Nation-Building and Contested Identities: Romanian & Hungarian ...

contributed to their isolation. Under the Tsarist regime, it was up to thelocal council to take care of the road network, and not much was done inthis respect; paved roads remained a rarity before the union with Romania.However, little was done even by the Romanian administration, which builtroads to connect Chiºinãu and other large cities with Bucharest, but didnothing for the villages. 52 By 1940, a large majority of Bessarabian roadswere still unpaved, so that, with the coming of the rainy season, they becameimpassable, condemning entire villages to isolation for months. Therefore,people felt that they were paying taxes not for the benefit of their province,but, as they put it, “for the modernization of the Bucharest-Sinaia road,used by the king and the political elite to go on vacation.”On the whole, the peasants’ way of life did not improve much duringthe interwar period. They continued to cultivate cereals, without taking intoconsideration the loss of the Russian market. The soil of Bessarabia is verygood for growing cereals, so that, traditionally, this is what most peasantsproduced primarily. 53 This meant that nearly all had wheat to make breadand oat to feed the horses, but could not earn a significant amount of moneyby selling what they harvested from their land because, with only one productoffered by all, the price of cereals was very low. However, most of thepeasants were reluctant to try other crops to assure themselves a higherincome, as they were reluctant to change their habits, from the religious calendarto the use of the Cyrillic alphabet. Moreover, the additional incomemade by mills or raising poultry, cattle, or sheep, was the lowest of all theregions in Greater Romania. 54 In terms of consumption, almost the entirefamily income was spent on food and clothing. 55 A very small amount ofmoney went to the church, while there was no spending on books, newspapers,or other things needed for school, such as copybooks, ink, etc., exceptfor the families with more than 3 hectares of land. 56 This illustrates onceagain the discrepancy between the educational program of the Liberals andthe basic material conditions needed to make it functional. With poverty andilliteracy reinforcing each other, the effort to spread education in the hopeof making the peasant population of Bessarabia “understand” its Romaniannesshad very limited results. It helped creating a tiny local elite of rural background,but did not succeed in making the peasants of Bessarabia feel thatthey were Romanian citizens. Cultural homogenization was inefficient withouteconomic development.The “Good Old” Russian TimesContrasting/Conflicting IdentitiesAlthough Bessarabia remained the poorest and the least modernizedprovince of Greater Romania until 1940, it was not this relative backwardnessthat made its peasant population perceive the Romanian administration161