RUMANIAN SOCIAL DEMOCRACY
Sra,—In your issue of December 12th, in his article The Marxist Brothers, Mr. Norman Kirby writes: "The Socialist movements of Bulgaria, Rumania and Serbia looked to St. Petersburg. . . . In Croatia, Hungary, Bohemia and parts of Poland . . . they looked to Vienna and Berlin. .. . Against this historical background it becomes easy to understand the varying fates of the Social Democrat parties behind the Iron Curtain in the last few months."
For the sake of this dangerous theory, and speaking only in terms of Rumanian ideological history, may I point out the following?
(1) Rumania was especially impermeable to Russian cultural influence because of the different alphabets both countries were and are using.
(2) The Rumanian Social Democrat party, weak as it always was in the political field, is, in its doctrinal formation, strictly German—and Austrian—Marxist. (3) On the contrary, a branch of the peasant ideology in Rumania was, through Constantin Stere, informed about the " narodnik " movement ; but even this branch fought against foreign influences. (4) Plekhanov and Axelrod, the real Russian Social Democrats, tried only to translate the Marxist catechism without any original Russian contribution ; after Lenin there was no longer Social Democracy.
Sublata causa, tollitur effectus.—Yours faithfully, G. IONESCU. 16 Gledhow Gardens, S.W.5.
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