MoldovaHISTORICAL BACKGROUND
Figure 12. Moldova, 1995
THE HISTORY OF THE REPUBLIC OF MOLDOVA is the history
of two
different regions that have been joined into one country,
but not
into one nation: Bessarabia and Transnistria. Bessarabia,
the
land between the Prut and Nistru rivers, is predominantly
ethnic
Romanian in population and constitutes the eastern half of
a
region historically known as Moldova or Moldavia (the
Soviet-era
Russian name). Transnistria is the Romanian-language name
for the
land on the east bank of the Nistru River; the majority of
the
population there is Slavic--ethnic Ukrainians and
Russians--
although Romanians are the single largest ethnic group
there.
To a great extent, Moldova's history has been shaped by
the
foreigners who came to stay and by those who merely passed
through, including Greek colonists, invading Turks and
Tatars,
officials of the Russian Empire, German and Bulgarian
colonists,
communist apparatchiks from the Soviet Union, soldiers
from Nazi
Germany, Romanian conationalists, and twentieth-century
Russian
and Ukrainian immigrants. Each group has left its own
legacy,
sometimes cultural and sometimes political, and often
unwelcome.
Moldova's communist overlords, the most recent
"foreigners,"
created the public life that exists in Moldova today.
Independence has brought about changes in this public
life, but
often only on the surface. What further changes Moldova
makes
will depend partly on how much time it has before the next
group
of "foreigners" comes to call.
Data as of June 1995
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