Moldova : History

The history of Moldova is complicated by the fact that the republic's present-day territory was not called Moldova or Moldavia until 1940. Present-day Moldova occupies the central two-thirds of a region historically referred to as Bessarabia. For centuries the name Moldova referred to a larger area encompassing Bessarabia and stretching from the Black Sea in the south to Bukovina, a former province of Romania, in the north, and from the Siret River in the west to the Dnestr in the east.

In 1878 Russian forces reannexed Bessarabia, which remained part of the Russian Empire until 1917. In March 1918 the Bessarabian legislature voted in favor of unification with Romania, and at the Paris Peace Conference in 1920 the union was officially recognized by the United States, France, the United Kingdom, and other western countries.

In 1939 Bessarabia was granted to the USSR in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Soviet - German agreement on dividing Eastern Europe. Although Romania declared its neutrality in September 1939, the USSR forced it to concede Bessarabia, and Soviet forces occupied the region in June 1940. At first Soviet authorities continued to call the new territory Bessarabia. But on August 2, 1940, the Moldavian SSR was proclaimed, and the former Moldavian ASSR abolished.

The Trans-Dnestr region was transferred to the new republic, while the remainder of the Moldavian ASSR reverted to Ukraine. The Moldavian SSR was reoccupied by Romanian forces from 1941 to 1944, when Soviet forces again retook the territory. It remained part of the USSR until the collapse of Communism in 1991, when an independent Moldovan republic was established.

Moldova joined the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) in the same year and became a member of the United Nations (UN) in 1992. The issue of ethnicity and territoriality has dominated the political scene in Moldova since the late 1980s and has resulted in a civil war in which hundreds of people have been killed. After a law was passed in 1989 making Romanian the official language, separatist movements appeared in the southern and eastern portions of the country. Local officials refused to enact the language law in the area east of the Dnestr, where large numbers of Slavs reside but do not constitute a majority of the population. A political group promoting greater autonomy for the area, Yedinstvo, was formed.

In September 1990, after a referendum on autonomy was held, the local leadership created a Trans-Dnestr Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, which was preceded by the formation of an autonomous Gagauz Soviet Socialist Republic in the southeast. In 1991, when the Moldovan government declared independence from the USSR, the Trans-Dnestr leadership declared independence from Moldova.

Fighting soon broke out, and in 1992 Moldovan President Mircea Snegur (1990- ) authorized military action against the rebels. The rebels, aided by contingents of Russian cossacks and the Russian 14th Army, consolidated control over the disputed area. The Moldovan government made several futile requests for UN intervention, but was forced to settle for a combined Russian- Dnestr-Moldovan peacekeeping force. In May 1993 the Moldovan side made several concessions to the opposing side, including the presence of Russian forces in eastern Moldova until the region is granted special political status. Unsatisfied, the Trans-Dnestr leadership demanded that the Moldovan Parliament rescind parts of its 1991 declaration of independence and return the republic to a subordinate political position within the CIS. In February 1994 Moldova held its first free parliamentary elections.

The Communist-led Agrarian Democratic Party won the largest number of seats. A bloc of Socialist parties won the next largest percentage. In a referendum held in March 1994, 90 percent of the voters supported an independent Moldova with its 1990 borders, which would include the Trans-Dnestr region.

In April the Moldovan Parliament suspended the 1989 law that made Romanian Moldova's official language.