Abstract
In this book, based on her Habilitation thesis, Svetlana Suveica explores how an imperial borderland, Bessarabia, became a hotly contested region in a post-imperial world. She sets out the stakes and interventions in her introduction: the book thus tackles post-imperial transitions, puts a ‘periphery’ at the centre of late-imperial Russian history, and assesses Eastern European engagement with the ‘Wilsonian moment’ at the end of the First World War (15, 16). Her study is part of a wave of scholarship concerned with challenging binaries of empire/nation-state, pre-1914 and post-1918, old versus new. Suveica's work emphasizes continuity over rupture in Bessarabia at the end of the First World War, yet it does so with great historical sensitivity for contemporaneous politics and the political language at the time. Post-imperial Encounters therefore builds on the work of Pieter Judson and others who have long argued that nation-states behaved like ‘little empires’ after the First World War.
Self-determination, Suveica shows, unlocked opportunities for ‘new political actors’ to argue for a suite of different solutions: nationalist visions, democracy, autonomy, imperial continuities and other views in-between (23, 24). The very idea of self-determination thus gripped local actors and groups with the power to imagine possible futures. Yet in Suveica's book, Wilson plays a minor role as an echo for ideas first articulated by Eastern European national elites (28, 29). As her book and its title make clear, the ‘elsewhere’ part – away from Paris – has been underappreciated by scholars of interwar east-central Europe, especially for the period between the cessation of hostilities and the conclusion of the peace treaties. For Bessarabia, the contest over state-building began in earnest in 1917 with the emergence of the Moldovan Democratic Republic, which was swiftly followed by the refutation of autonomy a year later in December 1918. Suveica convincingly situates interpretations of ‘1918’ as either continuity (Romanian nationalist historiography) or rupture (Moldovan nationalist historiography). Ultimately, however, her book argues strongly for (imperial) continuities by ‘demonopolizing’ self-determination from the Paris Peace Treaties by foregrounding local Bessarabian actors and ideas in the history of wartime and post-war Bessarabia.
Suveica's book weaves together a network of correspondence, memoranda, newspapers and other records centred on the ‘Bessarabian cause’ (57). In Chapter 1, we find ourselves in the midst of what Suveica calls ‘the drama’, namely the events leading up to and following 2 July 1919 at Quai D’Orsay where the ‘Bessarabian question’ was negotiated. Politicians such as Ion I. C. Brǎtianu invoked Romania's anti-Bolshevik credentials to argue against Russian claims and resist the Minority Treaty for Romania (69). In intricate detail, Suveica walks us through the back and forth in early July 1919, including the different Bessarabian actors, the coverage in the French press, and rival plans aired at the conference. The so-called Bessarabian delegation (91) argued for a plebiscite in the hope that the outcome would place Bessarabia outside of Romania's borders and inside a ‘White’ Russia, i.e., in a Russian non-Bolshevik status quo ante. The delegation members were, generally, made up of pre-war elites who rejected revolutionary change, be it red or Romanian nationalist. Their elite status in Bessarabian society emerged out of social and institutional changes in the region during the nineteenth century. Bessarabian nobles and would-be elites transformed into a civil elite which benefited from ‘Russification’ of state and church. As Suveica demonstrates, loyalty to new Russian elite structures was heavily underwritten by patronage and client networks (99). The First World War upended the century-old elite client structure in Bessarabia, and what followed was contestation and revolutionary chaos as some of Suveica's eyewitnesses, such as the American observer Louis Guy Michael, attest (120–2). Romania's entry to the First World War, first allied with the Central Powers, then with the Allies, as well as Ukraine's declared independence in 1918 severed the Bessarabian elite's connection to the Russian centre. Amid that chaos, the Bessarabian elite and the Romanian government reached a compromise, which was the union of Bessarabia with Romania.
Why then was self-determination not interpreted as independence for Bessarabia as it was for the Baltic states? As Suveica demonstrates in Chapter 3, Bessarabian politics had already developed ambitions for autonomy, not independence, within the Russian Empire during the First World War. It was only the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 that made independence a current issue (159). But that independence was calibrated as ‘autonomy within Romania’, which translated the established politics of Bessarabian autonomy into a post-war Romanian context. It is here that we get a sense of the real complexities at play in south-eastern Europe, which jarred with the simplicity of Wilsonian self-determination. The Sfatul Țǎrii (the Bessarabian Council) thus endorsed the union with Romania in April 1918 with some guarantees for Bessarabian autonomy. And yet tensions erupted almost immediately over fears of secularization, the impact of the new agrarian law in 1918, and a rejection of Romanian ‘colonists’ in Moldova and Bessarabia (162, 163). Constantin Stere, the populist politician, acted as a diplomat and informal representative of Romania in Bessarabia and tried to assuage fears that the union with Romanian threatened demands to keep ‘Bessarabia for the Bessarabians’.
The pace at which the situation on the ground changed is breathtaking and a reminder of the multiple possibilities and interpretations of ‘self-determination’. One of the significant strengths of Suveica's book is how deftly it combines intricate and rivalling political developments. Competing claims to autonomy in a Ukrainian and post-imperial non-Bolshevik Russian federation feature as possible ‘solutions’ to the post-war chaos (184, 185). Suveica thus concludes that 1918 was the year of autonomy – perhaps autonomies – for Bessarabia and not, as nation-centric historiography would have it, simply as the year of the union between Romania and Bessarabia.
Towards the end of the book, the ‘elsewhere’ in the title gains in prominence. Bessarabian delegates Alexander Krupenskii and Alexander Schmidt, for instance, set the diplomatic wheels in motion away from the Paris Conference in a memorandum which outlined why Bessarabians were too unconnected to Romania to be included in the nation-state. Elsewhere, appeals and black books circulated as charm offences to the US and British government. In the European press, contrasting voices argued over the ‘oriental Alsace Lorraine’ as Bessarabia was sometimes called, which seemed a curious choice given the contested nature of the Franco-German borderland. Some used the comparison to argue against joining with Romania while others employed the Alsace Lorraine comparison to advocate against separating Bessarabia from Romania. Suveica details the extensive travel, fact-finding missions and debates that went on in 1919. Emmanuel de Martonne's work on Bessarabia and Alsace Lorraine made a big impact in Romania and Bessarabia generating a dialogue with Krupenskii. Krupenskii meanwhile tirelessly advocated the ‘Bessarabian cause’ of resisting unification with Romania by travelling to London. Both Krupenskii and Schmidt were to be sorely disappointed by the time of the London Declaration on 3 March 1920, which effectively recognized Bessarabia as part of Romania. The Bessarabian cause had died and its advocates faced a furious backlash by being denounced as Russian traitors (296).
Suveica's book is meticulous in its research and original in its presentation. Chapter 6 introduces us to the Bessarabian-Russian network, which is visualized in an appendix. As fascinating as the chapter is, it is also slightly disruptive to the flow of the book. Émigrés in Switzerland played a particularly vital role in the tapestry of the Bessarabian-Russian network. Yet many of the granular details of the individuals involved, most prominently Alexander Krupenskii and Vladimir Tverdokhlebov, either deserved to be included early on or already featured in the analysis. In any case, Suveica also considers the period after the Paris Peace Conference. What remained was ambivalence, Suveica argues, which was partly the outcome of awkward ‘missions’ to Bessarabia to train Russian-speakers as loyal civil servants in education, law, and state bureaucracy (375). The mixed success and subsequent ambivalence were, in fact, an advantage to Romanian nation-builders, as those deemed least Romanian were labelled as unreliable for the nation-building project. The Bessarabian-Russian protagonists in the book disperse into social spaces in the interwar period with some, such as the ever-present Krupenskii or Pantemilon Sinalino, still advocating a Bessarabian future under the protection of a Russian Empire.
Suveica uses the term ‘peripheral’ throughout her book. And yet the story told here is quite different: Bessarabia became a central battleground for imperial control, revolutionary change and nationalist agendas. Indeed, the networks uncovered throughout the book further challenge the primacy of ‘Paris’, although Paris does loom large in the book. The sheer detail Suveica commands is mesmerizing and is a very valuable addition to the careful archaeology of the end of empire in east-central Europe. Current political tensions over the place of Moldova in Europe and the future of Transnistria are an echo of the contestations in Post-imperial Encounters. Contingent, contested and subject to political change, the future of Bessarabia and Moldova looks up for grabs again.