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BUKOVINA
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CONTENTS
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THE HISTORY OF THE REPUBLIC OF MOLDOVA is the history of two
different regions that have been joined into one country, but not into one
nation: Bessarabia and Transnistria.
Bessarabia, the land between the Prut and Nistru
rivers, is predominantly ethnic Romanian in population and constitutes the
eastern half of a region historically known as Moldova
or Moldavia
(the Soviet-era Russian name). Transnistria is
the Romanian-language name for the land on the east bank of the Nistru
River; the majority
of the population there is Slavic--ethnic Ukrainians and Russians-- although
Romanians are the single largest ethnic group there.
To a great extent, Moldova's history has been shaped by the
foreigners who came to stay and by those who merely passed through,
including Greek colonists, invading Turks and Tatars, officials of the
Russian Empire, German and Bulgarian colonists, communist apparatchiks from
the Soviet Union, soldiers from Nazi Germany, Romanian co-nationalists, and
twentieth-century Russian and Ukrainian immigrants. Each group has left its own legacy,
sometimes cultural and sometimes political, and often unwelcome.
Moldova's communist
overlords, the most recent "foreigners," created the public life
that exists in Moldova
today. Independence
has brought about changes in this public life, but often only on the surface.
What further changes Moldova
makes will depend partly on how much time it has before the next group of
"foreigners" comes to call.
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EARLY HISTORY - I
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The texts come
from the Country Studies Program, formerly the Army Area Handbook Program.
The Country Studies Series presents a description and analysis of the
historical setting and the social, economic, political, and national
security systems and institutions of countries throughout the world.
From The Library of Congress
The maps are mostly compiled and drawn by
Andrew Andersen except the maps of Ottoman Empire that come from The New
Cambridge Modern History Atlas (1970) and a fragment of the map of Roman
Empire that comes from Random House Compact Atlas of World History (1995)
THERE ARA ALSO SOME EVENTS OF RECENT MOLDOVAN
HISTORY that require special attention.
Those events include:
The texts of the above articles are written
by Andrew Andersen and Tsvi Kerem,
while the maps are drawn by Andrew Andersen.
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RECOMMENDED READING:
Bremmer, Jan,
& Taras, Ray,
New States,
New Politics:
Building the Post-Soviet Nations,
Cambridge
University Press, 1997
Gheorghescu, Vlad,
The Romanians,
Ohio State University
Press, 1991
Seton-Watson, Robert,
A
History of the Roumanians,
London,
Archon Books, 1963
NB.: There is
an opinion according to which the background of the Moldovans is
more complicated than just Romanian. To learn more about
that try to get
access to:
King,
Charles,
Who are the Moldovans?
(A paper
presented at Romanian Studies Day, School
of Slavonic and East
European
Studies, London
/ January 13, 1995)
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