Dumitru Topciu

Dumitru or Dimitrie Gheorghe Topciu (Gagauz: Dmitriy Topçu, Bulgarian: Димитър Топчу, romanized: Dimitar Topchu, Russian: Дмитрий Георгиевич Топчу, romanized: Dimitri Georgevich Topchu; September 2, 1888 – 1958) was a Romanian politician and agriculturalist of Bessarabian birth and Gagauz ethnicity. Originally a subject of the Russian Empire, he established his reputation as a lawyer and advocate of peasant welfare, also networking between the Bessarabian Gagauz, Romanians, and Bulgarians. He formed a Bulgarian–Gagauz caucus after the February Revolution, seeking representation inside the Russian Republic, and overall shunning Romanian nationalism. After his mandate in the Provisional Council of the Russian Republic was cut short by the October Revolution, he was sent to Sfatul Țării, which acted as a legislative body of the Moldavian Democratic Republic. Topciu was absent during its March 1918 vote on that polity's union with Romania; by his own testimony, he assisted the Romanian expeditionary force, in his other capacity as the provisional leader of Bender Uyezd. After escaping prosecution for his alleged smuggling activities along the Dniester, he settled in Tighina, entering Romanian politics as a member of the People's Party.

In interwar Greater Romania, Topciu became a proponent of Gagauz assimilation, embracing forms of Romanian nationalism which came to be ridiculed in the press; he was also outspoken in his resistance to Gagauz re-Turkification. In tandem, he was a leader of the Agricultural Syndicate in Tighina County, a champion of the winemakers' corporate interests, and simultaneously a temperance activist, who spoke out against the consumption of Bessarabian moonshine. He 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. Topciu served additional terms during which he veered from agrarianism to fascism, affiliating with the National Agrarians (1932), the National Christian Party (1935), and the Union of National Awareness (1939). Touring the Budjak subregion, he had a major contribution in canvassing Gagauz votes for Romania's far-right groups.

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 (1940). He supported Ion Antonescu's takeover of the country, as well as his alliance with the Axis Powers. Having been chased out of Bessarabia by a Soviet invasion in 1940, he became an organizer of formal and informal efforts to assist his fellow refugees. Topciu managed to survived the establishment of a Romanian communist regime in 1948, though he was still harassed and had to pay a fine for his involvement with the black market; he lived his final decade in obscurity, at his new home in Bucharest.