Nicolas Trifon, Editor of "Iztok," has Died

From Union Communiste Libertaire
October 15, 2023

This Romanian anarchist, who had taken refuge in France, edited Iztok, a "libertarian review of Eastern Europe" from 1979 to 1991. Appreciated for his caustic erudition, he continued to write regularly for Le Courrier des Balkans.

In the 1980s, as the cracks in the Soviet bloc were multiplying, an indispensable little French-language review followed, from a libertarian point of view, the counter-powers, samizdats, social struggles, free trade unions, anarchists and other left-wing dissidents that were springing up in the USSR, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria... This publication was Iztok, a "libertarian review of Eastern Europe", whose first issue in French appeared in September 1979, and of which Nicolas Trifon was, right up to the end, along with Frank Mintz and Vincent Albouy, one of the main architects.

Born in Romania in 1949, Nicolas Trifon was 19 at the time of the Prague Spring and May 68 in France. A young teacher who had become a long-haired deviant - a "social hippie" to use the terminology in vogue under Ceaucescu - he had suffered repression and managed to take refuge in France in 1977.

Shortly after his arrival, he became active in the Organisation Combat Anarchiste (OCA), which in 1979 was to merge into the Union des Travailleurs Communistes Libertaires (UTCL). However, he did not join the unified organization, and devoted himself to launching Iztok.

The magazine was a great success, its articles often being retranslated into Italian, German, English and Spanish. The Iztok ("East" in Bulgarian) team also tried to spread anarchist thought in the East, with pamphlets written in Polish, Hungarian, Bulgarian and Romanian, although circulating them on the other side of the Iron Curtain proved difficult. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the libertarian movement began to organize itself in Eastern Europe, and the Iztok team felt its role was outmoded. The publication closed with the 20th issue, in June 1991.

Nicolas Trifon joined the CGT proofreaders' union in 1985, and worked intermittently in the daily press (Les Echos and Le Parisien libéré). Starting in 2005, he began a regular collaboration with Le Courrier des Balkans, becoming a mainstay of this medium. That same year, he published Les Aroumains, un peuple qui s'en va (Acratie), in defense of the Romanian national minority from which he came.

As Florentin Cassonnet writes in Le Courrier des Balkans, the war in Ukraine was Nicolas Trifon's last commitment: "Attentive to making heard the voice of libertarian alternatives opposing Russian imperialism but also all forms of nationalism, he referred to the tutelary figure of Nestor Makhno, Ukrainian anarchist fighter during the Russian Civil War."

Stricken with cancer, Nicolas Trifon died on August 18, 2023. His memory has been widely hailed.

Guillaume Davranche (UCL Montreuil)

Nicolas' blog at Le Courrier des Balkans: https://www.courrierdesbalkans.fr/-L-en-dehors-balkanique-o-le-blog-de-N...

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Here is another good piece on Nicolas' passing. The libertarians/anarchists who lived in the Eastern Bloc, or fled it, are beginning to disappear. Their lessons are at risk of being lost amidst today's flirtations between anarchists and communists.

In Romanian, so translate from google if you must: https://pagini-libere.ro/nicolas/

"Nicolas, on the other hand, was haunted by this "return" - that's how he saw it - to Marx, after the failure of "historical communism". Perfectly agreeing with me that this "communism" was nothing but state capitalism, Nicolas believed that Marxism could only lead to such a thing... It is no longer possible for a libertarian to resurrect Marx, Nicolas once told me, after the pamphlet "Listen, Marxist!" of Bookchin. This is nonsense, a dangerous waste of time. He was, moreover, "estomaqué", as the French say, when he heard that the new "leftists" in Romania nowadays are Marxist-Leninists or even Stalinists on the face. When I advertised Bernard Friot, whose seminar I had been attending for a year, and his idea of ​​a "wage for life," Nicolas drew back in his chair and grimaced skeptically. Hearing what it was about, he could not be against it, but it was clear that, psychologically, he did not agree with Friot's "communism", suspecting it to present risks for individual freedom and the danger of totalitarian drifts, despite all appearances. It just didn't smell right. From "communism" he disliked workerism, the cult of the proletariat, not adopting the dogma of the proletariat as a revolutionary class in itself. He had more sympathy for a certain fringe of the lumpen-proletariat than for certain strata of the "proletariat" today. On one occasion he told me something like "I, an anarchist, have no problem with theft either"; we know that, in his youth, in Romania, he sought to escape the totalitarian uniformity by adopting a "nonconformist" way of life."

thanks for this additional information. it's really helpful to get more fleshing out of obituaries on both a personal and/or ideas-level understanding.

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