Moldovan (Romanian speaking). Ukrainians form the largest minority with 28.3 percent, and 25.5 percent of the population claim Russian heritage. There is a Slavic concentration in the urban centers, particularly in the capital of Tiraspol. The Moldovan population constitutes a majority in the countryside.
Despite its plurality of Romanian speakers, Transnistria has never been part of the greater Ro1568 manian lands to the west of the Dniester. The region formed part of Kievan Rus and then the Gali-cia-Volhynian Kingdom between the ninth and fourteenth centuries. It was subsequently drawn into the Ottoman Empire before being annexed by the Russian Empire in 1812. Following the Bolshevik Revolution and ensuing civil war, Transnistria was briefly incorporated into Soviet Ukraine.
In 1924, land stretching from the Dniester in the west to the Bug River in the east was carved off of Soviet Ukraine to form the Moldovan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (MASSR). The creation of the MASSR formed part of the Soviet Union’s policy of national liberation, which was designed to draw bordering states (Bessarabia) away from the influence of bourgeois neighbors (Romania). Tiraspol was named capital of the MASSR in 1929, though the right was reserved to shift the capital to Chisinau upon reunification with rump Moldova. Following the Soviet Union’s annexation of Bessarabia in 1940, six western districts were integrated with Bessarabia to form the Moldovan Soviet Social Republic (MSSR). The remaining MASSR territory reverted to Soviet Ukraine.
Despite the merging of Transnistria and Bessarabia between 1940 and 1991, social, political, and economic differences between the two regions remained. Having been significantly sovietized between World War I and World War II, the Transnis-trian political elite was considered by Moscow to be more reliable than its Bessarabian counterpart. Moldovan Communist Party (CPM) members from Transnistria were, therefore, relatively overrepre- sented in the Moldovan Soviet structure. Transnistria was the focus of Soviet industrial expansion in the region, particularly the steel industry, while Bessarabia remained agrarian. Sizable Ukrainian and Russian immigration also shifted the demographic balance during this period, though ethnic Moldovans remained in the majority.
From 1987, Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of per-estroika allowed ethnic Moldovans to seek a redress of the socioeconomic imbalance in the MASSR. A devolution of power from Moscow to the constituent republics, and the introduction of direct elections to the Moldovan Supreme Soviet in 1989, enabled Bessarabians to increase their influence over national policy.
Conflict between Chisinau and Tiraspol began to mount from 1989. Tensions were exacerbated
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
by the introduction of a number of restrictive language laws that favored the Moldovan language over Russian. Sporadic violence began in 1989 and continued intermittently until a peace accord was signed in July 1992.
Transnistrian resistance was initially led by the United Council of Work Collectives, under the leadership of Ukrainian national Igor Smirnov. Protests swiftly became violent, as industrial managers mobilized their workers against Moldovan police forces. An autonomous Dniester Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic was proclaimed on September 2, 1990. This proclamation was followed by a declaration of full independence on August 27, 1991, with Smirnov as president.
Conflict peaked in the summer of 1992 following the intervention of the Russian Fourteenth Army, which was stationed in Transnistria. Although Moscow claimed credit for taking swift action, the decision to engage was likely taken by Fourteenth Army commander Yuri Netkachev, without official sanction from the Russian government. Netkachev was soon replaced by Alexander Lebed. Throughout the conflict, the Fourteenth Army provided troops and armaments to the Transnistrian forces. With a disorganized defense- led by poorly armed police forces- Moldovan troops were unable to retain control of their positions in Transnistria and suffered considerably more casualties than Transnistrian and Russian forces. Overall casualties have been estimated at between seven hundred and one thousand. A pact signed on July 21, 1992, between Russian president Boris Yeltsin and Moldovan president Mrcea Snigur ended armed hostilities, and Russian forces began to withdraw in 1994.
At the turn of the century, the DMR remained autonomous, though the international community refused to recognize its claims to statehood. See also: LEBED, ALEXANDER IVANOVICH; MOLDOVA AND MOLDOVANS; PRIMAKOV, YEVGENY MAXIMOVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hill, Ronald J. (1979). Soviet Political Elites: The Case of Tiraspol. New York: St. Martin’s Press. King, Charles. (2000). The Moldovans: Romania, Russia, and the Politics of Culture. Stanford, CA: Hoover Press. Kolst?, Pal. (1993). “The Dniester Conflict: Between Ir-redentism and Separatism.” Europe-Asia Studies 45(6):973-1000. O’Loughlin, J.; Kolossoc, V.; and Tchepalyga, A. (1998). “National Construction, Territorial Separatism, and Post- Soviet Geopolitics in the Transdniester Moldovan Republic.” Post-Soviet Geography and Economics 39(6):332- 358.
The term transition has been applied to the countries that have abandoned the Soviet-type political and economic system at the end of the twentieth century. As it suggests a passage from one state to another, it is important to define both the point of departure and the point of arrival.
The point of departure may be considered the communist system that appeared in Russia following the October 1917 Revolution, and which was imposed on the countries of Central and Eastern Europe under Soviet rule after World War II. The core of this system may be described in terms of three features. First, economic life was under the control of a single party. In the USSR, this was the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union). All the national parties in Central and Eastern Europe were subordinate to the CPSU until the very end of the system, notwithstanding some crises, even though not all were officially labeled communist. The two exceptions were Yugoslavia and Albania, whose leaders broke with the Soviet system in 1948 and 1961, respectively. The second feature was that the economic institutions were based upon state ownership of the means of production. The private sector was nonexistent or negligible, and market ways of operating could only be found in an illegal underground economy. Finally, the third feature was compulsory central planning that regulated production, trade, and distribution of incomes.
The transition process began as a rejection of these three foundations of the communist economic system. The initial shock came with the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, which triggered the collapse of the communist parties and the beginning of a threefold process: from one-party rule to democracy, from state ownership to private property, and from plan to market. In the Soviet case, the transition process also included the collapse of the Soviet state as a federation of republics; this led to the independence of the three Baltic states, and later of the other twelve former republics. Officially the Soviet Union was dissolved
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
1569
in December 1991. The Russian Federation was the biggest Soviet Republic and the dominant one, both economically and politically.
All the former communist countries in the world, with the exceptions of North Korea and Cuba, became engaged in a transition process. In the case of the Asian countries, particularly China and Vietnam, the transition process was well under way in the beginning of the twenty-first century. Although perhaps more advanced economically than in some former European communist countries, the transition did not touch the political system, which remained communist. Can one still speak of transition? The question is debated.
In all the countries the basic transition policies were identical in their economic design. They were prepared by the new governments with the help of Western experts and international organizations, with the dominant influence of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (the first institution created solely for the purpose of assisting the transition). The building blocks of the transition were again threefold. First, there was an overall liberalization of the economic activities. Prices that had been fixed or controlled by the state were freed, as were the rates of exchange (for converting foreign into local currencies and vice-versa) and the rates of interest. People became free to undertake business activities and
