Paul Bujor

Paul Bujor (born Pavel Bujor;^[1] August 2, 1862 – May 17, 1952) was a Romanian zoologist, physiologist and marine biologist, also noted as a socialist writer and politician. Hailing from rural Covurlui County, he studied biology in France and Switzerland, where he was attracted by left-wing ideas; his evolutionary biology, informed by the work of Carl Vogt, veered into Marxism and irreligion. Returning to the Kingdom of Romania, he was a junior member of the Romanian Social Democratic Workers' Party, active on its moderate wing. He earned the critics' attention in the 1890s as a short story writer with a socialist and pacifist message, but only returned to fiction writing briefly, in the 1930s. An award-winning ichthyologist, Bujor was hired by the University of Iași, where he taught for 41 years, and throughout the period worked on documenting the Black Sea fauna, and made discoveries concerning the environment of Techirghiol Lake. He inaugurated the Romanian study of animal morphology, while also contributing to histology, embryology, and parasitology, and gave popular lectures on evolution and physical culture.

Bujor rallied with the Poporanist movement, infiltrating the National Liberal Party from the left. He was among the founders of the leading Poporanist review, Viața Românească, but expelled after expressing disagreement with its refusal to criticize the National Liberal mainstream. As an independent left-winger, constantly pushing for land reform and universal suffrage, Bujor had publicized and sometimes violent conflicts with his far-right colleague at university, A. C. Cuza. Elected to Senate as a university representative, and serving throughout the social upheaval of World War I, Bujor clashed with the National Liberal Prime Minister Ion I. C. Brătianu, whom he accused of bringing disaster upon the country. In 1919, he was one of the founders and leaders of Peasants' Party, which became part of a successful electoral coalition, representing groups throughout Greater Romania; Bujor was selected as Greater Romania's first president of the Senate.

The Peasantist attempts at constitutional reform, and Bujor's own signs of approval for far-left concepts, eventually led to a backlash in 1920. Deposed by King Ferdinand I in 1920, Bujor expressed hopes for a revolution against "the oligarchy", but he was gradually marginalized. After 1926, with disciple Ioan Borcea, he represented the dissident left within the consolidated National Peasants' Party, openly criticizing his party's leadership while serving as representative in the Assembly of Deputies. Bujor, still a rival of Cuza, professed anti-fascism throughout the 1930s, but withdrew from the public eye during World War II. He returned to prominence under the communist regime, when, at age 86, he was inducted into the Romanian Academy.