Moldovans - Identity in The Historical Principality of Moldova

Identity in The Historical Principality of Moldova

According to Miron Costin, a prominent chronicler from the 17th century Moldavia, the inhabitants of the Principality of Moldavia spoke Romanian and called themselves "Moldovans", but also "Romanians" which, he notes, comes from "romanus". Also, the Slavic neighbours called Moldovans "Vlachs" or "Volokhs", a term equally used to refer to all native Romance speakers from Eastern Europe and the Balkan peninsula.

As the ethnonym "Romanian" was gaining more and more popularity throughout the West Moldavia and Bukovina during the 19th century, its dissemination in Bessarabia, a more backward and rural province of the Russian Empire at the time, was welcomed mostly by the Romanian-oriented intellectuals, while the majority of the rural population continued to use the old self-identification "Moldovans".

Until the 1920s, historians generally considered Moldovans as a subgroup of the Romanian ethnos. After 1924, within the newly created Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, Soviet authorities supported the creation of a different standardized language (see Moldovan language) to prove that Moldovans form a separate ethnic group.

If in the past, the term "Moldovan" has been used to refer to the population of the historical Principality of Moldavia. However, for the inhabitants of Bessarabia living under the Russian rule, the term gained an ethnic connotation by the beginning 20th century: in May 1917, at a congress of Bessarabian teachers, a dispute arose over the identification of the native population; a group protested against being called "Romanians", affirming they were "Moldovan", while another group, led by the poet Alexei Mateevici, supported the view that the Moldovans are also Romanians.

In 1918, Bessarabia joined the Kingdom of Romania, following a vote of Sfatul Ţării. The circumstance of the vote was itself complex, since the Romanian troops were present in Bessarabia at the request of the Sfatul Ţării as it was facing exterior threats and anarchy. By the time of the union, the largely illiterate Romanian-speaking peasants of Bessarabia did not consider themselves part of a larger Romanian nation, and there was no mass nationalist movement as in other regions, such as Transylvania. The unified Romanian state promoted a common identity for all its Romanian-speaking inhabitants. Owing partly to its relative underdevelopment compared to other regions of Greater Romania, as well as to the low competence and corruption of the new Romanian administration in this province, the integration process of Bessarabia in the unified Romanian state was less successful than in other regions and was soon to be disrupted by the Soviet occupation.

In 1940, during World War II, Romania agreed to an ultimatum and ceded the region to the Soviet Union, which organized it into the Moldavian SSR. The Soviets began a campaign to strengthen the Moldovan identity different from that of the rest of Romanian speakers, taking advantage of the incomplete integration of the Bessarabia into the interwar Romania (see also Moldovenism). The official Soviet policy also stated that Romanian and Moldovan were two different languages and, to emphasize this distinction, Moldovan had to be written in a new Cyrillic alphabet (the Moldovan alphabet) based on the Russian Cyrillic, rather than the older Romanian Cyrillic that ceased to be used in the 19th century in the Old Kingdom and 1917 in Bessarabia.