Bessarabia

• 1. Introduction

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  Bessarabia sits between two rivers, the Dniester to the east and the Prut to the west, and for that reason alone it has rarely been left alone. Covering 45,630 square kilometers of mostly hilly plains and fertile steppe, it now forms the core of Moldova, with smaller portions inside Ukraine. But for most of its modern existence, the region was someone else's prize. The Ottoman Empire held parts of it. The Russian Empire swallowed it whole in 1812. Romania claimed it after the First World War. The Soviet Union seized it back in 1940, lost it to Romania in 1941, and recovered it in 1944. Every one of those changes came with violence, disputed legality, or both. What this land grew in the ground, who lived on it, and what language they were permitted to speak all changed depending on who sat in the capital that happened to rule it. How did a territory of such agricultural richness end up so repeatedly broken and rearranged? And what does the name itself actually mean? The answer turns out to be fiercely contested too.

• 2. A Name in Dispute

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  The word Bessarabia has at least three competing origin stories, and each one says something different about who the land belonged to. The traditional explanation traces the name to the Basarab dynasty, the ruling house of Wallachia, who allegedly governed the southern portion of the region in the 14th century. In Romanian the region is still called Basarabia. The name Basarab itself is thought to come from Cuman or Pecheneg Turkic roots, probably meaning something close to "father ruler".

  But the early Moldavian chronicler Miron Costin explicitly rejected the idea that the name referred to Moldavian lands near the Black Sea, dismissing it as a cartographic mistake made by Western mapmakers. Linguist Dan Alexe goes further, arguing the name is most probably of Iranian origin. He proposes it derives from ba sar ab, a phrase built from the Iranian words for "at", "head" and "water", making the whole name mean something like "by the water" or "headwater". His argument draws on the way Iranian-speaking peoples named rivers across the Black Sea region; the Don, the Danube, the Dnieper and the Dniester all carry the ancient Iranophone particle don, meaning "water" or "river". He also notes that ab appears in other place names such as Punjab, meaning "five rivers".

  Dimitrie Cantemir added yet another layer by insisting the name originally applied only to the territory south of the Upper Trajanic Wall, an area only slightly larger than present-day Budjak. Whatever its true origin, the name itself was first used in local sources only in the late 17th century, and the confusion among Western cartographers likely helped spread it far beyond its original boundaries.

• 3. Layers of Conquest

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  Before any empire claimed Bessarabia, the land had already absorbed thousands of years of human settlement. The Cucuteni-Trypillia culture flourished between the 6th and 3rd millennium BC. In antiquity, Thracians, Scythians, Sarmatians, Celts and Cimmerians all passed through or settled there. Greek colonists founded Tyras along the Black Sea coast in the 6th century BC and traded with local populations.

  The first polity believed to have included all of Bessarabia was the Dacian kingdom of Burebista in the 1st century BC. After his death it fractured, and the central parts were later reunified under Decebalus before the Roman Empire defeated his kingdom in 106 AD. Southern Bessarabia entered the Roman Empire even earlier, in 57 AD, as part of the province of Moesia Inferior. The Romans built earthen defensive walls in the south, including the Lower Trajan Wall, to protect Scythia Minor from raids. Most of the region beyond the Black Sea shore stayed outside direct Roman control, its inhabitants referred to by later historians as the Free Dacians.

  From the 3rd century through the 11th century, successive waves of peoples swept through: Goths, Huns, Avars, Bulgars, Magyars, Pechenegs, Cumans and Mongols. In 561, the Avars captured Bessarabia and executed the local ruler Mesamer. The Mongols struck three times in major invasions, in 1241-1290 and 1343, driving much of the population into the Carpathian mountains. Genovese merchants later rebuilt or established forts along the Dniester and Danube, including Moncastro, seeking commercial footholds amid the chaos. By the late 14th century, the newly established Principality of Moldavia began pulling the region into a more stable political framework, establishing control over the fortresses of Akkerman and Chilia by 1392.

• 4. Stephen the Great and Ottoman Pressure

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  Stephen the Great ruled Moldavia between 1457 and 1504, a reign of nearly 50 years during which he won 32 battles against virtually all of his neighbours, including the Ottomans, the Tatars, the Hungarians and the Poles, while losing only two. After each victory he raised a monastery or church near the battlefield in honor of Christianity. Many of those battlefields and churches, along with old fortresses, are spread across Bessarabia along the Dniester.

  The pressure Stephen resisted eventually proved overwhelming. In 1484, the Ottoman Empire invaded and captured Chilia and Cetatea Alba, annexing the southern shoreline of Bessarabia and dividing it into two sanjaks. In 1538, the Ottomans pressed further north, annexing land as far as Tighina, while central and northern Bessarabia remained under the Principality of Moldavia, itself now an Ottoman vassal. Between 1711 and 1812, the Russian Empire occupied the region five times during its wars with Ottoman and Austrian forces.

  The final transfer came through the Treaty of Bucharest, signed on the 28th of May 1812, which concluded the Russo-Turkish War of 1806-1812. By its terms, the Ottoman Empire ceded the land between the Prut and the Dniester to the Russian Empire, and the entire region took the name Bessarabia. The acquisition counted among the Russian Empire's last territorial gains in Europe. Administratively, the territory became an oblast of the Russian Empire in 1818 and was elevated to a guberniya in 1873.

• 5. Language, Land, and the Russian Century

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  The Russian Empire's century of rule over Bessarabia left marks that outlasted its departure. According to historian Vasile Stoica, emissary of the Romanian government to the United States, Romanian was banned from schools and government facilities in 1834, despite the fact that roughly 80% of the population spoke the language. That ban later extended to churches, media and books. Anyone who protested risked exile to Siberia.

  The region also absorbed large waves of settlement. Between 1812 and 1846, Bulgarian and Gagauz populations migrated into southern Bessarabia from across the Danube, having lived under oppressive Ottoman rule. German settlers arrived in 1814 and concentrated in the southern parts. Turkic-speaking Nogai tribes from the Budjak region had been entirely driven out before 1812.

  One of the sharpest episodes of this period came on the 6th of April 1903, in the capital city Chișinău. The Kishinev pogrom killed 47 or 49 Jews, severely wounded 92 more and destroyed 700 houses. Local newspapers had primed the violence: the anti-Semitic publication Bessarabetz, run by Pavel Krushevan, falsely alleged that local Jews had murdered a Russian boy. Another paper, Svet, recycled the old blood libel, claiming the boy had been killed so his blood could be used in preparation of matzos. The 1905 Russian Revolution then ignited a Romanian nationalist movement in Bessarabia, setting the stage for the upheavals that the next decade would bring.

• 6. Votes, Legality, and Two World Wars

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  In the chaos of the Russian Revolution of October 1917, a National Council known as the Sfatul Tarii was established in Bessarabia, with 120 members elected from Bessarabia and 10 from Transnistria. After the Romanian Army crossed the republic's border under the pretext of securing supply lines against Bolsheviks, the Sfatul Tarii declared Bessarabia's independence and then union with the Kingdom of Romania. The vote on the 9th of April 1918 produced 86 deputies in favour, three against and 36 abstentions.

  The legality of the union was contested from the start. Romania's prime minister Alexandru Marghiloman later admitted the decision had been made in Bucharest and Iași, not in Bessarabia. The Country Council subsequently removed the conditions it had attached to union and voted for its own dissolution, with only 44 of 125 members present. The meeting had not been publicly announced. France, the United Kingdom, Italy and Japan recognized the union in the Treaty of Paris of 1920, but that treaty never came into force because Japan did not ratify it. The United States refused to sign it at all, considering Russia's absence from the conference a disqualifying factor. The Soviet Union never accepted the union and by 1924, after Romania twice declined a regional plebiscite, declared Bessarabia to be Soviet territory under foreign occupation.

  On the 23rd of August 1939, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact assigned Bessarabia to the Soviet sphere of interest. On the 26th of June 1940, the USSR issued a 24-hour ultimatum demanding Romania cede Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina under threat of war. Romania yielded and began evacuating its forces. During the seven days from the 28th of June to the 3rd of July, the Romanian Army reported 356 officers and 42,876 soldiers dead or missing. The Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic was formally established on the 2nd of August 1940 on most of Bessarabia's territory, merged with portions of the former Moldavian Autonomous SSR.

  On the 22nd of June 1941, Romania recovered Bessarabia with Wehrmacht support as part of Operation Barbarossa. Romanian troops committed pogroms against Jewish civilians and murdered Jewish prisoners of war during the recapture. The portion of Bessarabia's Jewish population that had not fled with the retreating Soviets, numbering 147,000 people, was gathered into ghettos and then deported during 1941-1942 in death marches to Romanian-occupied Transnistria. On the 20th of August 1944, a Soviet force of approximately 3,400,000 troops launched the Second Jassy-Kishinev offensive and overran Bessarabia in five days. The German 6th Army of approximately 650,000 men was obliterated in pocket battles at Chișinău and Sărata. Marshal Ion Antonescu was arrested by King Michael on the 23rd of August 1944 and later handed over to the Soviets.

• 7. Economy and Marginalization

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  Around 80% of the population worked in agriculture at the start of the First World War, and the land they worked was enormously productive: the region grows sugar beet, sunflower, wheat, maize, tobacco, wine grapes and fruit, and supports sheep and cattle herds. But the decades of Romanian rule turned that fertility into extraction rather than development.

  The Romanian land reform distributed land to peasants but left them deeply indebted. More than two-thirds of peasant households received less than 5 hectares each, and as of 1931 nearly 367,800 peasant families remained landless. By 1940-70% of the peasantry was in debt to large landowners and moneylenders. In the district of Soroca by 1938, only a quarter of peasant households had retained the land allotted to them. Winemaking, a mainstay of the local economy, was squeezed out of its traditional markets: most-favoured-nation status given to France brought cheap French wine in, Soviet markets were blocked, and a trade war starting in 1926 cut off Polish exports.

  Industry fared no better. The number of industrial workers fell from 5,400 in 1925 to 3,500 in 1937, while across Romania as a whole the industrial workforce grew by nearly 27% in the same period. Fixed capital in Bessarabian industry dropped by 10% between 1929 and 1937. Electricity production in Chișinău, recorded in 1925 at 4.47 million kWh, grew by only 6.7% over the following decade, while Bucharest's output grew by 238.2% and Galați's by 572.3%. By the end of the 1930s, only one in seven Bessarabians had access to electricity, compared to one in four among the broader Romanian population. During the entire 22 years of Romanian rule, only one large industrial enterprise was built in the region: the Bălți sugar plant. A 1938 review by the Bessarabian Federation of Chambers of Commerce put it plainly, calling the province "a colony for industry in the rest of the country".

• 8. Independence and Unresolved Borders

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  Dissent against Soviet rule surfaced as early as 1969, when a clandestine National Patriotic Front formed in Chișinău, gathering more than 100 members who vowed to work for Bessarabia's separation from the Soviet Union and union with Romania. In December 1971, following a tip passed to KGB chief Yuri Andropov by the Romanian security services, four leaders of the movement were arrested: Alexandru Usatiuc-Bulgar, Gheorghe Ghimpu and Valeriu Graur from the National Patriotic Front, and Alexandru Soltoianu, who led a parallel group in northern Bukovina. All were sentenced to long prison terms.

  By February 1988 the Soviet state had weakened enough for the first unsanctioned demonstrations to take place in Chișinău. On the 31st of August 1989, four days after a demonstration of 600,000 people in the capital, Romanian became the official language of the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic. In 1990 the first free parliamentary elections were held, won by the opposition Popular Front. A government led by Mircea Druc, one of the Popular Front's leaders, took office. The Republic of Moldova declared independence on the 27th of August 1991, inheriting unchanged the boundaries of the Soviet Moldavian SSR.

  Those boundaries left an unresolved question that persists to the present day. After a short war in the early 1990s, the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic declared itself in Transnistria, and its authority extended to include the municipality of Bender on the western bank of the Dniester. In 1994, the Gagauz-inhabited areas of southern Bessarabia were organized as an autonomous region within Moldova. The two thirds of Bessarabia that now forms Moldova's core and the portions absorbed into Ukraine continue the partition that Soviet administrators drew in 1940, a line recognized internationally by the Treaty of Paris that formally ended the Second World War in 1947.