Ilie Moscovici

Ilie B. Moscovici
Moscovici, ca. 1920
Member of the Romanian Social Democratic Party Executive Bureau
In office May 9, 1927 – 1928
Member of the Assembly of Deputies of Romania
In office May 1920 – May 1921
Personal details
Born	(1885-11-28)November 28, 1885 Băiceni, Iași County
Died	November 1, 1943(1943-11-01) (aged 57) Bucharest

Ilie B. Moscovici (also known as Tovilie; November 28, 1885 – November 1, 1943) was a Romanian socialist militant and journalist, one of the noted leaders of the Romanian Social Democratic Party (PSDR). A socialist since early youth and a party member since its creation in 1910, he returned from captivity in World War I to lead the PSDR from Bucharest, and involved himself in a violent clash with the Romanian authorities. He mediated between reformist and Bolshevik currents, and helped establish the Socialist Party of Romania (PS) as a fusion of both tendencies. Moscovici served as a PS representative in Chamber, but was deposed over his instigation of the 1920 general strike, then imprisoned. Although he voted against the creation of a Communist Party from the rump PS and criticized Comintern interference in Romanian affairs, he was again apprehended in 1921. Together with the communists, he appeared as a defendant in the Dealul Spirii Trial.

Moscovici spent the 1920s and '30s on reconstructing the PSDR and enlarging its basis, sometimes together with, and sometimes against, the moderate socialist Constantin Titel Petrescu. He was the party's representative to the Labor and Socialist International, a participant in antifascist causes, and a publisher of Marxist literature. Seen as the Social Democratic doctrinaire, he continued to take stands against the Communist Party and the Soviet Union, cautioning against the formation of a "popular front".

Persecuted by the far-right for his politics and his Jewish ethnicity, Moscovici was still active in the clandestine PSDR by the time of World War II. He died, after a long illness, before his party's involvement in the Coup of 1944. In later years, after the PSDR was absorbed by the Communist Party, Moscovici's contribution was censored out of socialist history. His work was carried on by his daughter, Mira Moscovici, who helped reestablish an independent PSDR in 1990, during the country's post-communist era. Moscovici's relatives include French social scientist Serge Moscovici and his son, the politician Pierre Moscovici.