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

Contrasting/Conflicting Identitiesruseascã la Basarabia româneascã (From the Russian Bessarabia to the RomanianBessarabia) (Bucharest: Semne, 1997).30 Ion Mateiu, Renaºterea Basarabiei (The Rebirth of Bessarabia) (Bucharest:Cartea Româneascã, 1921), p. 114.31 Cassian R. Munteanu, Prin Basarabia româneascã: Însemnãri de cãlãtorie(Through Romanian Bessarabia: Travel notes) (Lugoj: Tipografia Iosif Sidon,1919), p. 43.32 For the gradual policy of Russification through successive changes in the administrativestatus of Bessarabia, and gradual introduction of Russian in church andschool, see Nistor, Istoria Basarabiei, pp. 178-197 and 226-276. However importantthese changes were, it seems to me that, since the largest part of the populationwas rural and illiterate, they remained untouched by the introduction of theRussian language. The policy of modifying the ethnic map of Bessarabia by settlingvarious other groups, such as Germans, Russians, Ukrainians, Cossacks andJews was more successful, effectively transforming the region from a prevalentlyRomanian into a multiethnic one. As a result, the percentage of Moldovansdecreased constantly. According to the data gathered by the Russians in Bessarabiain 1817, it is estimated that 86% of the population was Moldovan. See Nistor,Istoria Basarabiei, p. 203. A Russian military statistics, published in 1871, indicatedthat the Moldovans made up 67.4% of the population, while the last Russiancensus of 1897 showed that, according to the mother tongue, the Moldovans wereonly 47.58%. See Boldur, Basarabia, pp. 112-113.33 As Charles King observes, the Russian Slavophile writers did not make any differencebetween the Bessarabians and their neighbors from across the Prut.Russia’s rights on Bessarabia were based on the historical argument of the Slavprimacy on that territory. With the establishment of the MoldovanAutonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, the Soviets initiated a propagandacampaign, which used class arguments, taken from the Comintern theses, inorder to support the difference between the Moldovans and the Romanians.The former, who were the descendants of the peasants once under the yoke ofWallachian and Western Moldovan aristocrats, had nothing to do with the latter,who were the descendants of their exploiters. In the post-war period, sinceRomania also became a socialist country, the Soviet argument had to bechanged. The Soviet historians argued that the Moldovans were a separatenation, the product of a normal process of nation-formation that took place inthe 19 th and 20 th centuries, when this region, with the exception of twenty-twoyears, was separated from Romania. See King, The Moldovans, pp. 26, 59-62and 106-110.34 Data from both censuses are provided in Nistor, Istoria Basarabiei, p. 304.35In 1930, in the urban areas of the other newly-acquired provinces of GreaterRomania, Romanians made up 33% in Bukovina, and 34.7% in Transylvania;by contrast, in the Old Kingdom, Romanians represented 74.3% of the urbanpopulation. See Livezeanu’s calculation in her Cultural Politics, p. 10.36 For a comparison of the historical regions of interwar Romania with respect totheir economic development, see Norman L. Forter and Demeter B. Rostovsky,The Roumanian Handbook (London: Simpkin Marshall, 1931; reprint,New York: Arno Press, 1971), pp. 213-242 (page references are to the reprintedition).171