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After the Declaration of Sovereignty on 23 June 1990, and until 23 May 1991, it was officially known as the Soviet Socialist Republic of Moldova. From 23 May 1991 until the declaration of independence on 27 August 1991, it was renamed the Republic of Moldova while remaining a constituent republic of the USSR.
The Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, [a] shortened to Moldavian ASSR, was an autonomous republic of the Ukrainian SSR between 12 October 1924 and 2 August 1940, encompassing the modern territory of Transnistria (today de jure in Moldova, but de facto functioning as an independent state; see Transnistria conflict) as well as much ...
in this sense—that up until the end of the Soviet Union, local nation-alism and not Great Russian nationalism was perceived by Moscow as the greatest danger to the cohesion and the very existence of the USSR. This was the case at lest of Moldavian SSR as I will try to show further in this article.
Aug 27, 2021 · After a few months of heavy fighting between the Moldovan army and pro-Russian rebels backed by the ex-14th Soviet Army, a peace treaty was signed between Moldova and Russian Federation in...
- Overview
- History of Moldova
- Old Moldavia
- The Russian administration (1812–1917)
- World War I and the Russian Revolution
- The Romanian administration (1918–40)
- World War II
- The Moldavian S.S.R.
Bessarabia—the name often given to the region of historical Moldavia between the Dniester and Prut rivers—has a long and stormy history. Part of Scythia in the 1st millennium bce, Bessarabia later came marginally under the control of the Roman Empire as part of Dacia. Lying on one of the principal land routes into Europe, it was invaded by successi...
Bessarabia—the name often given to the region of historical Moldavia between the Dniester and Prut rivers—has a long and stormy history. Part of Scythia in the 1st millennium bce, Bessarabia later came marginally under the control of the Roman Empire as part of Dacia. Lying on one of the principal land routes into Europe, it was invaded by successi...
The Genoese, founding fortified commercial outposts on the Dniester in the 14th century, paved the way for contact with Western culture, but Bessarabia’s development depended on the rise of the principalities of Moldavia and Walachia, which soon expanded to include the territory. The southern area, which originally fell into the Walachian sphere, probably took its name from the Basarab dynasty. The whole province became part of Moldavia in the 15th century but was soon exposed to the Turkish onslaught; the key points of Cetatea Albă and Chilia (modern Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyy and Kiliya, Ukraine, respectively) were captured in 1484, and this conquest was ratified by treaty (in 1503 and 1513). The southern part of Bessarabia was again detached and organized by the Turks into two sanjaks (districts) of the Ottoman Empire.
Beginning with Peter I (the Great), Russia drove toward the Danube delta. The Russians occupied Moldavia five times between 1711 and 1812 and finally secured Turkey’s cession of Bessarabia—approximately half of historic Moldavia—in the Treaty of Bucharest (1812).
In 1829, in the Treaty of Adrianople, Russia pushed the frontier south to include the Danube delta. After the Crimean War, the Treaty of Paris in 1856 restored southern Bessarabia (at that time divided into three districts: Izmail, Kagul [or Cahul], and Bolgrad) to Moldavia, but in 1878, despite Romania’s having fought on the Russian side against Turkey, the Treaty of Berlin assigned these three districts once more to Russia, giving the Dobruja to Romania as compensation.
The Russian administration had at first been liberal. Autonomy had been granted in 1818 and had remained in force until 1828; a Moldavian boyar had been made governor and a Moldavian archbishop installed. Nevertheless, many Moldavian peasants, fearing the introduction of serfdom, fled across the Prut. The introduction of the zemstvo system in 1869 provided a measure of local autonomy, but a policy of Russification in both civil and ecclesiastical administration was thereafter pursued, with little effect on the largely illiterate peasantry. The founding of the kingdom of Romania (1881) formed a centre of attraction for Moldavian nationalism, but no lively movement developed in Bessarabia until after the Russian Revolution of 1905. The movement’s strength was drawn not from the boyars (largely Russified) but from schoolteachers and parish priests. Bessarabia achieved some prosperity under Russian rule. The empire formed a good market for Bessarabia’s agricultural produce, which was dispatched by river or by the railway system built to link the region with the north-south main line to Odessa. Chișinău was a relatively flourishing town, though its large Jewish population suffered severely in pogroms in 1903 and 1905.
During World War I the Central Powers tempted Romania to side with them by offering to restore Bessarabia. The scales were tipped in favour of the Allies, however, by counteroffers of Transylvania and Bukovina, as well as by the Francophile sentiment of the Romanian people, so that by 1916 Romania was fighting as Russia’s ally. The revolutionary and nationalist ferment in the Russian Empire spread quickly to Bessarabia, which proclaimed support for the moderate Socialist Revolutionary Aleksandr Kerensky in March 1917. In April the National Moldavian Committee demanded autonomy, land reform, and the use of the Romanian language; similar rights were claimed for the Moldavians, about 400,000 in number, settled east of the Dniester.
A move toward complete independence was encouraged by events in Ukraine, and in November 1917 a council known as the Sfatul Țării (Sfat) was set up on the model of the Kiev Rada. On December 15, 1917, the Sfat proclaimed Bessarabia an autonomous constituent republic of the Federation of Russian Republics. Disorders caused by the revolutionary Russian soldiery led the Sfat to appeal to the Allies’ representatives and to the Romanian government at Iași for military help, whereupon the Bolsheviks occupied Chișinău in January 1918. They were driven out by Romanian forces within two weeks, and on February 6 the Sfat, again following Kiev, proclaimed Bessarabia an independent Moldavian republic, renouncing all ties with Russia. Recognizing the economic impossibility of isolation and alarmed by the pretensions of the German-sponsored Ukrainian government, the Sfat voted for conditional union with Romania in April 1918. Reservations about the union were abandoned with the defeat of the Central Powers and the creation of Greater Romania, and unconditional union was voted at the final session of the Sfat in December 1918. The union of Bessarabia with Romania was recognized by a treaty (part of the Paris Peace Conference) signed on October 28, 1920, by Romania, Great Britain, France, Italy, and Japan; the treaty eventually was ratified by all signatories but Japan. The Soviet Union never recognized Romania’s right to the province, and in 1924 it established the tiny Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic on Ukrainian territory across the Dniester. The frontier along the Dniester was closed, but railway connections were reestablished in 1936, two years after the resumption of diplomatic relations.
The Romanian government immediately put through a drastic land reform, initiated by Sfatul Țării, whereby the maximum holding allowed was 247 acres (100 hectares). Notwithstanding this, the province languished economically. The uncertainty caused by the continued pretensions of the Soviet Union hindered development; Romania had little need of Bessa...
After the German-Soviet pact of August 1939, the Soviet Union revived claims to Bessarabia, and the collapse of the western European front to the Germans in 1940 precipitated action. In late June a Soviet ultimatum to Romania demanded the cession of Bessarabia and of northern Bukovina. The Romanian government was forced to submit, and Soviet troops...
Following the Soviet occupation of Bessarabia in 1944, the province was reintegrated into the Soviet Union as the Moldavian S.S.R. Thereafter, policies formulated in Moscow became the norms for political and economic development until the Soviet system began to weaken in the late 1980s. The Communist Party coordinated all public activities, justify...
The Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic (Moldavian SSR), established on August 2, 1940, consisted of six and a half counties of Bessarabia joined with the westernmost part of the already extant MASSR (an autonomous entity within the Ukrainian SSR). Various changes were made to its borders, which were finally settled by November 1940.
Aug 3, 2021 · In August 1989, the Supreme Soviet of the Moldavian SSR made Moldovan the official language, recognized a linguistic Moldavian-Romanian identity, and the Romanian Latin alphabet in the Moldovan language.
