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The frontier: As a natural border, the Dniester river has always represented the furthest reach of any Moldovan state in history

CHISINAU (Tiraspol Times) - One could write thousands of pages beside the ones already written on Bassarabia. The name itself can be likened to the sadness of an entire nation.

Today’s Republic of Moldova represents only a part of Romania’s historical province, from a territorial point of view, with the rest being part of Ukraine. And with the things going on in it, with the way its leadership addresses relations with Bucharest, it increasingly grows apart from what it has represented across time in the Romanian collective consciousness.

Ruler Stefan the Great (1457-1504) – admired on the other bank of the Prut River and considered in Romania one of the greatest leaders of all time in the Romanian lands – ruled over a ‘Greater’ Moldavia that stretched up to the Dniester. His frontier fortifications were not on the Prut River, as Moldovan historians know very well, but close to the Dniester River.

The subsequent history, starting with 1812 when Bassarabia entered Russian authority for the first time, is a ‘seesaw’ dance with the authority over that province taken over in turn by Romania and Russia (later the USSR), culminating with the 1940 ultimatum Moscow sent Bucharest asking it to relinquish the territory on the East bank of the Prut River.

Moldova’s Independence in 1991 seemed the start of new perspectives. Errors were committed in Chisinau as well as in Bucharest. But Mircea Snegur, the President of the Republic of Moldova at the time, and Mircea Druc, the Republic’s Premier during the same period, along with the leadership in Bucharest lost the historical chance of forging the basis of a different relationship between the two states, or the basis of a reunification.

The following 16 years have showed that the Moldavians on the other side of the Prut River were content with the victory of the Latin method of writing, with a national hymn and a flag – plus the liberty of the cult of Stefan the Great and Mihai Eminescu. These separated them from the pressures of Moscow. Otherwise, few things have changed.

See also:
» The shared - and not so shared - history of Pridnestrovie and Moldova [1]
» Moldova [2]