Bessarabia

Bessarabia , historic region, c.17,600 sq mi (45,600 sq km), largely in Moldova and Ukraine. It is bounded by the Dniester River on the north and east, the Prut on the west, and the Danube and the Black Sea on the south. Consisting mainly of a hilly plain with flat steppes, it is an extremely fertile agricultural area, especially for wine grapes, fruits, corn, wheat, tobacco, sugar beets, and sunflowers. Dairy cattle and sheep raising are also important. Agricultural processing is the chief industry. There are some stone quarries and lignite deposits. Bessarabia's leading cities are Chişinău and Tiraspol in Moldova and Izmayil and Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyy in Ukraine. The population consists of Moldovans (about two thirds), Ukrainians, Russians, Jews, and Bulgarians. As the gateway from Russia into the Danube valley, Bessarabia has been an invasion route from Asia to Europe. Greek colonies were planted on the Black Sea coast of Bessarabia as early as the 7th cent. BC The region was later part of Roman Dacia , but after the 4th cent. AD it was subject to incursions by Goths, Huns, Avars, and Magyars. Slavs first settled in Bessarabia in the 7th cent. in the midst of these incursions. From the 9th to the 11th cent., the area was part of Kievan Rus , and in the 12th cent. it belonged to the duchy of Halych-Volhynia. Cumans and later Mongols overran Bessarabia; after the latter withdrew it was included (1367) in the newly established principality of Moldavia . The region probably derives its name from the Walachian princely family of Bassarab, which once ruled S Bessarabia. In 1513 the Turks and their vassals, the khans of the Crimean Tatars, conquered Bessarabia. After the Russo-Turkish wars, the region was ceded to Russia by the Treaty of Bucharest (1812). The Crimean War resulted (1856) in Russia's cession of S Bessarabia to Moldavia; but the Congress of Berlin (1878) returned the district to Russia. After the Bolshevik Revolution (1917) the anti-Soviet national council of Bessarabia proclaimed the region an autonomous republic; however, in 1918, Bessarabia renounced all ties with Soviet Russia and declared itself an independent Moldovan republic, later voting for union with Romania. Although the Treaty of Paris (1920) recognized the union, Russia never accepted it. In 1940 Romania was forced to cede Bessarabia to the USSR; the Romanian peace treaty of 1947 confirmed Bessarabia as part of the USSR. The larger part of the region was merged with the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic to form the Moldavian SSR (now Moldova); the southern and northern sections, with a predominantly Ukrainian-speaking population, were incorporated into Ukraine.

Bessarabia, region between the rivers Dniester and Prut (see Map 80) with a predominantly Romanian population which, except for a period under Russian rule between 1812 and 1918, formed the eastern half of the Romanian principality of Moldavia. In March 1918 a national assembly of Bessarabian Romanians voted for the union of the province with Romania. The new Soviet government refused to recognize the union and, in order to formalize its opposition to Romania's annexation of the province and to offer a nucleus for a ‘liberated’ Bessarabia, created in 1924 the Autonomous Moldavian Republic (AMR) in the partly Romanian-inhabited area of south-western Ukraine on the east bank of the Dniester. The Soviet interest in Bessarabia was conceded by Germany in a secret protocol to the Nazi–Soviet Pact of August 1939.

On 26 June 1940 the Romanian government received a Soviet ultimatum demanding the cession of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina and, bereft of international support, decided to accede. From the union of most of Bessarabia with the western part of the AMR (the areas around Tiraspol, Dubossary, and Rebnitsa) was created on 2 August 1940 the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic. The greater eastern part of the AMR was returned to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, thus revealing that its creation in 1924 was merely a political stratagem to give credibility to the Soviet claim to Bessarabia. By restoring most of the AMR's territory to the Ukrainian SSR the Soviet government admitted the fiction of ‘Moldavian’ in the autonomous republic's official name.

Immediately after the annexation of Bessarabia the Soviet authorities nationalized the land and private enterprises were taken over by the state. The process of sovietization was facilitated by the transfer of 13,000 specialists from Russia, the Ukraine, and Belorussia. deportations of Romanians now took place from the new republic to Central Asia in order to work in factories and collective farms as replacements for those drafted into the army. Estimates of the total number of Romanians resettled in this way vary from 100,000 to half a million. The deportations were interrupted by the German attack of 22 June 1941 on the Soviet Union (see BARBAROSSA) in which Romania, under General Antonescu, participated in order to recover Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina (see also Romania, 4(a)). These lost provinces were regained by 27 July. If deportation had been one of the sinister features of Soviet rule in Bessarabia, it was now the turn of the Romanian authorities to indulge in it. In the winter of 1941–2 there were large deportations of Jews and gypsies from Bessarabia to camps in Transnistria, a region east of Bessarabia which Antonescu had annexed from the Ukraine in August 1941. In December 1941 it was reported to Antonescu that 108,000 persons had been resettled there. Many of the deportees were packed into railway wagons without sufficient food and water and arrived at their destination dead. A large number of those who survived the journey were shot, buried, or starved to death in the Transnistrian camps by German and Romanian units.

The reconquest of Bessarabia was accomplished by the Red Army on 20 August 1944 when the Soviet generals Malinovsky and Tolbukhin successfully launched a massive assault of almost one million troops and 1,500 tanks against the combined German and Romanian forces straddling the Prut. Most of Bessarabia was reincorporated into the Moldavian SSR in its August 1940 frontiers, the former southern Bessarabian districts of Ismail and Cetatea Albă being assimilated into the Ukrainian SSR. These territorial realignments were formalized in the Soviet–Romanian Armistice Convention of September 1944 and confirmed by the Peace Treaty of 1947 with Romania.

Dennis Deletant

Bibliography

Dima, N. , Bessarabia and Bukovina: the Soviet–Romanian territorial dispute (Boulder, Colo., 1982).
Manoliu-Manea, M. (ed.), The Tragic Plight of a Border Area: Bessarabia and Bucovina (Los Angeles, 1983)