| Nichifor Crainic | |
| Office1: | Minister of National Propaganda |
| Term Start1: | 4 July 1940 |
| Term End1: | 14 September 1940 |
| Primeminister1: | Ion Gigurtu Ion Antonescu |
| Predecessor1: | Teofil Sidorovici |
| Successor1: | Position temporarily suspended |
| Term Start2: | 27 January 1941 |
| Term End2: | 26 May 1941 |
| Primeminister2: | Ion Antonescu |
| Predecessor2: | Himself |
| Successor2: | Mihai Antonescu |
| Office3: | State Secretary at the Ministry of Culture and Religious Affairs |
| Term Start3: | 14 September 1940 |
| Term End3: | 21 January 1941 |
| Primeminister3: | Ion Antonescu |
| Minister3: | Traian Brăileanu |
| Office4: | Co-Leader of the National Christian Party |
| Alongside4: | Octavian Goga & A. C. Cuza |
| Term Start4: | 16 July 1935 |
| Term End4: | 10 February 1938 |
| Predecessor4: | Octavian Goga (as president of the National Agrarian Party) A. C. Cuza (as president of the National-Christian Defense League) |
| Successor4: | None (party banned under the 1938 Constitution) |
| Birth Date: | 22 December 1889 |
| Birth Place: | Bulbucata, Giurgiu County, Kingdom of Romania |
| Death Place: | Mogoșoaia, Ilfov County, Socialist Republic of Romania |
| Nationality: | Romanian |
| Party: | National-Christian Defense League (before 1935) National Christian Party (1935 - 1938) |
| Alma Mater: | University of Bucharest University of Vienna |
| Occupation: | Writer, Professor, Politician |
| Profession: | Theologian, Philosopher |
Nichifor Crainic (in Romanian; Moldavian; Moldovan pronounced as /niˈcifor ˈkrajnik/; pseudonym of Ion Dobre in Romanian; Moldavian; Moldovan pronounced as /iˈon ˈdobre/;[1] 22 December 1889, Bulbucata, Giurgiu County – 20 August 1972, Mogoșoaia) was a Romanian writer, editor, philosopher, poet and theologian famed for his traditionalist activities. Crainic was also a professor of theology at the Bucharest Theological Seminary and the Chișinău Faculty of Theology. He was an important racist ideologue,[2] [3] [4] and a far-right politician.[5] He was one of the main Romanian fascist[6] and antisemitic ideologues.[2] [7] [8] [9] [10]
Crainic was a contributor of poetry to the modernist magazine Gândirea. After become disenfranchised with the publication's progressive views, rather than disassociate with the magazine he became increasingly intertwined in leadership positions in order to de-modernize it. At the end of a series of intellectual sparings within the publication itself, Crainic managed to wrest control of the magazine and institute a sea-change in editorial character supporting mystical Orthodoxy.
He developed an ideology given the name Gândirism (from gând – "thought"), a nationalist and neo-Orthodox Christian social and cultural trend. He edited the Gândirea magazine, and collaborated with numerous other publications such as Ramuri, România Nouă, Cuvântul, and Sfarmă-Piatră. He was also the editor in chief of the newspaper Calendarul.
Nichifor Crainic became a leading pro-Fascist figure in the political turmoil of the late 1930s, openly praising Mussolini and Hitler. He was an ideologue of antisemitism,[7] [8] although his prejudice was a defense of the Gospels rather than a vision of racial hierarchies. His beliefs were a major influence on the Iron Guard legionary movement, although Crainic viewed himself as a supporter of the legionnaires' rival King Carol II. In a 1938 essay, he theorised the "ethnocratic state" as applied to Romania:[11]
A fulfillment of ethnocracy was to be achieved through the means of a monarch-led corporatist system:
In 1940 he was elected a member of the Romanian Academy. He studied theology at the Seminary in Bucharest, and received his Ph.D. diploma from the University of Vienna.
After the Soviet army defeated the Germans and occupied Romania, Crainic went into hiding. A trial was conducted in his absence and he was found guilty of crimes against the people. He was eventually caught and imprisoned by the Romanian authorities in 1947, and spent 15 years in Văcărești and Aiud prisons. He was expelled from the Academy by the Communist regime.
Between 1962 and 1968 he was the editor of the Communist propaganda magazine Glasul Patriei ("The Voice of the Fatherland")—a magazine published in Romania by the Romanian Communist regime but sold only abroad, which they used as a tool to try to influence the Romanian intellectual émigrés to be patriotic and not work against the Communist Romania.
On 8 May 1995, after the fall of Communism, 10 of the sentences pronounced during the Post-World War II Romanian war crime trials were overturned by the Supreme Court of Justice. They were part of the 14 war criminals convicted in the "Journalists' trial" of 1945. Attorney General Vasile Manea Drăgulin presented the convictions decided upon in 1945 as illegal, believing the interpretation of the evidence to have been “retroactive, truncated, and tendentious”, therefore amounting to a “conviction decision, whose content is a synthesis of vehement criticism of their activity, to which we forcefully ascribed the character of war crimes”. The most notorious name in this lot was likely that of Crainic. An ardent pro-fascist and admirer of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, he was vice-president of the National Christian Party and then Antonescu's Minister of Propaganda. Crainic was among the 10 who were rehabilitated and he was welcomed back into the Romanian Academy.[12] [13]