Bessarabia on the first day of the Great Union (27 March - 9 April 1918)

Strangely enough, at the beginning of the 20th century, apart from the Black Sea, Romanians had Romanian neighbours on all the borders of their country. A reality that the Gotha Almanac expressed as follows: out of a total of 11,000,000 Romanians, 6,585,347 lived in the Romanian Kingdom, 2,799,479 in Transylvania, 1,121,669 in Basarabia and 230,000 in Bucovina. In 1918, in the context of the collapse of the Tsarist and Austro-Hungarian empires, Basarabia, on 27 March/9 April, Bucovina, on 15/28 November, and Transylvania, on 18 November/1 December, were united with the motherland, the three events being recorded in historiography by the phrase Great Union.

At the beginning of 1917, 105 years after its silent incorporation into the borders of the Tsarist Empire, and two and a half years after the outbreak of World War I, Bessarabia was one of Russia's 101 governorates. During the war years, more and more voices from among the nobility strangled in the "people's dungeon", as the Russian Empire was called, shared the view that a Russia on the battlefields could only be a step towards their own freedom. The collapse of Tsarism, the first link in the chain of empires that disappeared following the First World War - German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman - was the signal for events that decisively changed the political geography of the world, with implications for the lives of many peoples, including the Romanian people.

In full soul agreement with their brothers from all the historical provinces inhabited by them, the Romanians between Prut and Nistru showed not only courage, but also a special ability to pour into the national calapod their aspirations to freedom and unity, going in just a few months from governorship to autonomy, from autonomy to independence and from independence to union with the motherland. Accelerating the course of history in accordance with their aspirations, with the laws that govern the very life of peoples, the Basarabian Romanians carried out on 27 March/9 April 1918 the first stage of the process that was to end with the Great National Assembly in Alba Iulia on 18 November/1 December 1918.

For half a century, the union of Bessarabia with Romania remained an unapproachable subject for Romanian historiography. However, it became a priority subject after the collapse of the communist regime in December 1989. In my opinion, historians from the Republic of Moldova have made an important contribution in terms of the number and quality of their works published over the last two decades. This general effort to recover the unwritten history of the Great Union of 1918 has included some of my concerns, materialised in several studies and articles published in the magazines Magazin istoric and Helis. Written on different dates, as stand-alone material, they contain some small repetitions imposed by the chronology of events, but also by the documentary material used. The texts collected in this volume, which vary in approach and genre, are united by their effort to highlight the real dimension of the historical processes that have been going on for a century. This is also the reason why, at the suggestion of Oscar Print, they have been brought together in this volume.