Moldovans

According to Miron Costin, a prominent chronicler from 17th-century Moldavia, the inhabitants of the Principality of Moldavia spoke Latin and called themselves "Moldavians", but also "Romans" (with the local form "român/râmlean") which, he notes, comes from "romanus". Also, the Slavic neighbours called Moldovans "Vlachs" or "Volokhs", a term also used to refer to all native Romance speakers from Eastern Europe and the Balkan peninsula. In 1812, the Russian Empire received the eastern half of Moldavia from the Ottoman Empire and named it Bessarabia. As the ethnonym "Romanian" was gaining more and more popularity throughout the remaining territory of 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". Some authors observe that the Russian officials also initially preferred to refer to the native inhabitants of Bessarabia as "Romanians" (or "Volochi"), but after the 1859 unification of Moldavia and Wallachia they gradually began using the term "Moldavians" for them, to justify the idea of Russifiers and Pan-Slavists to create an identity different from that of the Romanians of Western Moldavia. Historian van Meurs however indicates that some Russian official documents and scholarly studies in the 19th century actually continued to use both "Romanians" and "Moldavians" when referring to the local population, noting that the Russian policy which restricted the use of the Romanian language in Bessarabia was rather part of the general tendency of Russification and of promotion of a tsarist nationality policy as such. Van Meurs concludes that before the October Revolution the inhabitants of Bessarabia probably considered themselves "Moldavians" in a "natural, primarily local-territorial sense", and there had been no consistent government-sponsored effort to influence the local nation-building process by promoting a Moldavian identity. Likewise, historian Charles King notes that the Moldovan peasant's view of his own national identity was not the product of Russian assimilationist policies but had instead remained virtually frozen since 1812. The Romanian researcher Irina Livezeanu further notes that the Russification policies did not greatly affect the identity of the Moldavians, as their overwhelming majority were illiterate peasants. Until the 1920s, Romanian 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 the Moldovan language standards allegedly in order to prove that Moldovans form a separate ethnic group. In the past, the terms "Moldovan" or "Moldavian" have 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 of the 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 "Moldovans", while another group, led by poet Alexei Mateevici, supported the view that the Moldovans are also Romanians. In March 1918, Bessarabia (the Moldovan Democratic Republic) joined the Kingdom of Romania, following a vote of Sfatul Țării. The circumstances surrounding the vote were themselves complex, since, at the request of the Sfatul Țării, Romanian troops were present in Bessarabia, as it was facing external threats and anarchy within. (1918–1940) and the M.A.S.S.R. to the east By the time of the union, the peasants of Bessarabia, who constituted the majority of Romanian speakers in the region, clung to a Moldavian identity and did not undergo the same nation-building as the ones in Romania. Moreover, during the interwar, peasants in all regions of historical Moldavia (Bessarabia, Bukovina and Western Moldavia) where more likely to identify themselves as Moldavians than city-dwellers. Several researchers who visited the area around World War I, including the Romanian historian Ion Nistor and French geographer Emmanuel de Martonne testified that most Bessarabian peasants called themselves Moldavians. On the other hand, the small Moldavian urban elite was Russified to a large degree. Pan-Romanian nationalism was "almost wholly" imported into the region around World War I by propagandists from Transylvania, Bukovina and the Old Kingdom. The Romanian state promoted a common identity for all its 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 returned the region to the Soviet Union, which organized it into the Moldavian SSR. The Soviets began a campaign to return the Moldovan identity overt that of the rest of Romanian speakers, taking advantage of the incomplete integration of 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 Cyrillic alphabet) based on the Russian Cyrillic, rather than the older Romanian Cyrillic that ceased to be used in the 19th century in the Romanian Old Kingdom and in 1917 in Bessarabia. ==Identity politics in the Republic of Moldova==