Who Was Solomon Katz and Why Does It Matter?

Solomon Katz

Communists did a pretty good job of concealing, locking up, and destroying historical records. Non-communist party members were not allowed access to historical documents in libraries or in archives.

The graduates of one of my hometown high schools, Liceul Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea, did not know who this Russian man was. This Bolshevik was born Solomon Katz in Ekaterinoslav, the Russian Empire, in 1855, and died in Bucharest, Romania in 1920.

Educated in the Russian empire, Solomon Katz came to Romania in 1875 to escape the tzar but three years later was kidnapped by the tzar’s agents and jailed in Russia. He escaped from captivity and returned to Romania in 1879 when his socialist activity began as editor of the Contemporary, The Social Magazine, and Social Critique.

A member of the Social Democrat Party of Romania, he became the founder of the platform of the Workers Social Democrat Party established in 1893. Solomon Katz took the fake Romanian name of Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea. He certainly did not hail from the Dobrogea region of Romania.

Lev Trotsky praised Solomon Katz’s communist achievements, writing that many ministers, diplomats, and prefects had learned the “political alphabet” from Solomon Katz, a.k.a. Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea.

Katz guided the first generation of Romanian socialist workers to the Marxist platform. Katz was one of the first “scholars” who guided all socialist parties towards the Russian Revolution.

Solomon Katz became one of the “parents of Romanian sociology.” His son, Alexandru Dobrogeanu-Gherea, eventually became one of the founding fathers of the Romanian Communist Party.

As students we had no idea that this Russian Jew and his son were the reasons for our daily misery. He was considered the most prominent Marxist theorist and thinker in Romania, literary critic, sociologist, journalist, politician, and restaurant entrepreneur in my hometown of Ploiesti.

This business side of C. D. Gherea is little known. He invented the catering service for the Ploiesti train station restaurant and held its sole concession from 1882 until his death in 1920.  Young boys sold sandwiches and glasses of beer from baskets to hungry travelers who did not wish to disembark on the train platforms to buy something to eat and drink as their luggage could have been stolen in their absence. Trains did not have dining cars back then.

As it is often the case, no matter how communist a famous person like C. D. Gherea was, he was not communist enough for Elena Ceausescu, a woman with barely an elementary education, so the high school’s name, Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea, was changed to Nikita Stanescu, a famous Marxist poet under Ceausescu’s communist regime.

Stanescu, born and raised in Ploiesti, was a talented town boy who attended a high school highly controversial to the communists because it was named after the Saints Peter and Paul, and communists can’t have religion mixed in with atheism.

But Nikita Stanescu, a very handsome man by any standards, was Elena Ceausescu’s favorite poet. She was so concerned about his health, that she sent the minister of health to his home, to treat him for the severe alcoholic addiction that was killing him. Stanescu was alleged to have drunk two liters of vodka a day, that is half a gallon, yet he never got drunk.

Close friends say that the more Stanescu drank, the more creative he became. The treatment he received in Mangalia, which Elena Ceausescu spent millions on, vitamins and other drugs, extended Stanescu’s life by a couple of years. He died at the age of 50 with a completely cirrhotic liver.

To a graduate like me and former teacher, to name a high school after such a drunk, talent set aside, is problematic – he was certainly not a role model of good behavior. However, as a communist poet, everybody in the communist world sang his praises and awarded him many famous prizes.

It is easier to understand now why our history teacher never answered questions from students that would have deviated from the communist historical narrative and instead, she said, “democracy has gone to your heads.” Avram was trying to say that democracy of any kind, including constitutional democracy was incompatible with communist tyranny or any other tyranny for that matter.

We are watching in the U.S. the communists in charge of our country altering history, dumbing down the curricula, changing names of schools, universities, roads, buildings, museums, ships, stadiums, football teams, destroying statues of people they do not like nor respect, and installing unknown Marxist activists, local and from around the world, in lock step with the global communist movement pushed by the U.N., using global warming scheme, conventions, agreements, accords, and programs that have now taken complete control at every level of government in every participating country.

Just like Solomon Katz emigrated from czarist Russia and changed Romanian society for almost a century, to benefit the Russian Bolsheviks whose communist ideas and platforms he was implementing, foreign nationals today are bribing groups and individuals at all levels of government to make sure that the global communist government will dominate the world, with a few billionaires at the helm. President Donald Trump was but a four-year bump in their plans, but they managed to neutralize him in an all-out assault unlike any other and rendered the country ungovernable.