The Attitude of the Local Romanian Population of Bessarabia towards the Russian Authorities and the Problem of “Reactive Identity”

Abstract

The subject of this paper concerns the relations between the czarist authorities and the Romanian population from Bessarabia, at the end of the 19th and the beginning and the 20th centuries. The author analyses the process of the “collective identity” formation in the case of the Romanians living under Russian domination. The idea of “otherness”, his image, as well as the peaceful or tense relations with those who did not belong to the Bessarabian Romanian community, played a decisive role in the genesis and consolidation of the Bessarabian Romanian’s “collective identity”.