TIRASPOL (Tiraspol Times) - On 27 August 1991, a new state was created in Chisinau. On that day, for the first time ever in history, the independent "Republic of Moldova" was formed. It was created by a unilateral declaration of independence which proclaimed the right of self-determination and declared that -

The Republic of Moldova is a sovereign, independent and democratic state, free to decide its present and future, without any external interference, keeping with the ideals and aspirations of the people within its historical and ethnic area of its national making.

The new country which was born on that August day in 1991 claimed the territory of the people "within its historical and ethnic area." But for more than 5,000 years, the Dniester river stood as an international and ethnic border. It separated civilizations and cultures throughout history, and represented the border of the historical and ethnic area for what is now known as the people of Moldova.

The notable exception being fifty years between 1940 and 1990 period, this is also the case today. The Dniester forms the border between Moldova, in the west, and independent but unrecognized Pridnestrovie (also known as Transdniester) in the east.

Moldova still pursues a territorial claim on Pridnestrovie. But the people of Pridnestrovie point to Moldova's own 1991 declaration of independence to show that this claim is invalid. In its text, Moldova speaks of the new republic's area as being the "historical and ethnic area". But, say historians at the Tiraspol State University, "this area ends at the Dniester. And historically, that has always been the case."

Do the facts in the case support that? A look back in time will offer an answer...

3000 BC: Tripolye's never crossed the Dniester

The first recorded settlers in Pridnestrovie belonged to the Tripolye culture. It was a late Neolithic archaeological culture that flourished ca. 4500 BC to 3000 BC. It was a neolithic culture in the Dniester to Dnieper region, and it never crossed the river into what is today Moldova. The Dniester marked the border at the time.

In the Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture, James "JP" Mallory (an Irish-American archaeologist and Indo-Europeanist) reports that the "culture is attested from well over a thousand sites in the form of everything from small villages to vast settlements comprised of hundreds of dwellings surrounded by multiple ditches."
Mallory, a professor at the Queen's University, Belfast, is the world's top living specialist on early settlements along the Dniester river.

The Tripolye culture was centered on the middle to upper Dniester River, in the Kamenka region of northern Pridnestrovie, with an extension in the northeast to as far as the Dnieper river.

An urban culture was later present, considered by experts to have been the first in Europe. Agriculture was attested, as well as livestock-raising, cattle mainly, but goats/sheep and swine were also evidenced. No signs of the culture have been found on the other side of the Dniester, in what is today Moldova. Five thousand years ago, just as today, the Dniester river formed a clear and natural border.

Slavic and Celtic common roots

In what is today Pridnestrovie, linguists find evidence of very ancient Slavic "hydronyms" or river names.

Stelae, stone icons, of early Slavic deities are native to the area. There are some thirty sites of the middle Dniester region where such anthropomorphic idols were found, according to D. Ya Telegin, the author of "The Anthropomorphic Stelae of the Ukraine", a comprehensive reference work published in 1994 and covering stone icons from both Ukraine and Pridnestrovie.

No such Stelae exist in Moldova, testifying to the fact that the Dniester formed an effective and natural border between two separate peoples, cultures, languages and religious entities.

The Slavic deities are closely tied to Celtic deities. In Irish mythology, Danu or Dana was the mother goddess of the Tuatha Dé Danann (peoples of the goddess Danu). Her Welsh equivalent is Dôn. Based on the evidence of place-names, such as the river Danube, Dniester, Dnieper and Don, she may have been worshipped throughout the Celtic world. Indeed, the presence of a goddess named Danu in Hindu mythology, associated with water and mother of a race of Asuras called the Danavas, may also indicate a very ancient Proto-Indo-European origin for this figure.

The Proto-Celtic language, also called Common Celtic, is the putative ancestor of all the known Celtic languages. Spoken around 800 BC, its lexis can be confidently reconstructed on the basis of the comparative method of historical linguistics. Proto-Celtic is a direct daughter-language o Proto-Indo-European.

From roughly 800 BC, this culture - by influence of "Thraco-Cimmerian" elements - introduced the Iron Age to Europe.

Two separate cultures, divided by the Dniester

Cimmerians, mostly equestrian nomads, inhabited the land between the Dniester (Tyras) and Don (Tanais) rivers in the 8th and 7th century BC. They are described by Herodotus and also in Book 11 of Homer's ''Odessey''.

In what is today Pridnestrovie, the Chernoles culture flourished at that time, thanks to Cimmerians. The Chernoles culture was an Iron Age archaeological unit dating ca. 750–200 BC. The most interesting thing about this culture is that it is a viable candidate for being the place where the Proto-Slavic language coalesced. It did not cross the Dniester.

On the other side of the Dniester River, the Basarabi culture was an archeological culture in Romania, also dated between 8th - 7th centuries BC. This Basarabi culture was present over much of Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Voivodina, and central Moldavia up to the Dniester River until approximately 650 BC.

In the 4th century BC, both nomadic and agricultural Scythians increased in population on the left bank of the Dniester. Herodotus (in Book IV, 17) specifically mentions Scythian farmers in the area and highlights the Dniester (Latin: Tyras) as one of the rivers of Scythia. No Scythian civilization has been recorded in the area which is today Moldova, thanks to the separation of the Dniester river and its status - even 2,400 years ago - as an effective and natural international border.

Dacians on one side, Slavs on the other

Dacia (the "land of the Daci") was also called Getae by the ancient Greeks. It existed on the other side of the river, and was the forerunner of today's Romania and Moldova. Dacia had clearly marked borders: It was bounded on the north by the Carpathians, on the south by the Danube, on the west by the Tisza River, on the east by the Dniester river. At no point in time did it ever extend beyond the Dniester and it therefore never included today's Pridnestrovie.

When the Dacian Kingdom of Decebal fell to the Romans in 106, the area came under huge linguistic and cultural influence of the Roman Empire through settlement of numerous colonists and veterans of the Roman legions. Wood and mud forts of the Legio V Macedonica, employed for providing early warning and travel security, stretched all the way to the Dniester River. This Roman influence is still present in the language and ethnic makeup of the people of Moldova today. It stopped where the Roman forts stood: At the banks of the Dniester River.

The mixture of Romanized Dacians and Roman colonists that resulted is referred to by scientists as proto-Romanians, although they continued to call themselves roman, while many neighbouring (especially Slavic) nations called them Vlach.
They did not formally cross the Dniester to make the left bank part of the land that they ruled.

Instead, from approximately 300 to 376 AD, the territory of Pridnestrovie was ruled by Ermanaric, whose empire stretched south of the Pripet Marshes between the Don and Dniester rivers. Ermanaric respected the natural border provided by the Dniester and did not rule over any of the territory which is today Moldova.

East Slavs settle in Pridnestrovie: 600 AD

By 600 AD, the so-called East Slavs settled along the Dnieper river in what is now Ukraine; they then spread westward to the basins of the northern Dniester and the Southern Buh (Bug river). Since then, the land which is today Pridnestrovie has been part of a larger Slavic nation. While international borders kept changing, the core Slav element was almost dominant in the population. There was immigration and population movements over time, but since the year 600 AD, Slavs have almost been an absolute majority in the region.

This old Slavic land was settled by the Slav tribe of the Tivertsi. According to the Laurentian Codex, they inhabited the land all along the Dniester river until they were formally brought into the first Russian kingdom, Kievan Rus'. All Slav, there were no Romanian inhabitants at the time.

For a just before the first millenium, the land which is now Pridnestrovie was included in the early "Old Russia", Kievan Rus', under the rule of Volodymyr the Great. It was brought into Kievan Rus' during the reign of Svyatoslav I.

Later, in 1261, Cossacks lived in the area between the rivers Dniester and the Volga as described for the first time in Russian chronicles and in accounts by Byzantine, Iranian and Arab historians of the time, as documented in the "History of the Cossacks" by Vasili Glazkov. The Cossacks were unique to this side of the Dniester. They did not enter Moldova.

After Kievan Rus' and the cossacks, Pridnestrovie passed to the Slav kingdom of Halych-Volhynia until the fourteenth century, when the northern part became and the south merged with Yedisan, of Crimea. Halych-Volhynia was the major Eastern Slavic power after Kievan Rus'.

The Principality of Moldavia (''Moldova'', in Romanian) was a Romanian Vlach state founded in the 14th century by two noble Vlachs from Maramureş: Dragoş and Bogdan. The Principality of Moldavia in its greatest extent stretched its realm from north of Transylvania's Carpathian Mountains in the west to the Dniester River in the east. It never included any land on Pridnestrovie's side of the Dniester.

In the 1360s, the area came under the rule of Wallachia's princes of the House of Basarab for whom the region was named Bessarabia and remained so up until the reign of Mircea the Elder of Wallachia. As Roman I (Prince of Moldavia, 1391-1394) secured his eastern border along the Dniester by 1392, Mircea the Elder ceded the area to the Principality of Moldavia.

The Principality of Moldavia was the first time in history that Moldova existed as a sovereign state. It did not include Pridnestrovie or any other land on east of the Dniester at any time in history.

In 1470, in the Battle of Lipnic, Moldavia was attacked by the southern part of Pridnestrovie, then under the rule of the Volga Tatars of the so-called Golden Horde. They crossed the Dniester River which separated the two cultures, but once the invaders came to Moldavia they were fought back and had to retreat again to their homeland back on the other side of the Dniester.

Bogdan cel Chior, or "Bogdan the One-Eyed", was Voivode (Prince) of Moldavia between 1504 and 1517. In the first few years of his rule, he wanted to expand Moldavia beyond its border on the Dniester, and wanted a slice of northern Pridnestrovie which at the time was part of Poland. But in October 1509, Bogdan was severely defeated on the Dniester river. A peace was signed on January 17, 1510, when the ruler finally renounced his pretensions.

Under formal Russian rule

By then, Slavs had already lived in Pridnestrovie for nearly 1,000 years. After the time of the Cossacks, fellow Slavs from Poland had ruled much of the area. The Romanians were newcomers to the area, later arrivals who came to the land as immigrants after it was already populated. The original inhabitants are Slavs.

The land had never been under Moldovan rule and it was in its majority inhabited by Slavs, including a large and fast growing number of Ukrainian peasants; the largest ethnic group in Pridnestrovie in the 18th century.

In 1738, in the Russo–Turkish War of 1735-1739, the Dniester was the frontline. Russian forces failed to cross the Dniester that year.

The 1792 Treaty of Jassy recognized Russia's 1783 annexation of the Crimean Khanate and transferred Yedisan, then the ruler of southern Pridnestrovie, to Russia. This made the Dniester the Russo-Turkish frontier in Europe.

It was also the first time in history that Russia formally established its boundary along the Dniester in the immediate vicinity of Moldavia. At that time, Moldavia had been in existence for almost five hundred years and her eastern boundary had been the Dniester for all this time.

Pridnestrovie, or Transnistria as it is called in Romanian, had never been considered a natural part of Bessarabia or even a Greater Romania for that matter. When Romania considered an invasion as part of World War II, two preeminent Romanian political figures of the time, Iuliu Maniu and Dinu Brătianu declared that "the Romanian people will never consent to the continuation of the struggle beyond our national borders."

Even at the height of Romanian nationalism, the Dniester River was always clearly seen as the eastern boundary of the Romanian lands. In a show of national sentiment, Mihai Eminescu, probably the best-known and most influential Romanian poet penned the famous poem "Doina". In it, he speaks of a Greater Romania stretching "from the Dniester to the Tisza", naming the two rivers which in traditional Romanian thought have always been considered the nation's coordinates: Its far eastern and western boundaries.

Forced union with Moldova: An act of war

Historically, Moldavia always extended between the Carpathian Mountains (the historical border with Transylvania) and the Dniester River.

So how, ask the people in Pridnestrovie, can Moldova all of a sudden try to lay claim to the area on the left bank of the Dniester? East of the Dniester was never part of the traditional historical and ethnic area which was claimed in Moldova's own 1991 declaration of independence. And if the declaration limits itself to the traditional historic and ethnic lands, why doesn't Moldova simply stay on its own side of the river? And let Pridnestrovie live in freedom and independence in its own traditionally, historic Slavic land?

For the answer, like the answer to many other of history's wrongs, turn to Stalin. One of the past century's most bloody dictators, the Soviet mad-man teamed up with equally brutal Adolf Hitler to carve up small states in Europe between them. In 1939, just before World War II, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was signed with a secret protocol dividing Romania (and much of the rest of Europe) between dictators Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin. A year later, in 1940, the area of Bessarabia (today's Moldova) was invaded by Soviet troops and forcibly proclaimed as the “Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic” (MSSR); as a merger between Moldova and Pridnestrovie.

In one cruel move, Pridnestrovie fell into an artificial union with Moldova as a victim of World War II: a small country caught between two of the most ruthless dictators in history.

For nearly fifty years under the rule of the Soviet Union, the artificial union under MSSR never took root or managed to blend the two distinct nationalities from which is was created. Although Stalin's Soviet dictatorship tried, it never managed to crush the separate national identities of these two ethnically and historically different areas.

Upon independence in 1990 (for Pridnestrovie) and 1991 (for Moldova), the two countries were still as different as they had always been. Moldova, with its Romanian language and its ties to Romania, on one side of the Dniester. And on the other side of the Dniester, the mostly Russian-speaking Pridnestrovie with its Slav majority.

One of the longest existing international borders in Europe restored

By force, and as an act of war, the two distinct lands of Pridnestrovie and Moldova were joined despite their will and despite the old and natural border of the Dniester River which separated them throughout millenia. In the dissolution of the Soviet Union fell, they both sought independence on their own terms. Without the need for war or use of force, they then both declared their separate independences. For Pridnestrovie, this meant restoring the Dniester river to its historical status as a one of the longest existing international borders in Europe.

When the Republic of Moldova was formed, it covered only its historical and ethnic area (to quote from its own declaration of independence). At the time of its creation, Pridnestrovie's own independence declaration - unrecognized by the rest of the world - was already a year old. No one asked the people of Pridnestrovie, in a referendum or otherwise, if they wanted to be part of Moldova. But later that same year, a referendum held December 1991, gave the answer: It was a resounding 'No' to union with Moldova, and a clear yes for independent statehood for Pridnestrovie. Similar results were repeated in another independence referendum held on fifteen years later, 17 September 2006.

Today, historians at the Tiraspol State University point out that it would be a travesty to demand that Pridnestrovie should be part of Moldova. That was never the case in the past. To insist that it should be the case in the future would be to uphold the worst of Stalin's World War II legacy - a brutal reminder of a time which ended for good when the Soviet Union fell and when this part of Europe once again emerged into freedom and democracy.

On the web:
» Republic of Moldova's independence declaration (27 August 1991) [1]
» History of Pridnestrovie [2]