Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic
몰다비아 자치 소비에트 사회주의 공화국
The autonomous republic created inside the Ukrainian SSR on the left bank of the Dniester on 12 October 1924. It was meant to bolster the Soviet claim to Bessarabia, lost to Romania, and to spread pro-Soviet feeling there; its official capital was the “temporarily occupied” Chișinău. It was dissolved on 2 August 1940, when the Soviet Union, having annexed Bessarabia, formed the Moldavian SSR.
In depth
In February 1924 Grigory Kotovsky and nine other Bolshevik activists, several of them from Romania, sent a memorandum to the Central Committees of the Russian and Ukrainian Communist Parties arguing that 500,000 to 800,000 Moldavians lived on the left bank of the Dniester and that a Moldavian republic would be a powerful political and propaganda factor in solving the Bessarabian question. The People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Georgy Chicherin, objected that it would only strengthen Romania’s position on Bessarabia and stir up “Romanian chauvinism”. The Politburo of the Ukrainian party counselled prudence on 7 March and on 18 April, finding the Moldavian figures inflated, judged autonomy inappropriate, but Moscow ignored it. The Russian party’s Central Committee ordered the republic’s creation on 29 July, and the All-Ukrainian Central Executive Committee enacted it on 12 October. Begun in March as an autonomous oblast of four districts, it grew to 11 districts and 7,516 km², taking in areas such as Balta, which was only 2.52% Moldavian. The provisional capital was Balta, moved to Tiraspol in 1929. In the 1926 census Moldavians made up 30.1% of the population against 48.5% Ukrainians.
The republic was industrialized quickly, but for lack of skilled labour Ukrainians and Russians migrated in from other republics; in 1928 only about 600 of 14,300 industrial workers were Moldavians. It went through a famine in 1925, and collectivization, faster than in Ukraine, was complete by summer 1931, with about 2,000 families deported to Kazakhstan. In the famine of 1932–1933 many tried to flee across the Dniester, and near Olănești on 23 February 1932 forty people were shot. The republic promoted the view that Moldavians were distinct from Romanians, creating a separate “Moldavian” standard written in Cyrillic; it switched to the Latin script in 1932 and back to Cyrillic in 1938. In the Great Purge of 1937 many intellectuals were condemned as enemies of the people or bourgeois nationalists and executed. After the Soviet occupation of Bessarabia in June 1940, the Moldavian SSR was formed on 2 August from six Bessarabian counties and the western part of the autonomous republic.