The national ideal -- One ideal or many? : a short history -- Colonization and resettlement : early Romanian experience -- Into the Nazis' fold -- Romanian eugenics : racism without a "race" -- Modern science and nationalism : two Romanian cases -- The population exchange with Bulgaria : "an opportunity missed"? -- Model province -- The new regime -- The project : "Model province" -- Cleansing the terrain, I : mass murder -- Cleansing the terrain, II : deportation -- The cost of Utopia -- What did they know? What did they do? -- Between the dream and reality -- Romanianization -- Deporting Roma -- Stopping deportations and changing course -- "Voluntary" population exchange with Bulgaria -- Getting ready for the world that never came : planning population exchanges -- Letting them out, and keeping them out
Abstract This article revisits the foundational years of 1989–1992 when the Republic of Moldova obtained its independence and simultaneously suffered territorial losses due to separatist movements. The quasi-official view in today's Moldova holds that separatist movements of that era in Transnistria and Gagauzia were the results of Moscow's meddling in Moldovan affairs aimed at punishing the Moldovans' quest for independence. The paper argues that this interpretation attributes too much power to the decision-makers in Moscow, and also strips local actors of agency. Instead, the article calls for a renewed focus on the developments in Moldova itself and for discourses developed by separatist leaders and opinion-setters to be treated as representative of genuine popular sentiment. It argues that the Moldovan national movement alienated the non-Moldovan population whose primary means of communication was Russian. The article relies on personal recollections as well as numerous published primary and secondary sources.
Based on a wide range of sources, this article explores the aims, methods, and evolution of Romanian occupation policy in southwestern Ukraine and the local non-Jewish population's reactions to it. It shows that the policy was more oppressive than is usually assumed and that it resulted in a substantial deterioration of relations between occupiers and occupied, especially in the countryside.
Romanian war-time policy towards Jews presents a paradox. In the summer and fall of 1941 Romanian military and police were killing the Jews of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina indiscriminately. In late fall of the same year, those Jews who survived the first wave of killings were forcibly deported further to the east—this time not only from Bessarabia and the northern part of Bukovina but from the whole of the latter's province. In the late fall of 1941, Jews from Odessa were once again murdered en masse and any survivors deported from the city. At this time, i.e. in the summer and fall of 1941, Romanian policy was at least as radical and brutal as the Germans', perhaps surpassing it in its brutality, a fact that elicited Hitler's delight and commendation. But then Romanian policy underwent a gradual but more and more pronounced change. Though Romanian authorities took part in the preparations for the deportation of Romanian Jews to the Nazi concentration camps in the summer and early fall 1942, in October of that year the Romanians abruptly terminated their participation in all preparations. In 1943 and 1944 the Romanian government even took measures to protect Romanian Jewish citizens residing in the German-ruled territories by demanding that those Jews were exempt from deportation to concentration camps and facilitated Jewish emigration to Palestine from Romania. Inside Romania, Jews were still heavily discriminated against, exposed to various vexations and harsh confiscatory taxation, but the majority of them survived the war.
