Nation-Building and Contested Identities - MEK

Contrasting/Conflicting Identitiesests. 62 Obviously, my point is not to underline the alleged superiority orefficiency of the system introduced by Alexander II in his attempt to reorganizethe Tsarist regime according to Western European ideas, but theradical difference between this Russian-type of administration and theRomanian-type of modern centralized system, in which the relationshipbetween every citizen and the state was unmediated by local institutions.How these structural changes, occurred after the incorporation intoGreater Romania, were perceived by the Bessarabian peasants? In termsof social relations, the estates, more or less symbolic, but with origins thatwent back to the fifteenth century, preserved under the Tsarist administration,lost their significance. 63 All the peasants became simple inhabitantsof the village, as it was inscribed in their identity papers. Although thememory of these traditional hierarchies prevented a radical and suddenchange of the rural social relationships, this transformation brought discontentfor those who represented a kind of village nobility. Besides thestatus leveling, the Romanian centralized administration put an end to thezemstvo-system that, according to the wishes expressed in the conditionalunion of 27 March 1918, was to be maintained. 64 Although, as shownabove, the peasants did not really participate in the process of decisionmakingin the zemstva, at least they felt that they were represented.In turn, as citizens of Greater Romania, they felt that someone else decidedtheir affairs in Bucharest, without taking their local needs into account.The Romanian state also replaced the administrative personnel andsent its own representatives to the province. It is well-known that appointmentsto Bessarabia, the poorest region of the country, were seen rather asa punishment, so that not exactly the best clerks arrived there. 65 Therefore,it is not surprising that these people, who represented the central government,were not held in high esteem in the eyes of the local population. Asthere was no significant colonization of Bessarabia with people from otherprovinces, their main interaction with the Romanians was through thesestate representatives, among whom the most visible were the tax collector,the policeman, the teacher and the priest. 66 Most of the grievances wereraised by the tax collector, who was seen as a corrupted clerk, a person whotried to cheat the locals, taking advantage of their illiteracy. There werenumerous cases when the peasants were asked to pay the same tax a secondor even a third time. The policeman, often a drunkard, was associated to thetax collector and with his attempts at extorting money from the peasants. 67The attitude towards the priest was different. As seen above, besides clothing,most of the family spending went to the church, which meant the priest.It is also true that, in many cases, the priests were locals, sons of peasants,and, obviously, had a different type of relationship with the villagers than thetax collector or the policeman, who, usually, were from other regions.163