Strategia sovietică privind teritoriile românești (1918-1924)

In 1918, Bessarabia proclaimed its independence from the Russian Empire and united with Romania. The Bolsheviks pursued the objective of transforming Bessarabia into a bridgehead for the Romanian revolution. The project failed. In 1918, Soviet Russia, counting on the support of Hungarian Soviet troops, prepared for war against Romania. And this project ended in failure. At the beginning of 1920, the highest-ranking military specialists prepared a report addressed to L. Trotsky, the president of the Revolutionary-Military Council of the Russian Soviet Republic, in which they argued the necessity of regaining Bessarabia, because the province, they claimed, covered the entire south of Russia from Hungary and Romania. In the situation where Romania would not accept the retrocession of Bessarabia, the option of delimiting the Romanian territory between the Prut and Dniester was proposed based on the ethnic structure of the population of the counties of the former Bessarabian governorate and, above all, based on the strategic interests of Soviet Russia. On October 12, 1924, the III Session of the Central Executive Committee of Ukraine adopted the decision “On the creation of the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic within Ukraine”, according to which the border of the SSR, to the west and southwest, lied on “state border of the USSR”. In the conviction of some Bolshevik leaders from Balta and Kyiv, this formula would have meant that the territory between the Dniester and the Prut was also included in the composition of the MASSR, since the Soviet Union had not recognized the union of Bessarabia with Romania. At the current stage of the research, no official document was identified in which the western and southwestern borders of the MASSR were fixed on the Prut River and the Danube. On the contrary, the western and southwestern border of the MASSR was not even declared on the Prut and the Danube but remained on the Dniester.