Moldova's history: two centuries of arguing over one language's name

How the Principality of Moldavia came to exist

People were on this land long before any state. Oldowan flint tools found at Dubăsari on the lower Dniester in 2010 are dated to between 800,000 and 1.2 million years old, and the Cucuteni-Trypillian culture, dated to about 5500 to 2750 BC, farmed, fired pottery in kilns and built large settlements across the region. In recorded antiquity the territory was held by a succession of peoples, among them Scythians, Sarmatians and Bastarnae, while the south was intermittently under Roman and then Byzantine rule between the 1st and 7th centuries. Goths, Huns, Avars, Magyars, Pechenegs, Cumans and Mongols all crossed it, and the Golden Horde ruled it from 1241 into the early 14th century.

The state whose name the republic carries was founded by Vlach nobles from Maramureș. Dragoș was sent by the Hungarian king in 1343, or in 1285 by other accounts, to guard the kingdom's frontier against the Tatars. Bogdan I of Cuhea rejected Hungarian authority in 1359 and became the first independent prince. The principality took its name from the Moldova River, and a legend recorded by the chroniclers Grigore Ureche and Dimitrie Cantemir says Dragoș named the river after his hound Molda, which drowned there at the end of an aurochs hunt. At its widest Moldavia ran from the Carpathians to the Dniester and took in the present republic, the eastern 8 of Romania's 41 counties, the Chernivtsi oblast and the Budjak in Ukraine. Turkic documents called it Kara-Boğdan, Black Bogdan.

Stephen the Great ruled from 1457 to 1504. He defeated an Ottoman army at Vaslui in 1475 and a Polish invasion in the Cosmin Forest in 1497, and he required every farmer and villager to bear arms; the levy called the Large Host could reach 40,000 men. He also lost the two Budjak fortresses, Chilia and Cetatea Albă, to the Ottomans in 1484, and accepted Ottoman suzerainty in 1498. From 1538 Moldavia was an Ottoman vassal. It kept internal autonomy, Turks were forbidden to own land or build religious houses there, and the share of revenue owed to the Porte rose in time to 10%.

Dimitrie Cantemir, prince and scholar, sided with Peter the Great in the war of 1710 to 1711 and was defeated at Stănilești. His Descriptio Moldaviae, written between 1714 and 1716, is the source of the hound legend. After his defeat the Ottomans stopped recognising local choices of prince and appointed their own, the arrangement known as the Phanariote system.

Why Russia annexed the eastern half of Moldavia

Russia occupied Moldavia five times between 1711 and 1812, according to Britannica. The Habsburg monarchy took about 11% of the principality's territory in 1775, which became Bukovina. The larger loss came at the end of the Russo-Turkish War of 1806 to 1812: by the Treaty of Bucharest of 28 May 1812 the Ottoman Empire ceded the land between the Prut and the Dniester, roughly half of Moldavia, to the Russian Empire.

The name the annexed land received was older than the annexation. Until 1812 "Bessarabia" meant only the southern strip between the Danube, the Dniester and the Black Sea, probably named after the Wallachian Basarab dynasty. Russia applied it to the whole eastern half, and the Prut became a frontier inside what had been one principality.

The two halves then went separate ways. Western Moldavia united with Wallachia in 1859, and the joint state proclaimed its independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1877 as Romania. Britannica notes that this was accompanied by a conversion from the Cyrillic alphabet to the Latin. Bessarabia, on the Russian side of the river, kept Cyrillic. The same language was from then on written in two scripts on either bank of one river, and the present argument over what to call it begins there.

What tsarist rule did to the language of Bessarabia

Russian rule began gently. Bessarabia had local autonomy until 1828, a Moldavian boyar, Scarlat Sturdza, led its civil administration, and a Moldavian archbishop, Gavriil Bănulescu-Bodoni, its church. In 1828 Nicholas I abolished the settlement and gave the governor general supreme power, and Article 63 of the new regulation required all administrative personnel to work in Russian. Romanian still appeared occasionally in official documents up to 1854.

In 1835 the tsarist authorities set a seven-year deadline to move education from Romanian to Russian, and from 1867 Romanian was purged from education entirely. In the church, Archbishop Pavel Lebedev, who held the see from 1871 to 1882, closed the printing press in Chișinău and collected and burned the books already printed in Romanian, which were in Cyrillic letters. A later archbishop persuaded the Russian synod in 1900 to allow religious pamphlets in Romanian, and from 1908 the church journal Luminătorul appeared in the language.

The result shows in the figures for 1912. Of the 1,709 primary schools in Bessarabia that year, none taught in the language of the largest ethnic group, and the literacy rate among Moldavians was 10.5%, and 1.7% among Moldavian women.

The population changed underneath the policy. After 1812 the Russian authorities expelled the Nogai Tatars of the Budjak and settled the land with Moldavians, Bulgarians, Gagauz, Ukrainians, Germans and Russian veterans. Bessarabian Germans numbered 42,216 by 1856, and Bulgarians and Gagauz 115,000 in 43 localities by the same year. The imperial census of 1897 counted about 50,000 Jews in Kishinev, 46% of a city of about 110,000, and the city's Jews suffered pogroms in 1903 and 1905. The Moldavian share of the region is itself disputed: official statistics gave speakers of Moldovan and Romanian as 47.8% in 1897, while the Romanian historian Ion Nistor argued in the 1920s that Moldavians had made up 86% at the start of Russian rule.

How Bessarabia voted to join Romania

A national movement grew after the Russian Revolution of 1905, and Britannica attributes its strength to schoolteachers and parish priests more than to the largely Russified boyars. In April 1917 the National Moldavian Committee demanded autonomy, land reform and the use of the Romanian language, and claimed the same rights for about 400,000 Moldavians living east of the Dniester.

A council called Sfatul Țării, with 120 members chosen by county meetings of peasants and by political and professional organisations, proclaimed the Moldavian Democratic Republic on 15 December 1917 as part of the Russian Republic. Romanian troops entered Bessarabia on 26 January 1918. Romanian historiography generally holds that they came at the council's request; the council's president, Ion Inculeț, and the head of the provisional executive, Pantelimon Erhan, protested their presence. The council declared independence on 6 February 1918, and on 9 April it voted for conditional union with Romania by 86 votes to 3, with 36 abstentions. The conditions, which included autonomy and land reform, were dropped in December 1918 at a session attended by 44 of 125 members, or 48 of 160 by other counts, and some have judged that vote illegitimate for lack of a quorum.

Britain, France, Italy and Japan signed a treaty recognising the union on 28 October 1920, and Japan never ratified it. Soviet Russia never recognised the union. In 1924 the Soviet government created the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic on Ukrainian land east of the Dniester, with a population only 30% ethnic Romanian, and moved its capital from Balta to Tiraspol in 1929.

Under Romanian administration Bessarabia stayed rural and poor. About 87% of its people lived in the countryside, and a land reform capped holdings at 100 hectares. Literacy rose from 15.6% in 1897 to 37% by 1930, against a national rate of 60% in the same period. The language was now written in Latin letters, and a Romanianisation programme closed minority schools and cultural institutions across the province.

How the Soviet Union built a Moldavian republic

The secret protocol of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 placed Bessarabia in the Soviet sphere. A Soviet ultimatum of 26 June 1940 demanded it, Romania gave way, and Soviet troops crossed the Dniester on 28 June. The Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic created on 2 August 1940 did not follow Bessarabia's historic border. It joined six and a half Bessarabian counties to the western strip of the old autonomous republic east of the Dniester, and handed the north around Hotin and the southern districts along the Danube and the Black Sea to Soviet Ukraine. That transfer is why the present republic has no sea coast.

About 90,000 people in the annexed territories were arrested, deported or executed in 1940 and 1941, and 19,000 were deported from the Moldavian SSR on 12 and 13 June 1941 alone. Romania retook the region as Germany's ally in July 1941, and Romanian forces, working with the Germans, deported about 147,000 Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina to Transnistria, of whom more than 90,000 died. Soviet troops entered Kishinev on 24 August 1944, and the Paris peace treaty of February 1947 fixed the border of June 1940.

A famine in 1946 and 1947 killed at least 115,000 peasants. Its causes are argued over: the historian Charles King found no evidence that requisitioning was aimed at Moldavians, and the sources name the drought of 1946 and delivery quotas. On 5 and 6 July 1949 another 35,000 people were deported, and on the night of 31 March 1951 a further 2,617 people, mostly Jehovah's Witnesses.

Soviet policy held that Moldavians were a separate people with a separate language. From the early 1950s the written standard was literary Romanian in Cyrillic letters, with technical terms taken from Russian, and Russian was required for any leadership post. Only 14% of the republic's political leaders were ethnic Moldavians in 1946. When Nicolae Ceaușescu visited in August 1976, Leonid Brezhnev later told him he had seen for himself that the Moldavians had their own language. Ceaușescu's reply, as recorded: "Yes, I did, but they spoke with me in Romanian."

The republic was built to farm. Between 1940 and 1991, with 0.2% of Soviet territory, it produced 8.2% of Soviet wine and 12.3% of its fruit, while Transnistria, with about 15% of the republic's population, produced 40% of its GDP and 90% of its electricity.

How an alphabet law ended Soviet Moldavia

The national movement of the late 1980s was about language before it was about independence. The Popular Front of Moldova, formed in 1989, organised mass demonstrations, and on 31 August 1989 the Supreme Soviet made Moldovan the official language of the republic and returned it to the Latin alphabet. The date is still a public holiday.

The law divided the republic. Slavic minorities in Transnistria had formed the Yedinstvo-Unitatea movement in 1988, and the Gagauz, a Turkic-speaking minority in the south, organised as Gagauz Halkı in November 1989. The Popular Front won the elections of 25 February 1990. In June 1990 the republic was renamed the Soviet Socialist Republic of Moldova and declared sovereign on 23 June; the Romanian tricolour with the Moldavian coat of arms became its flag and the Romanian anthem Deșteaptă-te, române! its anthem. Moldova boycotted the Soviet referendum of 17 March 1991 and took the name Republic of Moldova on 23 May 1991.

After the failed Moscow coup in August 1991, parliament declared independence on 27 August 1991. The Declaration of Independence named the state language as Romanian, denounced the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and declared the Soviet law of 2 August 1940 that created the Moldavian SSR null and void. Moldova was recognised at the United Nations on 2 March 1992.

Why Transnistria broke away and stayed apart

Transnistria, the strip east of the Dniester, was the part of the Soviet republic that had never belonged to Bessarabia. In 1989 Russians and Ukrainians made up 51% of its population and Moldovans 40%, and the headquarters of the Soviet 14th Guards Army sat in Tiraspol. On 2 September 1990 local authorities there proclaimed the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic, citing fear of Moldovan nationalism and of union with Romania. The Gagauz had declared their own republic in the south on 19 August 1990.

Fighting began when Moldovan police tried to take government buildings in Transnistria, and escalated into war between 2 March and 26 July 1992. The Russian 14th Army intervened on the separatist side in June, and an agreement signed on 21 July 1992 ended the fighting and set up the Joint Control Commission, a peacekeeping force of 5,500 Moldovan, Transnistrian and Russian personnel. The OSCE opened its Mission to Moldova on 4 February 1993 to work toward a settlement.

The two sides read the same documents differently. Transnistria's advocates argue that the 1940 Soviet law was the only legal act binding the left bank to Moldova, so the declaration that annulled it left no basis for Moldova's claim. Moldova's position, and that of the OSCE's participating states, is a settlement within Moldova's internationally recognised borders with a special status for Transnistria. In November 2003 Moldova rejected a Russian federalisation plan that would have kept Russian troops in the country for 20 years. About 1,400 Russian troops were stationed in Transnistria in March 2022, and the territory never adopted the Latin script of 1989.

In the south, parliament passed the special legal status of Gagauzia on 23 December 1994, and the autonomy was constituted in 1995.

How parliament and the courts renamed the language

The first years of independence turned away from Romania. The Agrarian Democratic Party won the elections of February 1994 against both the unionist and the pro-Russian parties, voters backed continued independence in March, and an ideology called Moldovanism, which stresses the country's distinctiveness from Romania, gained ground. The constitution ratified on 28 July 1994 reads, in its English translation, "The State language in the Republic of Moldova is the Moldavian language, and its writing is based on the Latin alphabet". It also proclaimed permanent neutrality, and the anthem was changed to Limba noastră, "Our Language".

In the elections of 25 February 2001 the Party of Communists won 49.9% of the vote and 71 of 101 seats. In March and April 2002 the opposition Christian-Democratic People's Party led mass protests in Chișinău against a plan to make Russian a second state language with compulsory study in schools, and the government withdrew the plan. In April 2009 protests against a Communist election victory ended with the parliament building broken into and set on fire.

On 5 December 2013 the Constitutional Court ruled that the Declaration of Independence was part of the constitution and prevailed over it where the two texts differed, so the Romanian of 1991 outranked the Moldovan of 1994. Parliament took almost ten years to act on the ruling. On 16 March 2023 it passed Law No. 52 with 58 votes out of 101, replacing "Moldovan language" with "Romanian language" in the constitution and every other law and declaring obsolete the clause about the Latin alphabet; the law came into force on 15 April 2023 and renamed the 31 August holiday from "Limba noastră" to "Limba română". Critics argued that the law amended the constitution without following the procedure for amendments, and the government described it as a technical measure implementing the court's decision.

The census of 2024 left the choice to respondents. Asked to name their language, 49.2% gave Moldovan and 31.3% gave Romanian.

How Moldova turned toward the European Union

After the federalisation plan was refused in November 2003, Moldovan policy moved toward the European Union. Russia stopped gas shipments and banned Moldovan wine in 2006, and banned the wine again in 2013. Romania joined the European Union in 2007 and began granting citizenship to Moldovans who applied for it. The Moldovan parliament ratified an association agreement with the EU in July 2014. In 2015 it emerged that about $1 billion, roughly 15% of GDP, had disappeared from Moldovan banks through a series of loans, and two governments fell within a year.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 hastened the process. Moldova applied for membership on 3 March 2022 and the European Council granted it candidate status on 23 June 2022. EU leaders decided in December 2023 to open accession negotiations, the Council approved the negotiating framework on 21 June 2024, and the first intergovernmental conference was held on 25 June 2024.

On 20 October 2024 a referendum asked whether to write the goal of EU membership into the constitution. It passed with 50.17% voting yes, amid allegations of outside interference and claims of vote manipulation. Article 11 of the constitution still proclaims the country's permanent neutrality, and that article can be revised only by a referendum carried by a majority of registered voters.