41 Facts About Dumitru Topciu

Dumitru or Dimitrie Gheorghe Topciu was a Romanian politician and agriculturalist of Bessarabian birth and Gagauz ethnicity.

In interwar Greater Romania, Dumitru Topciu became a proponent of Gagauz assimilation, embracing forms of Romanian nationalism which came to be ridiculed in the press; he was outspoken in his resistance to Gagauz re-Turkification.

Dumitru Topciu won his first mandate in the Assembly of Deputies after elections in 1926, being returned in 1931 as an affiliate of the Democratic Nationalist Party.

Dumitru Topciu served additional terms during which he veered from agrarianism to fascism, affiliating with the National Agrarians, the National Christian Party, and the Union of National Awareness.

Dumitru Topciu was finally recruited by King Carol II into his catch-all National Renaissance Front, which resulted in his peak political activity, as Undersecretary of State for Agriculture in the Gigurtu cabinet.

Dumitru Topciu supported Ion Antonescu's takeover of the country, as well as his alliance with the Axis Powers.

Dumitru Topciu managed to survive the establishment of a Romanian communist regime in 1948.

Dumitru Topciu was harassed and had to pay a fine for his involvement with the black market, serving a short sentence in Caransebes Prison; he lived his final decade in obscurity, at his new home in Bucharest.

Dumitru Topciu was born on September 2,1888, among the Gagauz people in Tomai, Bessarabia Governorate.

Dumitru Topciu was acquainted with activist Gherman Pantea, who allegedly followed Topciu's advice when meeting with Vladimir Lenin, leader of the Russian Bolsheviks, in April 1917, to probe him about the far-left's views on the issue of national determination.

Dumitru Topciu supported this autonomist agenda while attending the Congress of Bessarabian Co-operativists in late 1917.

Ten years after the fact, both Novakov and Dumitru Topciu explained that they were absent on official duty, to ensure provisions for the republican militia; this mission ran parallel with the Romanian military intervention in Bessarabia, with Dumitru Topciu acting as a liaison for the Romanian Land Forces in Tighina.

Dumitru Topciu was allegedly captured while entering Romania with rubles he had procured in Soviet Ukraine.

Dumitru Topciu was eventually recruited by Alexandru Averescu's People's Party.

Dumitru Topciu headlined its Assembly of Deputies list for the legislative election of March 1922 in Tighina, with Bulgarians Nicolae Petrov and Iacov Cunev as the runners-up.

Dumitru Topciu maintained his political profile as the old Uyezd was transformed into a Tighina County, serving as leader of the PP's county lodge.

Various documents were confiscated, and Dumitru Topciu's arrest was announced as imminent.

Reportedly, Dumitru Topciu had taken the liberty of presiding a meeting of the county council, of which he was not a member; this irregularity upset Leon, who stormed into the hall and hit Dumitru Topciu, until being evicted by the Romanian Police.

In May 1930, Dumitru Topciu was a Tighina County delegate at the PP congress in Bucharest.

Dumitru Topciu was by then a supporter of poet-activist Octavian Goga, who discarded the PP to establish his own National Agrarian Party.

Dumitru Topciu was frustrated by the law which awarded land to all pro-Romanian members of Sfatul, since he was technical disqualified by his absence from the union vote.

Dumitru Topciu's case was reviewed in February 1932, when he was awarded a 50-hectare estate in Ceadir-Lunga, and again in August, when he was ordered to hand it back.

Around that time, Dumitru Topciu was associating with Constantin Garoflid and Eftimie Antonescu of the Winemakers' Syndicate.

Dumitru Topciu had become the local leader of the Goga party in Tighina, preserving this post after July 1935, as the group became the National Christian Party upon merging with the LANC.

Dumitru Topciu improvised his speech on the spot, but it came out logically.

Dumitru Topciu never riled up the crowd, and never lost his temper.

Dumitru Topciu was prevented from campaigning in places such as Comrat by the terminal illness of his first wife, Evdochia.

Dumitru Topciu was returned to the Assembly as the only PNC deputy elected for Tighina.

Cuza's Union of National Awareness, Dumitru Topciu followed the other party leaders in joining the FRN during October 1939.

Dumitru Topciu took a seat in the Senate of Romania in the one-party elections of June 2,1939.

Dumitru Topciu became a legal tutor of her two sons from a previous marriage, Radu and Mircea Fasie.

Dumitru Topciu abandoned his Bessarabian properties on June 28,1940, immediately after the region was stormed into and annexed by the Soviets; as Duminica notes, he feared arrest by the NKVD.

Dumitru Topciu moved permanently to Bucharest, where he had become a landlord, having built himself a 6-storey mansion on the corner of Tunari and Eminescu Streets.

Dumitru Topciu was allowed to keep his post for ten more days, until the proclamation of an Iron Guard government, the "National Legionary State".

Dumitru Topciu was no longer serving in any official capacity in February 1941, when he was petitioning the Ministry of Agriculture as a delegate of the Winemakers' Syndicate.

Dumitru Topciu lived out the remainder of World War II, which witnessed Romania's partnership with the Axis Powers on the Eastern Front and a temporary recovery of Bessarabia.

Dumitru Topciu survived the establishment of a Romanian communist regime in early 1948, but was arrested in June under suspicions of sabotage, and prosecuted in October.

Dumitru Topciu was sentenced in December 1948 to pay a fine of 6,000 lei; his son was not charged.

Dumitru Topciu went on to serve time in Caransebes Prison, alongside old-regime figures such as Ion Costinescu and political dissidents such as Anton Dumitriu.

Dumitru Topciu himself survived confinement, and was allowed to go free after a relatively short period.

Dumitru Topciu is known to have lived his final years in Bucharest, dying there in 1958.