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Kishinev: The Character and Development of a Tsarist Frontier Town*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Michael F. Hamm
Michael F. Hamm*
Affiliation:
Centre College, USA
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Extract

At the Treaty of Bucharest in 1812, Russia annexed the eastern half of Moldavia, the territory between the Dnestr and Prut Rivers, which it called “Bessarabia.” One historian argues that this was an effort to circumvent the Tilsit agreement with Napoleon in which Russia had agreed to vacate both Romanian principalities. Since Tilsit “did not mention ‘Bessarabia’ the Russian troops could remain there.”

Type
Articles
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 26 , Issue 1 , March 1998 , pp. 19 - 37
Copyright
Copyright © 1998 Association for the Study of Nationalities 

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References

Notes

* I would like to thank IREX, the Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad Program, Centre College, Michael Impey, Charles King, and Wim van Meurs for their help in preparing this essay.Google Scholar

1. Dima, Nicholas, Bessarabia and Bukovina. The Soviet–Romanian Territorial Dispute (New York: East European Monographs, 1982), p. 13.Google Scholar

2. Zhukov, V. I., Goroda Bessarabii 1812–1861 godov (Kishinev: Kartia Moldoveniaskè, 1964), p. 48; Skal'kovskii, A., Bolgarskoe kolonii v Bessarabii i Novorossiiskom krae (Odessa, 1848).Google Scholar

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5. Trudy Bessarabskoi gubernskoi uchenoi arkhivnoi komissii, Vol. 2, 1902, p. 64.Google Scholar

6. Zhukov, , 1812–1861, p. 64; Grosul, Ia. S. and Budak, I. G., Ocherki istorii narodnogo khoziaistva Bessarabii (1861–1905 gg.) (Kishinev: Kartia Moldoveniaskè, 1972), p. 63. The extent to which serfdom was introduced remains controversial. Grosul and Budak (p. 69), estimate that as many as 70% of Bessarabia's peasants were enserfed by the Russian government.Google Scholar

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9. Ciobanu, , Chişonăul, p. 35. Whether Jews could serve on this council is unclear, but I could find no evidence specifically excluding them.Google Scholar

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16. These figures are taken from the Ezhegodnik Ministerstva Finansov. See Budak, Grosul and, Ocherki, pp. 33–36. Of the other Bessarabian districts, Orgeev District also had significant forests.Google Scholar

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20. Zhukov, , 1812–1861, p. 69. Prior to 1839, Jews were not included in the data because their births and deaths were not recorded in the metric books.Google Scholar

21. Iochim Vuica in 1840, as cited by Ciobanu, Chişinăul, pp. 53–54.Google Scholar

22. Ciobanu, , Chisinăul, p. 59. In addition to Kishinev, the Moldavian towns of Akkerman, Bendery, Khotin, and Soroki were allowed to form self-governing institutions under the 1870 legislation. Beltsy and Orgeev were still privately owned and were given a simplified form of public administration in 1877.Google Scholar

23. “Finansovoe znachenie gorodskikh predpriatii,” Gorodskoe delo, Vol. 2, 1914, pp. 79–80; Istoriia Kishineva, pp. 103–110; Grosul and Budak, Ocherki, pp. 31–36.Google Scholar

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25. According to Bessarabskaia zhizn', 22 October 1906, 4,823 of the 7,555 babies born in 1905 failed to survive infancy.Google Scholar

26. Boga, Leon, Luptă pentru limbă Romănească şi ideea Unirii la Romanii din Basarabia după 1812 (Chişinău: Universitas, 1993), p. 209; Istoriia Kishineva, pp. 68–69, 79; Ciobanu, , Chişinăul, p. 91. Cyrillic was used throughout Romania until the mid-nineteenth century and in Bessarabia until 1918.Google Scholar

27. Cited in Ciobanu, , Chisinăul, p. 52.Google Scholar

28. Zhukov, , 1812–1861 godov, p. 62.Google Scholar

29. Istoriia Kishineva, pp. 165–167.Google Scholar

30. Hitchins, Keith, Rumania, 1866–1947 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 245.Google Scholar

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32. Arbure, Zamfir, Liberarea Basarabiei (reprinted Chişinău: Universitas, 1993), pp. 176–177. This book was originally published in Bucharest in 1915.Google Scholar

33. Budak, , Obshchestvenno-politicheskoe dvizhenie, pp. 368–369. How often such perfomances were staged in Kishinev after the 1865 ruling is not known.Google Scholar

34. Bagalei, D. I. and Miller, D. P., Istoriia goroda Khar'kova za 250 let ego sushchestvovaniia (1655–1905) II (Khar'kov: Zil'berberg, 1912), p. 131.Google Scholar

35. See Hamm, Michael F., Kiev: A Portrait, 1800–1917 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), especially ch. IV, for a discussion of ethnic and linguistic blending.Google Scholar

36. Zhukov, , 1812–1861, pp. 46–47; Istoriia Kishineva, p. 48. These figures probably include Ukrainians (or Little Russians as they were called).Google Scholar

37. Pervaia vseobshchaia perepis’ naseleniia Rossiiskoi imperii 1897 g., Bessarabskaia gubernaia, Vol. III, No. 2 (St. Petersburg: Tsentral'nyi statisticheskii komitet, 1905), pp. 36–38. This census breaks down populations by language and religion.Google Scholar

38. Ibid., pp. 101–102, 112–117.Google Scholar

39. Ciobanu, , Chişinăul, pp. 59, 102–103.Google Scholar

40. Ibid., p. 35.Google Scholar

41. Vospominaniia F. F. Vigelia, pp. 98–99.Google Scholar

42. Urussov, , Memoirs, pp. 17, 66–68, 98. For a brief discussion of Moldavia's special categories, see Istoriia Kishineva, p. 49.Google Scholar

43. “Kishinevskii bomond,” Kievskaia gazeta, 7 July 1903. Also cited in Hamm, Kiev: A Portrait, p. 163.Google Scholar

44. Ciobanu, , Chişinăul, p. 29. Thirty-two were Moldavians, two were Greek, one was a Serb, and one a Bulgarian.Google Scholar

45. Klier, John D., Russia Gathers her Jews (DeKalb: Northern Illinois Press, 1986), p. 170.Google Scholar

46. Ciobanu, , Chişinăul, pp. 25, 28, 35–36; Bessarabia k stoletiiu 1812–1912, p. 59. Bulgarians also had their own street. Istoriia Kishineva, p. 48, notes that 700 Armenians lived in Kishinev in 1841, as well as 247 Greek families.Google Scholar

47. Bessarabia k stoletiiu, p. 210; Istoriia Kishineva, pp. 42, 70. On 5 August 1839, the Imperial Senate denied Russian citizenship to foreign Jews.Google Scholar

48. In his Memoirs, pp. 159, 162, Urussov describes Jewish-Christian relations as generally calm. Documents 464/10 and 464/16–21 of the Partiia Sotsialistov-revoliutsionerov collection in the International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam), which record reports from Jewish leaders, include similar conclusions. For a study of Kishinev's pogrom, see Judge, Edward H., Easter in Kishinev. Anatomy of a Pogrom (New York: New York University Press, 1992).Google Scholar

49. Berg, L. S., Naselenie Bessarabii (Petrograd, 1923), p. 10.Google Scholar

50. Cazacu, Petre, Moldova dintre Prut şi Nistru 1812–1918 (Chişinău: Ştiinţă, 1992), p. 164.Google Scholar

51. Budak, Grosul and, Ocherki, p. 464; Zhukov, 1861–1905, pp. 200–201.Google Scholar

52. Pervaia vseobshchaia perepis', Vol. III, pp. 116–118.Google Scholar

53. Budak, , Obshchestvenno-politicheskoe dvizhenie, p. 108.Google Scholar

54. Ibid., p. 187.Google Scholar

55. Ibid., p. 279. Of the 32 arrested, seven were said to be Moldavians (ibid., p. 280).Google Scholar

56. Ivanov, Iu and Shemiakov, D., Revoliutsionnoe dvizhenie v Moldavii v 1905–1907 gg. (Kishinev: Moldaviia, 1955), p. 31.Google Scholar

57. Ivanov, , Uchastie Moldavskogo naroda, p. 40; Shemiakov, Ivanov and, Revoliutsionnoe dvizhenie, pp. 46, 53–54.Google Scholar

58. TsGIA, fond OP 00, delo 4, chasf 70, pp. 2–4; Budak, , Obshchestvenno-politicheskoe dvizhenie, p. 343.Google Scholar

59. Boga, , Luptă pentru limbă Romănească, pp. 217–220. See also St., P. T., “Contribiţiuni noua pentru istoria evolutiei naţionalismului dintre Prut şi Nistru,” Viaţa Basarabiei, Vols. 7–8, 1937, pp. 471–473, cited in Budak, I. G., Obshchestvenno-politicheskoe dvizhenie, p. 15.Google Scholar

60. Ionescu, T., La Politique étrangère de la Roumanie (Bucharest, 1891), p. 13, cited in van Meurs, Wim P., The Bessarabian Question in Communist Historiography (New York: East European Monographs, 1994), p. 53.Google Scholar

61. Mogilianskii, N. K., Materialy dlia geografii i statistiki Bessarabii (Kishinev: Bessarabskoe gubernskoe upravlenie, 1913), p. 81.Google Scholar

62. See, for example, Budak, , Obshchestvenno-politicheskoe dvizhenie, p. 187. Of the 5,000 volunteers, about 1,500 were ethnic Bulgarians, some of them from Bessarabia, and the rest came from all over the empire.Google Scholar

63. Budak, , Obshchestvenno-politicheskoe dvizhenie, pp. 378–382. A student group with separatist ideals did form at Derpt (Iur'ev, now Tartu) University in Estonia in 1899, and some Romanian circles encouraged separatism.Google Scholar

64. Urussov, , Memoirs, p. 112. See also Budak, , Obshchestvenno-politicheskoe dvizhenie, p. 395.Google Scholar

65. Hitchins, , Rumania, p. 242.Google Scholar

66. Boga, , Luptă pentru limbă Romănească, p. 217; See also Petre V. Hanes, Scriitorii basarabeni (Bucharest, 1942), p. 18; Ciobanu, , Chişinăul, p. 89.Google Scholar

67. Ciobanu, , Chişinăul, p. 90.Google Scholar

68. One report written by local Jews stressed the role of the paper in inciting the pogrom, noting that its inflammatory stories had been widely circulated in the city's taverns and tearooms prior to the pogrom (PSR 464/10, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam). Bessarabets, whose windows were broken during the pogrom, initially said very little about the pogrom. It failed to publish editions at all on 7, 8, and 9 April. On 10 April, it blamed the pogrom “on drunken bur'ian [roughnecks], teenagers, and boys.” On 15 April it acknowledged that the pogrom had been “terrible.” On 29 April it published casualty figures and stated that the violence had resulted from the spreading of false rumors accusing Jews of ritual murders in Kiev, Kishinev, and elsewhere. On 30 April 1903, it criticized the national Russian press, stating that “90 percent of what is written by Kishinev correspondents is lies.”Google Scholar

69. Ciobanu, , Chişinăul, p. 61.Google Scholar

70. Cazacu, , Moldova dintre Prut şi Nistru, pp. 214, 220–225. Other papers to appear briefly were Viaţa Noua (New Life) and Lumina (Light). See pp. 226–227 for the ruckus over Bishop Vladimir. See Drug (Kishinev) 6 January 1906, for the position of the influential Rightist Pavolachi Krushevan; and Judge, Easter in Kishinev, ch. 3, for background on the city's Rightists.Google Scholar

71. One Romanian source, Arbore, , Liberarea Basarabiei, p. 189, contends that demands for autonomy had given way to demands for liberation by 1915.Google Scholar

72. Meurs, van, The Bessarabian Question, p. 56.Google Scholar

73. Ibid., pp. 66–69; Hitchins, , Rumania, p. 277.Google Scholar

74. Meurs, van, The Bessarabian Question, p. 71.Google Scholar

75. Dima, , Bessarabia and Bukovina, p. 22.Google Scholar

76. Simmons, Ernest J., Pushkin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1937), pp. 118–119.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

77. Ibid., p. 156.Google Scholar

78. Urussov, , Memoirs, p. 1.Google Scholar

79. Livezeanu, Irina, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), pp. 96–97. See also p. 100.Google Scholar

80. Ibid., p. 116. Private schools could continue to teach in languages other than Romanian.Google Scholar

81. Ciobanu, , Chişinăul, p. 91.Google Scholar

82. Livezeanu, , Cultural Politics, p. 120.Google Scholar

83. Clark, Charles Upson, Bessarabia: Russia and Roumania on the Black Sea (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1927), p. 221.Google Scholar

84. Ciobanu, , Chişinăul, p. 84.Google Scholar

85. This seems to be Ciobanu's conclusion as well. See, for example, p. 76.Google Scholar