History of Moldova
Moldova’s past runs through a medieval principality, a Russian imperial province and a Soviet republic before arriving, in 1991, at an independent state that is now negotiating to join the European Union.
The Principality of Moldavia
The Principality of Moldavia took shape in the middle of the 14th century on the land between the Eastern Carpathians and the Dniester river. Hungary sent the Vlach knyaz Dragoș across the mountains in 1353 to hold a defensive line against the Golden Horde, but it was Bogdan of Cuhea, another nobleman from Maramureș, who crossed the Carpathians in 1359, rejected Hungarian authority and became the first independent prince of Moldavia. The court moved as the state grew: Baia was the seat until 1388, then Suceava until 1564, and Iași afterwards. Modern Moldova occupies the eastern part of that older principality.
Moldavia spent much of its later history balancing between larger powers. From the middle of the 15th century, when Petru Aron agreed to pay tribute to Sultan Mehmed II, its princes ruled as Ottoman vassals while keeping their own church, law and court. At different periods the principality also took in Bessarabia, Bukovina and neighbouring lands. Its separate existence ended in 1859, when Alexandru Ioan Cuza was elected prince of Moldavia on 17 January and then of Wallachia as well, joining the two into the United Principalities that became Romania.
Stephen the Great
Stephen the Great ruled Moldavia from 14 April 1457 until his death on 2 July 1504, and fought the Hungarian and Polish kingdoms and the Ottoman Empire with success for most of that time. In 1475 he destroyed a large Ottoman army at the Battle of Vaslui, which the historian Alexander Mikaberidze called arguably one of the biggest European victories over the Ottomans. The following year he was beaten at Valea Albă, near Războieni, on 26 July 1476, but the invading army withdrew soon afterwards, worn down by shortages of supplies and by disease.
He is remembered as much for building as for fighting. Dozens of stone churches and monasteries went up in Moldavia during and after his reign, and together they produced a recognisable Moldavian architectural style. Stephen founded Putna Monastery in 1466 to mark his capture of Chilia, and was buried there in 1504. The Romanian Orthodox Church canonised him in 1992, since when he has been venerated as Stephen the Great and Holy. His statue stands in the centre of Chișinău, and the fortress at Soroca was begun on his orders.
Bessarabia under Russian rule
By the Treaty of Bucharest of 28 May 1812, which ended the Russo-Turkish war of 1806–1812, the Ottoman Empire ceded the land between the Prut and the Dniester to Russia. The new territory was organised as the Bessarabia Governorate of the Russian Empire. Bessarabia covers some 45,630 square kilometres in total, about two thirds of it inside today’s Moldova and the rest in Ukraine. A century of Russian administration followed, and it left its mark on everything from the layout of Chișinău to the neoclassical churches built in it.
The empire’s collapse reopened the question. Bessarabia, already proclaimed the Moldavian Democratic Republic two months earlier, declared itself independent on 6 February 1918, 24 January by the old calendar, and on 9 April 1918 its national council, the Sfatul Țării, voted for a conditional union with Romania: 86 deputies in favour, three against and 36 abstaining. Bessarabia then remained part of Romania for the next twenty-two years, until the Soviet ultimatum of June 1940. The Paris peace treaty signed in February 1947 confirmed the border that ultimatum had drawn.
The Soviet decades
Soviet claims on the region began early. In 1924 Moscow created an autonomous Moldavian territory east of the Dniester inside the Ukrainian SSR, with its capital at Balta and, from 1929, at Tiraspol. In June 1940, having secured Nazi Germany’s assent through the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, the Soviet Union pressed Romania into withdrawing from Bessarabia, and the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic was formally established on 2 August 1940 out of six and a half Bessarabian counties.
What followed was harsh. Deportations to Siberia, Kazakhstan and the northern Urals continued through the Stalin years, the largest on 12–13 June 1941 and on 5–6 July 1949, accounting for roughly 19,000 and 35,000 people from the Moldavian SSR alone. In 1946 a severe drought combined with the delivery quotas and requisitions imposed by the Stalin regime produced a famine across the south-western USSR in which at least 115,000 peasants died. A further 723 families, 2,617 people, were deported on the night of 31 March 1951, most of them members of neoprotestant congregations.
Independence and Europe
Moldova declared its independence from the Soviet Union on 27 August 1991. The new state kept its Soviet-era borders, including the strip of land across the Dniester where the unrecognised breakaway authority of Transnistria still governs. Independence day, 27 August, remains the country’s main national holiday, and the capital, Chișinău, is both the largest city and the main cultural and commercial centre of a parliamentary republic of about 2.4 million people.
European integration moved quickly after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. President Maia Sandu signed Moldova’s application for European Union membership on 3 March 2022, and the European Council granted the country candidate status on 23 June 2022, at the same time as Ukraine. Accession negotiations opened formally on 25 June 2024, again alongside Ukraine. Moldova is also a member of the United Nations, the Council of Europe, the World Trade Organization and the OSCE.