Nation-Building and Contested Identities - MEK

CRISTINA PETRESCUas an occupying force, but the social and the fiscal transformations thatoccurred under the new authorities, who demanded more than the Tsaristregime from their new subjects, without offering more. However low thetaxes paid by them were as compared to those from other regions, 57 theBessarabians had the impression that these were nevertheless higher thanthose paid under the previous regime, without having clear benefits for theircommunities. Since their life-style did not improve with the coming of theRomanians, they considered that Bucharest did nothing for them. As comparedto the other provinces, even land reform, in their view, was due to localinitiatives rather than to the central government. It is true that the RomanianParliament ratified, on 22 December 1918, the decree-law on land reform forBessarabia proposed by the Sfatul Þãrii, but, in this region, the turmoils ofthe Revolution in 1917 had already given the peasants the opportunity toseize land from the landowners by themselves. 58 It is due to this timesequence that, in their memory, the crucial action in the redistribution ofland was theirs and not that of the Romanian government, so they never feltgrateful to Bucharest for this reform. 59When blaming the Romanian administration for its carelessnesstowards the local problems, the Bessarabian peasants had only one termof comparison: the previous Tsarist regime. Therefore, the key element inanalyzing their resentment towards the Romanian central government isthe crucial difference between the Russian and the Romanian state structure.With the administrative unification within Greater Romania, theBessarabians found themselves overnight in a modern state, where a directrelationship between the most humble citizen and the central authority wasestablished. 60 Until December 1918, the zemstvo system of local administrationfunctioned in this province. Through this system, created by thereformist Tsar Alexander II in 1864, and introduced in Bessarabia in 1869,every city or province was granted the right to administer the issues thatwere too small to be handled by the central government directly, such aspublic services, the maintenance of roads, the public education, the medicalservices, etc. These problems were handled by a local administrative council,which was elected by the inhabitants themselves, and included landlords,who held an ex officio majority over the other categories of the Tsar’s subjects,elected representatives of the urban and rural communities.Due to this tradition of local government, the Bessarabian peasantsthought that the most trusted members of their own community shouldtake care of all the administrative problems and mediate between themand the central power represented by the Tsar. 61 Although it cannot besaid that the peasant representatives had a real influence on the zemstvoaffairs, their simple presence at meetings was enough to make the peasantswho elected them think that nothing was decided against their inter-162