Djamila said:
I saw that your favorite place of worship was built by Stephen of Moldova, JamesThePersian, so I thought to ask:
How do people feel about Moldova's government? Do you think it should be part of Romania, or - at the very least - a country with much closer, official, government ties to Romania and far fewer to Russia?
Djamila,
The Moldova I referred to was the medieval state of Moldova and not the modern republic. That state encompassed the modern state of Moldova (one of the regions of Romania), Bucovina, which is a sort of region within Moldova, the southern half being in modern Romania and the north in the Ukraine, and Besarabia. It is the latter, erroneously called the Moldova by the Soviets, which makes up the modern Republic of Moldova, though Besarabia did not include Transdnistria, which the Soviets added to it and is now a breakaway region, but did include the area south of Moldova (now in the Ukraine) including the Black Sea coast. The modern borders were set after WWII when Stalin annexed large areas of north eastern Romania and even the communist government refused to recognise them (one of the reasons Ceausescu was noticeably anti-Soviet in contrast to many Warsaw Pact leaders).
Most Romanians I know would be only too happy to reunify with the Republic of Moldova but the economy just could not handle the absorption of such a poor region at the moment. The two countries do have very close ties, though, as the only two Romanian speaking countries in the world (so called 'Moldovan' is just standard Romanian with an accent and some old fashioned vocabulary which is equally common in Romanian Moldova). Many Romanians would also be only too happy to get northern Bucovina and southern Besarabia back, the majority population in both regions being ethnic Romanians. There's, in fact, a nationalist party called Romania Mare (Greater Romania) which shows a map including all the annexed regions on their flag - it's rather too right wing for me to support, however.
The ideal, in terms of the populations involved, would be for Romania to get the whole of Bucovina and Besarabia back in return for giving Transdnistria to the Ukraine, though that is rather unrealistic given that southern Besarabia with its coastline is inevitably of more value to a state than even the heavily industrialised Transdnistria (a Slav region) is. Stalin really made a mess of the region but I think Romania will just have to get used to it, however unpalatable it might be. Does that answer your question?
James
