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Acad. Nicolae Dabija, in short: Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu showed that in 1230, there had been a compact Romanian population
in Podolia Volnâi, called the Land of the Bolohoveni. In 1849, this population was still compact, counting approximately
500,000 members. This north-eastern branch was mostly assimilated, but further south, the natives’ fate was another.
Up until the sixteenth century, Lithuania ruled the region east of the Dniester, north of Dubăsari, and the Nogai Tatars
plundered in the south, but the population was Romanian... Moreover, a series of travellers, geographers and prelates who
passed through the area, such as Gian Lorenzo D’Anania, Giovanni Botero, or Nicolo Barsi, testified on Romanian ethnic
character of this territory, in books published long before the Empire of the Russians crossed the Bug in 1792.
At that time, the Ukrainians lived in bends of the Dnieper, but one of the major bends of the Dnieper is called “Voloschi”,
meaning “Moldovan.”
Transnistria part of Moldavia in XVII century
In 1455, the city of Lerici, at the mouth of the Dnieper, flew the buffalo head, and the merchants paid customs fees to the rulers of Moldova. It is therefore not surprising that in 1679 Voivode Duca was the ruler of Moldova and the hetman of the Cossacks. A series of medieval documents attests the donations the rulers of Moldavia made to their subjects for services rendered, in this part of the Land of Moldavia from across the Dniester. After the Russo-Turkish War of 1735-1739, the peace treaty between the two powers was entitled “Statute for the Establishment, by Russia and Turkey, of Moldova’s Border on the Bug,” a treaty concluded on 12 September 1740. In 1766, the Russian government sent the Cossack Andrei Konstantinov scouting beyond the Bug. He showed that he had not found any Russian subject and had only heard Moldovan and Tatar spoken... When the Tsarist Empire crossed the Bug in 1792, the boroughs in Transnistria were Balta, Nani, Ocna, Bîrzu, Movilău, Moldovca, Dubăsari, Suclea, Rîmniţa, Moldovanca, Oceac, etc. The Russian Proto-hierarch Lebentiev in his The Ukraine of the Khan, published at Cherson in 1860, also admitted that the Moldovans were the most ancient in those places. The same thing was acknowledged in the Great Russian Encyclopaedia of the previous century. The Soviet linguist Serghieski recognised, in 1936, that the Romanians and the Ukrainians occupied these places at the same time, “if the Romanians were not there sooner.” With the revolutionary movements of 1917, the Transnistrian Moldovans began to organise themselves, at their congress of 17-18 December 1917, held in Odessa, demanding the “joining together of Transnistria and Bessarabia.” What was demanded at that congress was also demanded in Chişinău in 1989 (!): the school, the liturgy and the trials should be conducted in Romanian, and the Latin alphabet should be used... The most undeniable proof of the Romanian character of the territory between the Dniester and the Bug is created by the Soviets, on 12 October 1924, of the Autonomous Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic, with its capital at Balta. This republic included within its borders half of the over a million Romanians between the Dniester and the Bug. The surface of this republic was 7,516 square kilometres and was organised in 11 raions. It is very interesting that at the time, these Romanians were allowed to use the Latin script. A Congress of the Soviets from the Republic demanded the occupation of Moldova and the formation of a Moldovan state with its capital in Balta, which indicates, in fact, once again, the Romanian ethnic character of this province. After 1940, Stalin dismantled both Bessarabia, which lost the counties Bolgrad, Izmail, Cetatea Albă, and Hotin, and the Moldavian ASSR, which lost the raions Cruti, Balta, Bîrzu, Ocna and Nani in favour of RSS Ukraine.
The Russians in Moldavia: murders and deportations
acasa-Texts and maps about Transnistria
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