OCCASIONAL PAPERS IN ROMANIAN STUDIES No. 3 Moldova, Bessarabia, Transnistria Edited by REBECCA HAYNES School of Slavonic and East European Studies University College London OCCASIONAL PAPERS IN ROMANIAN STUDIES No. 3 Moldova, Bessarabia, Transnistria Edited with an Historical Introduction By REBECCA HAYNES The photograph on the front cover is of a Bessarabian country church taken from Charles Upson Clark, Bessarabia: Russia and Roumania on the Black Sea, Dodd, Mead & Company, New York, 1927, p. 104. All attempts have been made to establish whether copyright adheres to the photograph on the front cover. The School of Slavonic and East European Studies, UCL would be grateful to learn of any such rights. OCCASIONAL PAPERS IN ROMANIAN STUDIES NO. 3 Moldova, Bessarabia, Transnistria Edited with an Historical Introduction By REBECCA HAYNES School of Slavonic and East European Studies University College London 2003 OCCASIONAL PAPERS IN ROMANIAN STUDIES, NO. 3 EDITED BY REBECCA HAYNES Occasional Papers in Romanian Studies, No. 3 © School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London,2003 SSEES Occasional Papers No. 52 ISBN: 0-903425-63-7 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any other form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, UCL. Copies of this publication and others in the School’s referred series of Occasional Papers can be obtained from the Publications Office, SSEES-UCL, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU. Printed in Great Britain by Q3 Digital/Litho Queens Road, Loughborough, Leics. LE11 1HH Contents Notes on Contributors vii Historical Introduction 1 Rebecca Haynes The Holocaust in Transnistria: An Overview in the Light of Recent Research 143 Dennis Deletant The Moldovan Economy: From ‘Model’ to ‘Crash’? 163 Ronald J. Hill Transnistria since 1990 as seen from Chisinau 181 Natalia Gherman Security Concerns in Post-Soviet Moldova: The Roots of Instability 189 Trevor R. W. Waters The Conflict in the Transnistrian Region of the Republic of Moldova 205 Adrian Pop Index 219 Maps 1 The Principality of Moldova, Bessarabia and Bukovina, 1812 141 2 The Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic (MSSR), 1944-1991 142 v Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019 with funding from UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES) https://archive.org/details/SSEES0027 Notes on Contributors Dennis Deletant is Professor in Romanian Studies at SSEES-UCL. Natalia Gherman is Ambassador of the Republic of Moldova to Austria and Head of the Moldovan Mission to the OSCE and UN Agencies in Vienna. Rebecca Haynes is Lecturer in Romanian Studies at SSEES-UCL. Ronald J. Hill is Professor of Comparative Government at Trinity College Dublin. Adrian Pop is Professor at the Faculty of Political Sciences at the ‘Dimitrie Cantemir’ Christian University in Bucharest. Trevor R. W. Waters has recently retired from his post as Senior Lecturer at the Conflict Studies Research Centre, Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. Historical Introduction Rebecca Haynes The articles which follow are the product of a conference held at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London in 1999 on the history and contemporary affairs of Moldova, Bessarabia and Transnistria. Most of the papers deal with the Transnistrian dispute, as it developed over the course of the 1990s, but others consider economic conditions in the Republic of Moldova and Romanian policy towards the Jews during the Second World War. A common point in many of these articles is the issue of the Republic of Moldova’s relations with the Russians and Ukrainians, both inside and outside the Republic, and of Romania’s own relations with Moldova. Underlying this issue is the question of national identity. Are the Moldovans and Romanians ‘one nation’, and if so, what implications follow for statehood? Or is there a distinct ‘Moldovan’ identity, which justifies the maintenance of a separate Moldovan state? And if a distinct ‘Moldovan’ identity exists, is it connected in any way with the Moldovans’ historic ‘co-habitation’ with the Slavonic peoples both west and east of the Dnestr river? In seeking to write a historical introduction to these essays one issue becomes clear. The Moldovans’, and indeed the Romanians’, often complicated relations with the Ukrainians and Russians are not simply the product of Moldova’s incorporation within the Soviet Union after the Second World War, but stretch back to the very foundation of the prin¬ cipality of Moldova in the Middle Ages. It is for this reason appropriate to consider the issue of identity in contemporary Moldova, and the Transnistrian dispute, in a long-term historical perspective, and not simply as a product of more recent events. This historical introduction will, therefore, concentrate overwhelm¬ ingly on the period up to the Second World War. For the Soviet Union’s involvement in Moldova in the post-war era, and the unfolding of the Transnistrian dispute, the reader can do no better than to study Charles 1 2 Occasional Papers in Romanian Studies King’s seminal book. The Moldovans: Romania, Russia, and the Politics of Culture, (Hoover Institution Press, Stanford, 2000). Finally, I would like to thank those who made possible the original ‘Moldova, Bessarabia, Transnistria’ conference, as well as the publication of this volume. These include the Foreign and Commonwealth Office through whose generosity the conference took place. I would also like to thank Professor Michael Branch, former director of the School, and Professor George Kolankiewicz, the current director, who have made possible the publication of this volume. My thanks are also due to Professor Dennis Deletant and Dr Martyn Rady at the School for offering their comments on the following text. * The history of Moldova poses problems of both a practical and an intel¬ lectual nature. Amongst the former, is the lack of reliable historical data and basic information regarding Moldova. This is itself largely a result of the region’s history, which, on account of its frequent wars, changes of government and disputed sovereignty, has made accurate and continuous record keeping impossible. In addition, the country’s main centres of scholarly activity, the monasteries, have suffered themselves through war and plunder over the centuries. The historian is thus left with a number of often conflicting and incomplete accounts with which to develop his narrative. The intellectual problems confronted in writing a history of Moldova, however, pose even greater challenges. The first of these is the problem of territorial definition. Today ‘Moldova’ commonly refers to the Republic of that name which declared its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. The Republic lies between the Prut and Dnestr rivers and is bordered by the Romanian state in the west. It is otherwise surrounded entirely by Ukrainian territory. ‘Moldova’ is also, however, the name of the eastern part of the modern Romanian state. The two ‘Moldovas’ of today previously constituted the principality of Moldova which was founded in the fourteenth century and which in the nineteenth century joined with Wallachia to form the kingdom of Romania. The lands of the present-day Republic of Moldova were a part of the principality of Moldova until 1812 when they were annexed by Russia. The reader may well wonder what the relationship is between the principality of Moldova and ‘Moldavia’, a name often found in English-language histories of the area. ‘Moldavia’ is, however, simply the Latinized form of Moldova, and gained currency in Europe only from the eighteenth century onwards. There is also the frequent use in historical literature of the name Introduction 3 ‘Bessarabia’ to refer to the lands between the Prut and Dnestr rivers which were seized by Russia from the principality of Moldova in 1812. Bessarabia is the Latinized form of the Romanian Basarabia, the ety¬ mology and meaning of which we will explain further below (pp. 74-5). The area of the modern Republic of Moldova only, however, corresponds in part to the area of nineteenth-century Bessarabia. The second intellectual problem regarding the history of the Republic of Moldova is the question of national description and of language, which since the nineteenth century has been generally understood as the badge of identity. Most historians and commentators in Romania have argued that the ‘Moldovan’ language, adopted as the Republic’s official language in 1994, is a dialect of Romanian and, therefore, describe the language as ‘Romanian’ and the people of Moldova as ‘Romanians’. Many people in Moldova would concur with this view and regard themselves as being thus ‘Romanians’. Moldovan nationalists within the present-day Republic argue, how¬ ever, that although closely related to the Romanians, the Moldovans form a distinct ethnic and linguistic group, with a separate historical devel¬ opment. Complicated as they are, however, these problems of definition are by no means unique to Moldova. Throughout Eastern Europe, both historic ‘rights’ to territories and national identities are often subject to intensive scrutiny and debate. Indeed, the problems of Moldovan history are the problems of East European history writ small. The example of the Republic of Moldova’s Ukrainian neighbour, whose territory and identity are still hotly contested, is a further illustration. Not only is the territory