheviks. He vehemently supported the union of Bessarabia with Romania during the existence of an independent Moldavian Democratic Republic, and, as a member of its legislature (Sfatul Țării), worked to bring it about. Threatened by the Bolsheviks, he fled to Romania and returned with an expeditionary corps headed by General Ernest Broșteanu, being one of the delegates who voted for the union, and one of dignitaries who signed its proclamation.

In interwar Greater Romania, Buzdugan received mixed reviews as a neo-traditionalist poet, while also serving terms as a Bălți County representative in the Assembly of Deputies. There, he advocated decentralization and a system of zemstva, but opposed Bessarabian autonomy, while also becoming noted for his hawkish stance against the Soviet Union, his radicalized nationalism, and his antisemitic outbursts. He was successively a member of the Bessarabian Peasants' Party, the Peasants' Party, the National Peasants' Party, the Peasants' Party–Lupu, and the Democratic Nationalists. For a while, he was employed as a civil administrator, before delving in fascist politics with the Romanian Front.

His political activity made him a target of repression under the Romanian communist regime, but he avoided arrest by going into hiding during the late 1940s and early '50s. Protected by the literary critic Perpessicius, he later reemerged, but, until the time of his death, was only allowed to publish pseudonymous translations from Russian literature, culminating with a posthumous rendition of Eugene Onegin. Since the 1990s, his poetic work has been recovered and reassessed in both Romania and Moldova.