Alexander Schmidt

Alexander Carol Schmidt (, ; 1879–1954) was a Bessarabian-born Imperial Russian, Moldavian and, later Soviet, politician, economist, lawyer and academic. He was the last Tsarist mayor of Chișinău, between 1917 and 1918.

Biography Alexander Schmidt was born on 1879 in Kishinev, at that time part of the Bessarabia Governorate. A Bessarabian German, he was a son of Carol Schmidt, who was serving as mayor of Kishinev when he was born, and Maria Cristi. The Schmidt family was part of the Russian nobility. He was raised into the Eastern Orthodox faith. The war minister of the Moldavian Democratic Republic, Gherman Pântea, advised the Romanian Army to execute Schmidt and Tsyganko. In a memo submitted on November 8–10, 1918 to the ambassadors and military attaches of the Entente, established in Iași, by representatives of the former Kishinev Municipal Council headed by Schmidt himself, it was noted that the Council never had any doubts about the fact that the international conference will give Bessarabia the possibility of expressing its will through a plebiscite. Alexander Schmidt and Aleksandr Krupensky published numerous brochures and interviews in Paris and London in which they tried to prove the Russian character of Bessarabia. They led a delegation of Russian politicians, landowners and nobles to the 1919-1920 Paris peace conference that strongly argued against the international recognition of the union of Bessarabia with Romania. Among other things, it was mentioned that the Romanian administration would have forced the province's population to take part in Romanian elections, who would have been absolutely foreign to the Russian-speaking population of Bessarabia, "to make the Entente believe that the population of Bessarabia accepted forced Romanian occupation". Representatives of this so-called Bessarabian delegation insisted on the need to organize in the territory of Bessarabia of a plebiscite, stating that the population who could not write in Romanian she was obliged to complete the ballot papers in Romanian.

After failing to prevent the unification of Bessarabia with Romania, Schmidt settled in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. He became an active contributor to the Krasnaya Bessarabia magazine. From 1924 to 1930 he worked on the State Planning Committee of the Ukrainian SSR. He was then the head of the finance department of the Kharkov Financial and Economic Institute. During the great purge, he was arrested and imprisoned in a GULAG, but was later released and settled in Tashkent, the capital of the Uzbek SSR. In 1946 he became a professor at the Tashkent Financial and Economic Institute.

Alexander K. Schmidt died in 1954 and was buried in Tashkent.

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