Ion Inculeț (Romanian: [inkuˈlets]; 5 April [O.S. 17 April] 1884 – 18 November 1940) was a Bessarabian and Romanian politician. He served as President of the Country Council of the Moldavian Democratic Republic, Minister of the Interior of Romania, and, from 1918, a full member of the Romanian Academy.
Biography Ion Inculeț was born on 5 April 1884 in Răzeni village, which was part of the inter-war (between World War I and World War II) Lăpușna County, in the family of Constantin and Maria Inculeț (née Ionaș), who were peasants. The surname, Inculeț, indicates that Ion might have descended from the Ukrainians and Russians who had settled in Bessarabia. This is because his surname likely comes from the rivers Ingul and Inguleț, which are tributaries of the Bug River, which originates in Ukraine. Indeed, Ion's grandfather was described as either a Great Russian or Ukrainian (he was probably from the areas around the Inculeț rivers) to work as a cellar master for a landowner. However, Ion himself did not always go by the surname "Inguleț", as he also wrote it as Inculetz or Ingulet occasionally when signing himself off. After his birth, Ion was baptized soon after by a certain Ecaterina Grigore (Grigorievna) Ionaș, the widow of a man named Nicolae Ionaș. Soon after, the family moved to the village of Căinări in Tighina County and then to Chișinău. In 1888, Ion's brother Teodor was born in Căinăria, indicating the family stayed there for some time before moving over to Chișinău.
Education For his primary years, he initially attended the Spiritual School for Boys in Chișinău. After graduating from his primary school, in 1894, he was admitted to the Theological School in Chișinău. The school was subordinate to the Theological Seminary. He attended the school for five years, achieving the highest mark of five in a number of subjects, including arithmetic, Russian language and Church Slavonic, church singing, and sacred history, among others. In 1899, he earned the right to enroll in the first class of the Theological Seminary due to his performance at the Theological School. Among his classmates of the first graduating class were Pantelimon Erhan, the future Prime Minister of the Moldavian Democratic Republic, and Vasile Bârcă, who served as Mayor of Chişinău. He graduated from the seminary in June 1905 with the highest mark in the interpretation of the Holy Scriptures and in religious literature, among other things. Interested in studying natural science (then known as exact science), he afterwards enrolled in Dorpat University, which was then part of Iuriev (now Tartu, Estonia). At Dorpat, he quickly became involved in Basarabia, the first Romanian-language newspaper in Bessarabia, which was then a province of the Russian Empire. In the newspaper, he published articles on civil rights, personal inviolability, local administration, land reform, and relations between nobility and peasants. He wrote under the pseudonym Ion Gându. As he writes later in his memoir, in February 1907, the Tsarist police (the Okhrana), showed up at the editorial offices of the newspapers, confiscated what they could, and forced the people involved in it to leave Bessarabia or remain under police supervision. Thus, he decided to leave Bessarabia for Saint Petersburg. He quickly became involved in politics, joining the city council called the Saint Petersburg Soviet as a delegate of the Teachers' Union. He met influential figures in revolutionary politics there, including Leon Trotsky, and supported the Russian Revolution of 1905, a challenge against the Tsar's absolute power and the monarchy of Russia. While becoming active in politics, he also started attending the Saint Petersburg Imperial University in 1906 in the Faculty of Physical and Mathematical Sciences. He, however, did not want to study sciences anymore: on 17 September 1907 (and later again on 4 August 1910), he made requests to the rector of the university asking to be admitted to attend courses in the Faculty of Law, but his requests were refused. Interestingly, as noted by Alexei Găină, Ion's name does not appear in any of the general lists of students for the university -perhaps as a form of censorship, but it can not be certain. At the school, however, he did create the Association of Students from Bessarabia. In the end, he graduated from the university in 1911 with a first-class diploma and a recommendation for a teaching position.
Early career In 1912, upon graduating, he was hired as a teacher at the Kuzmina Real School, which was a private general education school. During his time in St. Petersburg, while working there, he lived on Malîi Boulevard, no. 11. He also started working scientific papers during this time in the fields of physics and meteorology like Crookes tube and the Doppler effect among other studies. In 1913, he was hired as a mathematics teacher at the private commercial school Tutorskaia. At the same time, he was a Privatdozent (as a private lecturer) in mathematics and astronomy. Returning to his previous position, he also started practicing journalism during the years 1913–1914, mostly through collaboration with science popularization magazines like Vestnik Znania. However, he still did not make much, and as a means of earning an additional income, he started taking on more teaching jobs. He was approved to teach at the State Commercial School, which was established by the First Teachers' Union, taught at the private girls' gymnasium Makarova, and also taught accounting courses, which was also established by the union. After getting his PhD in 1915, Inculeț worked as a physicist at the Meteorological Observatory, while at the same time, he wrote for the Basarabia newspaper of Constantin Stere.
Political career
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