Abstract
Bessarabia’s unification with the rest of the Romanian historical provinces in order to create the Greater Romania in 1918 opened up a dispute between the new state and Soviet Russia. The loss of its previous gubernia to the detriment of Romania, combined with a series of strategies imposed by its tremendous internal transformation, made the Soviet Union to reconsider its western borders. This article provides an overview of the formation of the Moldavan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (MASSR) – the political ancestor of contemporary Dnestr Moldovan Republic or Transnistria – and then proceeds to analyse its role as propaganda and political tools inside the USSR. In such context, Transnistria will be studied as borderland of Greater Romania in order to better understand its socio-political profile in accordance with Soviet policies. The main aim of this paper is to give an objective account of the events from the historical perspective and to reassess the socio-political engineering which the MASSR underwent from its creation in 1924 up until its union with Bessarabia in 1940.
Highlights
Transnistria or the DMR (Dnestr Moldovan Republic) represents a de facto state1 on the territory of the Republic of Moldova, which emerged in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s dismemberment
Likewise, when the Moldovan Socialist Republic (SSR) was constituted on 2 August 1940, it comprised Bessarabia and only six out of the thirteen raions of the Moldavan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (MASSR)
It is believed that the leadership in Kremlin did not follow any particular ethnic, historical or cultural logic in the creation of the new Soviet republic, but rather relied on strategic considerations (Ţîcu, 2016, p. 55)
Summary
Transnistria or the DMR (Dnestr Moldovan Republic) represents a de facto state on the territory of the Republic of Moldova, which emerged in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s dismemberment. Considering the Bessarabian dispute between the newly created Romania and the young Soviet state, the border on Dnestr made Transnistria a vital point on the Soviet Union’s political map Since these historical events are highly connected to the post-Soviet animosities between Tiraspol and Chișinău, the subje ct of the frozen conflict will be a marginal yet unavoidable discussion throughout this article. Transnistria will be studied as borderland of Greater Romania in order to better understand its socio-political profile in accordance with the Soviet policies From this perspective, the current work represents both an attempt to reconcile the main existing theories considering the foundation of the MASSR, and a comprehensive survey of the Sovie t political mechanism which had impacted on the region’s identity. The census of 1926 established the exact figure for ethnic Moldovans in MASSR as 572,000 people, which represented 26% of the whole population (Galuschchenko, 2008, p. 143)
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