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Romanian Views on Bessarabia and Bukovina: A Ukrainian Perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Theodore B. Ciuciura*
Affiliation:
Saint Mary's University

Extract

Nicholas Dima, Bessarabia and Bukovina: The Soviet-Romanian Territorial Dispute. Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1982. v, 173 pp. Distributed by Columbia University Press. Maria Manoliu-Manea, ed., The Tragic Plight of a Border Area: Bessarabia and Bucovina. American Romanian Academy of Arts and Sciences. Humboldt State University Press, 1983. xii, 280 pp.

Here are two good books providing detailed information on Bessarabia, until 1918 a province of the Russian Empire, and, to a lesser extent, on Bukovina, once a province within the Austrian part of Austria-Hungary. They include useful theoretical though somewhat debatable considerations on the history and ethnic nature of both regions. They come to proper conclusions which seem amply justified by the data and analysis which preceded them. However, both books are inadequately edited, especially the second one, and include a few statements either based on superficial generalizations or even tinted with disturbing — though perhaps unconscious — ethnocentrism.

Type
Review Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1982 by the Association for the Study of the Nationalities of the USSR and Eastern Europe, Inc. 

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References

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8 Ibid., pp. 119, 129.Google Scholar

9 Ibid., pp. 171, 172.Google Scholar

10 Ibid., pp. 162, 170.Google Scholar

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18 Biedrzycki, Emil, Historia Polakow na Bukowinie [History of the Poles in Bukovina] (Warsaw-Cracow, 1973), p. 26, n. 6. Contrary views are expressed in a book overlooked by the reviewed publications, Octavian Lupu, Bemerkungen zum Lage der Rumanen in der Bukowina während der Habsburgischer Herrschaft (Roma: Fondation Europeenne Dragan, 1980), although in more details but with a complete neglect of the provincial Diet and the privileged position of the Romanian landed gentry; also with an evident Romanian ethnocentrism. The Ruthenians are hardly mentioned; the word “Ukrainians” is never used.Google Scholar