Transformarea regiunii Basarabia în gubernie

Bessarabia was one of the first western provinces that came under the sights of the policy of administrative unification and Russification of the tsarism in the second half of the 19th century. Unlike the Baltic lands and Finland, which felt the consequences of Petersburg’s centralizing policy in the 1870s or 1880s, in Bessarabia such a policy was initiated in 1863, respectively 10 and 20 years earlier, in a context when the Russian armies were trying to suppress the revolution in Poland, when the new modern state – Romania – was becoming an increasingly important political reality. The last factor served for the tsarist authorities as a reason for accelerating and strengthening the Russification policy in Bessarabia. The documents allow us to highlight two stages of the process of transforming the Bessarabia region into a gubernya. In the first stage, the years 1863-1865, discussing the prerogatives of the Regional Council, it was found that, in fact, over the years, most of the functions of the Regional Council had been managed by other institutions, and it had become a useless body. At that stage, the discussions regarding the modification of the legal status of Bessarabia were stopped, until the introduction of the zemstva in the region, and until the preparation and realization of the agrarian and judicial reform in the province. In the second stage, the years 1868-1873, the correspondence between the governor general of Novorossia and Bessarabia with the governor of Bessarabia emphasized the stages of the gradual liquidation by the imperial authorities of “privileges” and “local peculiarities”. On October 28, 1873, Emperor Alexander II, following the discussions in the State Council, approved the proposal regarding the abolition of the Regional Council and the renaming of the Bessarabia region into a gubernya. The respective policy of administrative uniformity and national-cultural Russification of Bessarabia represented not only a way of consolidating the integrity of the Russian Empire, but also a way of “solving” of the Bessarabian problem.