Nicolas Trifon – a libertarian journey. Interviews

Nicolas Trifon is a Romanian-born libertarian socialist who emigrated to Paris in 1977. The sequence of interviews collected in this volume is a captivating read. These accounts span several decades, from the memory of the first few times Nicolas ”stepped out of line” and his early political actions in communist Romania, to his years of militant activism in France and his involvement with the “Iztok” group, or the memory of his travel to Poland and the connections he managed to establish, not always without any risk, with those who challenged or opposed the regimes in the Eastern Bloc.

The first two interviews were conducted by Mihai Codreanu in 2012. One of them was published in Anarhia, a Romanian language magazine, and later translated and published in the German language publication Bună. The third in the series, detailing the activity of the Iztok magazine and its collective, was published in 2007 and translated by us from the French original. The last part of this anthology consists of our conversation with Nicolas Trifon in April 2020. All the texts in the book are in Romanian.

We considered it would be interesting to add to the volume a manifesto printed by the “Iztok” group in France and published initially in Romanian, in 1981. The manifesto, of which few copies actually reached Romania, was titled “What Do the Anarchists Want?” and is, to our knowledge, the only anarchist programme in Romanian from that period.