aici - Asociatia Tinerilor Istorici din Moldova

SUMMARY
HISTORY AND DIPLOMACY IN 1912.
CENTURY FROM THE ANNEXATION OF BESSARABIA BY THE RUSSIA
For an exact image on a subject of the proposed
analysis and the contribution of all factors involved
in unfolding of the events in May 1912, I structured
the text on the three planes. The first plane is of the
international context within the epoque, of the
relations between the European powers, Russia and
the dynamic balance of forces in the South-Eastern
Europe. The second plan is an introspective approach
into mode in which is gradually structured the
Romanian politics in the early twentieth century and
not the least cause tensions that appear now. The third
plan has in the centre of attention the main elements
of political and cultural life in Bessarabia after 1900
and with the main focuse on the transformations that
have taken place in the process of Russification.
In 1912 some representatives of the political class
in Bucharest gave the expression of awareness by
towards its real status, beyond speeches and public
interventions. Romanian public manifestations
of discontent regarding the actions of the Tsarist
government in Chisinau prepared for the spring of
1912 was no haphazard. It appears from an increased
interest of Romanian society to the politics and culture
in Bessarabia, clearly manifested at the beginning of
the twentieth century.
In the meantime, the spring of 1912 brought to
Iasi the first preparations of protest, that auctioned in
May of the same year. Romanian state reaction to what
would happen in Chisinau on May 16 and general
concern to elude the suspicions from the neighbours,
not to take any action that could be considered as
provocation, certainly, has several explanations. For
king Charles I as political and diplomatic experience,
it was hard to believe that he did not even understood
the arrangements, in March 1912 between Bulgaria
and Serbia, through which two countries obliged
themselves to offer dual help in the case of an attack
on one of them from Romania or Austria-Hungary.
Without diplomatic tensions hitherto existed between
Romania and Serbia, enabled its availability of the
latter, actually assumed by the military convention
signed on April 29, 1912, with Bulgaria, through
which committed them to provide support in the case
of an attack from Romania certainly was considered
surprising. In equal possibility of a shift of forces in
the Balkans became more and more likely to happen.
In wake of such a deployment of forces it is normal
to put a question; namely whether the caused concerns
provoked by the celebrations and counterfestival
celebrations of May 16 were exaggerated or not Our
tendency is to give a negative response taking into
consideration that in a short while after the consuming
of the Bassarabian episode appeared a story according
to which the ministry of war gathered more troops
in garrison in Iasi and a number of newspaper Jubilee
“Besarabscaia Jizni” from Chisinau pointed out to
the public tsarist one. The security aspect enforced by
the newspaper’s filo-Russian orientation, at the social
instability from Romania could not scare, but only
irritate a government in serious offensive since the
beginning of the XX century.
Looked at as from a wider perspective, the public
commemorations, like anniversaries or Jubilees,
from the Romanian society, caused numerous
disputes, generated first of all by the desire of every
leading political group or leader to transform the
manifestations into personal capital of image. This
the reason why from a well-known pattern of the
organizers (the party in power at that time) tried
to make a big symbolic link to that event, while
others were mainly preoccupied to find numerous
malfunctions of organization or if it was possible, as in
1912, to try misappropriate the main event.
The steady attitude of Romanians in the spring of
1912, in a moment when the eastern part of the Prut
River marked the annexation of Bessarabia by the
Russians, obviously represented a clear awareness that
the political and military potential of Romania had to
imply a greater caution in reporting the neighbouring
powers. Beyond expectations, the protest action of
Romanians from the Kingdom, had taken the form
of cultural meetings and actions that had some form
of recollections and also was a certain maturing
and also an expression of a society which began to
understand that beyond the normal disappointments
in front of the will of Great Powers, a nation as was the
Romanian remained not so many options. Evoked at
just only a week after protests against the annexation
of Bessarabia, in Iasi, through the personality of Al. I.
Cuza, the inauguration of the statue of former ruler
definitely had a role of encouragement of an entire the
nation.
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