The history of Moldova

Moldova is a small landlocked country between Romania and Ukraine, lying mostly between the Prut and Dniester rivers. Its territory was the eastern half of the medieval Principality of Moldavia, a Romanian-speaking state that reached its height under Stephen the Great before falling under Ottoman overlordship. In 1812 Russia annexed this eastern half, known as Bessarabia; it joined Romania in 1918, was taken by the Soviet Union in 1940, and became the Moldavian Soviet republic, joined to a strip of land east of the Dniester. Since independence in 1991 the country has been divided by the unresolved status of that eastern strip, Transnistria, and by competing pulls towards Russia and the European Union.

Stone tools found near Dubăsari on the Dniester show that early humans were present more than 800,000 years ago. From around 5500 BCE the land was home to the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture, farmers who made finely painted pottery and built some of the largest settlements in the world at the time, some housing thousands of people. From the fourth millennium BCE herders of the Yamna culture spread across the steppe to the east, and the open grasslands of the south made the region a natural corridor for peoples moving from Asia into Europe.

In the first millennium BCE the land was inhabited by Thracian peoples, including the Getae, related to the Dacians, while the Scythians and later Sarmatians roamed the steppe, and Greek colonists founded the town of Tyras at the mouth of the Dniester. Trajan's conquest of Dacia in 106 CE brought Roman rule to what is now Romania, but most of present-day Moldova lay outside the province, though Roman influence and trade reached it and the south was at times under Roman and later Byzantine control. After the Roman withdrawal the area was crossed and ruled by a long series of peoples: Goths, the Huns, Avars, Slavs, Bulgars, Magyars, Pechenegs and the Turkic Cumans, whose steppe confederation is known as Cumania. The Mongol invasion of 1241 brought the region under the Golden Horde.

As Mongol power weakened in the fourteenth century, the Kingdom of Hungary pushed east of the Carpathians. Tradition holds that Dragoș, a Romanian noble from Maramureș, was sent by the Hungarian king to set up a frontier march against the Tatars, and that in 1359 another Maramureș noble, Bogdan I, threw off Hungarian authority and founded an independent principality. Named after the Moldova river, it stretched from the Carpathians to the Dniester and down to the Black Sea, including the present Republic of Moldova and the eastern part of today's Romania. Its people spoke Romanian, its church was Orthodox, and Church Slavonic was the language of its documents.

The principality's greatest ruler was Stephen III, known as Stephen the Great, who took the throne in 1457 with help from his cousin Vlad the Impaler of Wallachia and ruled until 1504. He fought Hungary, Poland and the Ottoman Empire, winning a famous victory over an Ottoman army at Vaslui in 1475, and built dozens of fortresses, churches and monasteries. The Orthodox Church later canonised him, and he remains the central national hero in both Moldova and Romania.

The Ottomans captured the Black Sea ports of Chilia and Cetatea Albă in 1484, and in 1538 Suleiman the Magnificent made Moldavia a vassal state. The principality kept its own princes, nobles (the boyars), laws and church, but paid tribute and could not pursue a foreign policy of its own. Raids by the Crimean Khanate and Nogai Tatars ravaged the countryside, and the Ottomans took the southern district of Budjak under direct control. In the seventeenth century Prince Vasile Lupu was a notable patron of printing and church building. After Prince Dimitrie Cantemir sided with Peter the Great of Russia against the sultan in 1711 and was defeated, the Ottomans appointed Phanariot Greeks from Constantinople as princes, a period remembered for heavy taxation.

In the eighteenth century Moldavia became a battlefield in the wars between the Ottomans, Russia and Austria. The Habsburg Monarchy annexed its north-western corner, Bukovina, in 1775. In 1812, while Napoleon was preparing to invade Russia, the Treaty of Bucharest ended a Russo-Turkish war by giving Russia the eastern half of the principality, between the Prut and the Dniester. The name Bessarabia, previously used only for the southern steppe, was extended to the whole annexed territory.

The Russian Empire first allowed Bessarabia a degree of autonomy, but from 1828 it was ruled as an ordinary province and gradually Russified. Russian replaced Romanian in schools, administration and eventually the church, and in 1912 only about one in ten ethnic Moldovans could read. The authorities expelled the Nogai Tatars from the south and settled Bulgarians, Gagauz, Germans, Ukrainians and Russians in their place, creating the mixed population that still characterises the region. Chișinău, a small market town in 1812, grew into the provincial capital. It had a large Jewish community, and in April 1903 an antisemitic pogrom stirred up by the local press killed between 40 and 49 Jews and injured hundreds, provoking international outrage; a second pogrom followed in 1905.

After the Russian Revolution of 1917, a regional council, Sfatul Țării, proclaimed a Moldavian Democratic Republic within a federal Russia in December 1917. With Bolshevik forces and deserting soldiers spreading disorder, Romanian troops entered the region in January 1918; the republic declared independence in February, and on 9 April 1918 the council voted, with many abstentions, for union with Romania. Britain, France and Italy recognised the union in 1920, but Soviet Russia never did, regarding Bessarabia as occupied territory.

In the interwar years Bessarabia was a poor, overwhelmingly rural province of Greater Romania. Land reform created many small farms, but the region lagged behind the rest of the country, and Romanian rule was centralising and often hostile to minorities. East of the Dniester, in Soviet Ukraine, Moscow created a Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in 1924, with its capital first at Balta and from 1929 at Tiraspol, as a basis for its claim. Ethnic Romanians made up only about 30 percent of its population.

The secret protocol of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 recognised Soviet interest in Bessarabia. In June 1940 the Soviet Union issued an ultimatum to Romania and occupied Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. On 2 August 1940 it formed the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic from most of Bessarabia and a western strip of the autonomous republic east of the Dniester, while the southern and northern districts of Bessarabia were given to Soviet Ukraine. Mass arrests and deportations followed, with about 19,000 people deported in June 1941 alone.

In 1941 Romania under Ion Antonescu joined Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union during the Second World War, retook Bessarabia and occupied the land beyond the Dniester, which it administered as the Transnistria Governorate. Romanian and German forces massacred Jews across Bessarabia in the summer of 1941, and Romanian authorities deported around 147,000 Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina to Transnistria, where more than 90,000 died in ghettos and camps, part of the Holocaust. The Red Army returned in 1944, and the 1947 peace treaty restored the 1940 border.

Under Joseph Stalin, forced collectivisation, requisitions and drought caused a famine in 1946 and 1947 that killed at least 115,000 people, and some 35,000 more were deported in July 1949. Leonid Brezhnev, later Soviet leader, ran the republic's Communist Party from 1950 to 1952. Soviet policy promoted a separate "Moldovan" identity and language, written in the Cyrillic alphabet, to separate the population from Romania. Industry was concentrated largely on the east bank of the Dniester, while the rest of the republic grew wine, fruit and tobacco, and Russians and Ukrainians formed much of the urban and technical workforce.

Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms allowed a national movement to emerge. In August 1989 the republic made Moldovan, written in the Latin alphabet, its official language and recognised its identity with Romanian, and the Popular Front won elections in 1990. Many Russian and Ukrainian speakers, and the Turkic-speaking Gagauz in the south, feared the loss of Russian's status and a possible union with Romania. The Gagauz declared their own republic in August 1990, and in September 1990 local authorities in Tiraspol proclaimed the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic on the east bank. Moldova declared independence on 27 August 1991, after the failed coup in Moscow and shortly before the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Clashes escalated into war between March and July 1992. The former Soviet 14th Army, based in Tiraspol, intervened on the side of the Transnistrian forces, and about 700 people were killed before a ceasefire was signed on 21 July 1992, monitored by a joint peacekeeping force of Moldovan, Russian and Transnistrian troops. Transnistria has since functioned as a de facto state with its own government, army, currency and borders, but no United Nations member recognises it, and internationally it is regarded as part of Moldova. Its authorities seek independence and closer ties with Russia, which keeps troops there despite past commitments to withdraw; Moldova offers wide autonomy and calls for the Russian forces to leave. Negotiations under the OSCE, including a Russian federalisation plan in 2003 that Moldova rejected, have not settled the dispute. Gagauzia, by contrast, accepted autonomy within Moldova in 1994.

A constitution adopted in 1994 declared Moldova a neutral parliamentary republic. Independence brought a collapse of industry and widespread poverty, and hundreds of thousands of Moldovans emigrated to work in Russia and the European Union. From 2001 to 2009 the Party of Communists under Vladimir Voronin governed; after disputed elections in April 2009 protesters stormed parliament, and pro-European parties took power that summer. In 2014 Moldova signed an association agreement with the EU, but the same year about one billion dollars, equal to around an eighth of the country's economic output, was stolen from three banks, a fraud that discredited much of the political class.

Moldova applied to join the European Union in March 2022, days after Russia's full-scale invasion of neighbouring Ukraine, received candidate status in June 2022 and opened accession negotiations in June 2024. In 2023 the constitution's references to the Moldovan language were changed to Romanian, and Moldova began leaving the Commonwealth of Independent States, completing the legal steps in 2026. In October 2024 voters approved, by 50.17 percent, a constitutional amendment making EU membership a national goal, and President Maia Sandu, first elected in 2020, won a second term in November; Moldovan authorities and Western governments accused Russia of large-scale interference, which Russia denied. When Russian gas deliveries through Ukraine ended on 1 January 2025, Transnistria faced a severe energy crisis. Sandu's Party of Action and Solidarity kept its parliamentary majority in the election of 28 September 2025, and Vasile Tofan became prime minister in July 2026 as negotiations on EU accession continued.