Andrei Cușco, 1878, înainte și după: construcție națională românească, politici imperiale ruse și viziuni ale alterității în Basarabia de sud / 1878, Before and After: Romanian Nation-Building, Russian Imperial Policies, and Visions of Otherness in Southern Bessarabia
The reintegration of three Southern Bessarabian districts into the Russian Empire in 1878 represented not only a high point of the Russian-Romanian symbolic competition for Bessarabia, but also the creation of an ‘administrativ aberration’ within the Russian Empire. The former Romanian territories, merged into the new Ismail uezd, preserved their institutional and legal peculiarities for almost 40 years. Thus, the modern structures of an emerging nation-state were transferred into the Russian imperial context. This article will discuss, first, the attitude of a number of Russian observers and officials towards the 1856 – 1878 Romanian administration, with a special emphasis on mutual perceptions and the foreign policy dimension. Second, the article will examine the polemics concerning the alternative strategies for integrating this region within the empire.