OWNERSHIP ON THE TERRITORY OF "BESSARABIA" IN THE XIX – AT THE BEGINNING OF XX CENTURY: A COMPLEX TANGLE OF ARGUMENTS OF INTERESTED PARTIES IN CIRCUMSTANCES OF REGION-FRONTIER

Abstract

It was in 1812, that the Russian Empire on the basis of the Bucharest treatise had included the territory between the Dniester, Prut and the Danube, which became part of the newly formed Bessarabian area. It was the region where the interests of geographically close countries faced. Therefore the system of argumentation of property rights on this territory has acquired particularly acute significance. Among the possible arguments of the interested in Bessarabia parties Russian writers of the 19th century mentioned the principles of the right of conquest and the first settlement, ethnographic, historical, economical. In international law were used and other principles like following: geografìc, strategic. The important value the questions have got: «what is Bessarabia?», what’s origin of its name, what are the borders of Bessarabia. The answers to these questions often were intended to create a basis for the principle of conquest (or also for historical argument) in the struggle for the region in the nineteenth century.The borders of «Bessarabia» region in public discourse within the Russian Empire were quite ambiguous. Location of Bessarabia on the political-strategic (and historic) frontier led, along with the identification of Bessarabia with Bessarabia area (oblast) in the Russian Empire, to actualize of the concept of «Bessarabia» as the southern part of Bessarabia area (oblast) (Budjak). This approach allowed virtually to exclude from competition for Bessarabia (in the meaning of «Budjak») Moldavian Principality (later Romania). In turn, the notion of «Budjak» was also not completely unambiguous. «Floating» border of Bessarabia as Budjak was possible due to its border position, in the formation of which a role played not only fight of the Russian Empire for this territory, but also internal dispute over territory between the Moldavian Principality and The Ottoman Empire which existed at least in the XVIII century, and other factors. The imagination on Bessarabia affected the interest to it in Odessa, in particular, on the part of the Odessa historian, statistics and economist A. Skal’kovs’ky.The article argues that the argument of the conquest of the territory concerning Bessarabia which was important to the Russian Empire until 1856, this time lost its meaning. It has been changed by other arguments, including economic, historical. A special role in the system of the rights on the territory of Bessarabia in the epoch of the development of modern Nations the ethnographic argument started to play. It included a reference to the fact that the territory of Bessarabia (Budjak) since ancient times were inhabited by Slavs and, in particular, by Ants. On the other hand, adepts of the ethnographic principle paid their attention to a significant percentage of Ukrainian and Russian population in the region in the historical realities of the second half of the nineteenth century.The use of ethnographic argument allowed not only the Empire, due to its official project of the «Russian people», insist on its rights, but also promoted the creation of the base of ethnographic evidences for the establishment of the Ukrainian rights in the territory of Bessarabia-Budjak, according the significant role of Ukrainians in settling of this historic frontier of countries and peoples.