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

CRISTINA PETRESCUsidered themselves Moldovans, but if one took into consideration any kinshipwith another people, these were the Russians and not the Romanians. 31Comparing this situation with the problems they were facing athome, related to the policy of Magyarization, many Transylvanians put theblame on the Tsarist regime and its Russification policy. 32 However, asalready pointed out, this affected the elite but not the illiterate peasantpopulation. The appellative “Romanian,” which entered into public use inthe United Principalities in the second half of the 19 th century, meantnothing to the Romanian-speaking population east of the Prut, whosemembers, subjects of the Tsar, continued to define themselves asMoldovans. This was the way they used to think about themselves “sincethe beginning of the world,” as they put it, meaning actually as early astheir family memories reached. Thus, the problem of Bessarabian indifferenceto the national cause, which embittered many Romanians fromother provinces, must be understood not as a result of Russification, butas sign of rural isolation. Moreover, in 1918, their self-identification asMoldovans had nothing to do with the Russian attempts to forge a separateMoldovan nation; this strategy was employed only by the Soviets inthe interwar period, 33 with the establishment, on 12 October 1924, of theMoldovan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic between the riversDnestr and Bug, on Ukrainian territory, in the region later known asTransnistria.It was the rural isolation that made the task of awakening the nationalconscience among the Bessarabians so problematic. In 1918, Bessarabiawas the least urbanized region of Greater Romania, and it remained so upto World War II. According to the 1930 census, the only one made in theinterwar period, 87% of the population still lived in rural areas, whereasthe cities continued to be dominated by Jews and Russians. Taking intoaccount the data available from the last Russian census of 1897, and thosefrom the 1930 Romanian census, it can be seen that the Romanians, inspite of the fact that their proportion in urban areas rose in this periodfrom 14.2% to 30.6%, 34 still represented a minority in Bessarabian cities. 35This can be explained by the fact that there was neither a significant migrationof Romanians from other regions to Bessarabia, with the exception ofadministrative personnel and a relatively small number of newly-trainedteachers, nor a notable migration of the locals from villages to cities. Thisis not surprising, considering that nothing could attract the peasants tocities. The Romanian economy was primarily agrarian in all the historicalprovinces, but in the Old Kingdom and in Transylvania there was alsoa representative industrial sector. 36 In the case of Bessarabia, one cannoteven claim that an industrialization process began; the data, provided ina eulogy of the Romanian administration in the region, certify the existence158