Nation-Building and Contested Identities: Romanian & Hungarian ...

for individual paths of social insertion in the new capital, the integration ofthe Bessarabians into Greater Romania remained essentially a case of transformationof a rural population into a modern nation.Moldovan Peasants into RomaniansContrasting/Conflicting IdentitiesIt is well known that, politically and institutionally, Greater Romania wasforged by centralizing decisions in Bucharest, unifying the administration,introducing a unique legislation and a state-sponsored educational systemin accordance with the model that functioned in the Old Kingdom. However,beyond structural transformations, it was the challenging task of creatingthe nation, of transforming the peasants into a community of citizens, whichhad to be fulfilled by the central authorities. 27 As it is shown below, the integrationof the Romanian-speaking population of Bessarabia raised problemsfar more difficult than those encountered in other regions. The membersof this overwhelmingly rural, mostly illiterate and quasi-immobilepeasant population, who had no sense of national identification with theRomanians, but had idealized memories from the Tsarist period, foundthemselves overnight citizens of Romania. It was the transition from theTsarist-type of local government to the Romanian-type of centralized modernstate with a corrupt administration that alienated the Bessarabians,many of whom felt, as the interviewed persons bear witness, that they wererather occupied by their alleged brothers than united with them.As the already mentioned opinion of Take Ionescu suggests, theBucharest elite was aware of the fact that the rural Romanian-speakingpopulation of Bessarabia, still untouched by national propaganda, was indifferentto its Romanianness. Unlike in Transylvania, where the process ofnational awakening was actually initiated, or in Bukovina, where even thepeasants were exposed to the influence of the Romanian literature and,thus, began to change their self-appellative from Moldovans into Romanians,in Bessarabia, the Romanian-speaking population continued to consideritself as Moldovan. In 1917-1918, the Transylvanian and the Banatrefugees, who went there thinking that they will contribute to the nationalawakening, quickly realized that their task was not the resurrection of a longdormant national conscience – as they might have imagined considering thatBessarabia was still part of Moldova at a time when the Romanians in Transylvaniahad already a developed national conscience 28 –, but to constructone from the scratch. Even the Romanian-speaking teachers had no knowledgeof Romanian culture or history, nor any memory of a common pastwith the people across the river Prut. 29 For them, historical knowledge waslimited to that of Moldova, and the identity of the language was not enoughto reveal the common origins with the Romanians. 30 Not only that they con-157