The Kishinev Ghetto, 1941–1942 sheds new light on the little-known historical events surrounding the creation, administration, and liquidation of the Kishinev (Chisinau) ghetto during the first ...months following the Axis attack on the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa) in late June 1941. Mass killings during the combined Romanian-German drive toward Kishinev in Bessarabia, after a year of Soviet rule in this Romanian border province, were followed by the shooting of thousands of Jews on the streets of the city during the first days of reestablished Romanian administration. Survivors were driven into a ghetto, persecuted, and liquidated by year’s end. The Kishinev Ghetto, 1941–1942 is the first major study of these events.
Often overshadowed by events in Germany and Poland, the history of the Holocaust in Romania, including what took place in Bessarabia (corresponding in large part with the territory of the modern Republic of Moldova), was obscured during decades of communist rule by denial and by policies that blocked access to wartime documentation. This book is the result of a lengthy research project that began with Paul A. Shapiro’s missions to Romania for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to negotiate access to these documents.
The volume includes:
· A preface describing the origin of the project in the immediate aftermath of the Ceausescu regime in Romania.
· A hundred-page study setting the events of the book within the historical context of Eastern European antisemitism, Romanian-Soviet conflict over control of Bessarabia, and Romania’s alliance with Nazi Germany.
· A thoughtfully curated collection of archival documents linked to the study.
· A chronology of related historical events.
· Twenty-one black and white photographs and a map of the ghetto.
Students and scholars of Holocaust history, Judaic studies, twentieth-century Eastern European history, Romania, Moldova, and historical Bessarabia will want to own this important, revealing volume.
Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Kin Majorities explores why communities like Crimea and Moldova engage with dual citizenship and how this intersects, or not, with identity. Analyzing data collected from Crimea and Moldova in 2012 ...and 2013, just before Russia's annexation of Crimea, Eleanor Knott provides a crucial window into Russian identification in a time of calm.
Bessarabia was the only territory representing an object of rivalry and symbolic competition between the Russian Empire and a fully crystallized nation-state: the Kingdom of Romania. This book is an ...intellectual prehistory of the Bessarabian problem, focusing on the antagonism of the national and imperial visions of this contested periphery. Through a critical reassessment and revision of the traditional historical narratives, the study argues that Bessarabia was claimed not just by two opposing projects of ‘symbolic inclusion,’ but also by two alternative and theoretically antagonistic models of political legitimacy. By transcending the national lens of Bessarabian / Moldovan history and viewing it in the broader Eurasian comparative context, the book responds to the growing tendency in recent historiography to focus on the peripheries in order to better understand the functioning of national and imperial states in the modern era.
In this volume Iurie Stamati analyzes the archaeological discourse on the place of the old Slavs in the medieval history of Moldova of the Soviet period.
Focusing on regime trajectories across the former Soviet Union, Pluralism by Default posits that political competition in new democracies has often been grounded less in well-designed institutions, ...democratic leaders, or emerging civil society and more in the failure of authoritarianism. Lucan Way contends that pluralism has persisted in many cases because autocrats lack the organization, authority, or coordination to steal elections, impose censorship, repress opposition, or keep allies in line.
Attention to the dynamics of this pluralism by default reveals a largely unrecognized contradiction in the transition process: the same factors that facilitate democratic and semi-democratic political competition may also thwart the development of stable, well-functioning democratic institutions. National divisions or weak states and parties—typically seen as impediments to democracy—can also stymie efforts to crack down on political opposition and concentrate control. Way demonstrates that the features that have made Ukraine the most democratic country in the former Soviet Union also contributed to the country’s extreme dysfunction and descent into war in 2014.
One of the goals of Russia's Eastern policy was to turn Moldavia
and Wallachia, the two Romanian principalities north of the Danube,
from Ottoman vassals into a controllable buffer zone and a
...springboard for future military operations against Constantinople.
Russia on the Danube describes the divergent interests and uneasy
cooperation between the Russian officials and the Moldavian and
Wallachian nobility in a key period between 1812 and 1834. Victor
Taki's meticulous examination of the plans and memoranda composed
by Russian administrators and the Romanian elite underlines the
crucial consequences of this encounter. The Moldavian and
Wallachian nobility used the Russian-Ottoman rivalry in order to
preserve and expand their traditional autonomy. The comprehensive
institutional reforms born out of their interaction with the tsar's
officials consolidated territorial statehood on the lower Danube,
providing the building blocks of a nation state.
The main conclusion of the book is that although Russian policy
was driven by self-interest, and despite the Russophobia among a
great part of the Romanian intellectuals, this turbulent period
significantly contributed to the emergence, several decades later,
of modern Romania.
This ethnographic study of Gagauz religion offers an original perspective on 'folk religion' as discourse and object of study. It is also the first monograph published in a Western language on this ...little-known European people's history and culture.
Abstract
Efforts to commemorate the victims of the 1903 Chişinǎu (Kishinev) pogrom and the Holocaust in Bessarabia and Transnistria have achieved varying degrees of success in the Republic of ...Moldova. Gaining public recognition for these experiences has proven a convoluted process. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the local Community has led an enduring memorialization campaign, which has steadily evolved with the shifting political climate. Though Community representatives have at times had a fraught relationship with Moldovan officials, they have continuously sought official acknowledgment of their efforts. This article analyzes how both the government and the Jewish Community have handled memory in public spaces and the local media of Chişinǎu.
The Republic of Moldova claims a European lineage reaching back in time long before its 14th century accession to statehood. In the 15th century, it managed against all odds to avoid being conquered ...by Islam and-albeit an intermittent vassal after 1485-it maintained its autonomy and was never turned into a province of the Ottoman Empire. After this period, however, Moldova would not be so fortunate, as it altered between Russian, Romanian, and Soviet control until it finally gained its independence in 1991 from the Soviet Union. The second edition of the Historical Dictionary of Moldova, through its chronology, introduction, appendixes, maps, bibliography, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on important persons, places, events, and institutions and significant political, economic, social, and cultural aspects, traces the history of this small, but densely populated country, providing a compass for the direction it is heading.
