Background
See also: History of Moldova and Union of Bessarabia with RomaniaBessarabia had been part of the Principality of Moldavia until it was annexed by the Russian Empire in 1812. During the Russian Revolution of 1917, a newly formed Parliament (Sfatul Țării) declared Bessarabia's autonomy inside a Russian state. In 1918, after the Romanian army entered Bessarabia, the makeshift parliament decided on independence, only to review its position and ultimately decide on a conditional union with Romania. The conditions, including the provisions for autonomy, were ultimately dropped.
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 strongly promoted the Moldovan ethnic identity, against other opinions that viewed all speakers of the Romanian language as part of a single ethnic group, taking advantage of the incomplete integration of Bessarabia into the interwar Romania.
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 reformed Russian Cyrillic, rather than the obsolete Romanian Cyrillic that ceased to be used in the 19th century in the Old Kingdom and 1917 in Bessarabia.
Read more about this topic: Movement For The Unification Of Romania And Moldova
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