Transnistria, officially known as the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic (PMR) and locally as Pridnestrovie, is a landlocked breakaway state internationally recognised as part of Moldova. Transnistria controls most of the narrow strip of land between the Dniester river and the Moldova–Ukraine border, as well as some land on the other side of the river's bank. Its capital and largest city is Tiraspol. Transnistria is officially designated by the Republic of Moldova as the Administrative-Territorial Units of the Left Bank of the Dniester ()Law No. 173 from 22 July 2005 "About main notes about special legal status of settlements of left bank of Dnestr (Transnistria)": Romanian , Russian or as ("Left (Bank) of the Dniester").
The region's origins can be traced to the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (MASSR), which was formed in 1924 within the Ukrainian SSR. During World War II, the Soviet Union took parts of the MASSR, which was dissolved, and of the Kingdom of Romania's Bessarabia to form the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1940. In 1990, during the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic was established in hopes that it would remain within the Soviet Union should Moldova seek unification with Romania or independence, the latter occurring in August 1991. Shortly afterwards, a military conflict between the two parties started in March 1992 and concluded with a ceasefire in July that year.
As a part of the ceasefire agreement, a three-party (Moldova, Russia, and Transnistria) Joint Control Commission and a trilateral peacekeeping force subordinated to the commission were created to deal with ceasefire violations. Although the ceasefire has held, the territory's political status remains unresolved: Transnistria is an unrecognized but de facto independent semi-presidential republicArticle 55 of the Constitution of the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic with its own government, parliament, military, police, postal system, currency, and vehicle registration.Jos Boonstra, Senior Researcher, Democratisation Programme, FRIDE. Moldova, Transnistria and European Democracy Policies , 2007 Its authorities have adopted a constitution, flag, national anthem, and coat of arms. After a 2005 agreement between Moldova and Ukraine, all Transnistrian companies seeking to export goods through the Ukrainian border must be registered with the Moldovan authorities. This agreement was implemented after the European Union Border Assistance Mission to Moldova and Ukraine (EUBAM) took force in 2005. In addition to the unrecognised Transnistrian citizenship, most Transnistrians have Moldovan citizenship,Der n-tv Atlas. Die Welt hinter den Nachrichten. Bertelsmann Lexicon Institute. 2008. page 31 but many also have Russian, Romanian, or Ukrainian citizenship. The main ethnic groups are Russians, Moldovans (Romanians), and Ukrainians.
Transnistria, along with Abkhazia and South Ossetia, is a post-Soviet "frozen conflict" zone.Vladimir Socor,, IASPS Policy Briefings, 1 March 2004 These three partially recognised or unrecognised states maintain friendly relations with each other and form the Community for Democracy and Rights of Nations.
In March 2022, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe adopted a resolution that defines the territory as under military occupation by Russia.
Toponymy and terminology
The region can also be referred to in English as Dniesteria, Trans-Dniester,Regions and territories: Trans-Dniester, BBC News, 7 March 2007 Transdniester or Transdniestria. These names are adaptations of the Romanian colloquial name of the region, Transnistria, meaning "beyond the Dniester". The term Transnistria was used in relation to eastern Moldova for the first time in the year 1989, in the election slogan of Leonida Lari, the deputy and member of the Popular Front of Moldova formed during the reforms of the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, when she stated:
The documents of the government of Moldova refer to the region as , meaning "Left (Bank) of the Dniester", or in full, ("Administrative-territorial unit(s) of the Left Bank of the Dniester").
According to the Transnistrian authorities and their constitution, the name of the state is the "Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic" (; , ; ). However, the name "Pridnestrovian Moldovan Republic" in English is occasionally used interchangeably with the aforementioned official name. Likewise, the term "Moldovan language" is also sometimes used interchangably with "Moldavian language", despite "Moldavian" being the name it is called by in the constitution.
According to the Transnistrian authorities, the short name of the state is Pridnestrovie (; , ; ), meaning "[land] by the Dniester".
The Supreme Council passed a law on 4 September 2024 which banned the use of the term Transnistria within the region, imposing a fine of 360 rubles or up to 15 days imprisonment for using the name in public.
History
Soviet and Romanian administration
In 1924, the Moldavian ASSR was proclaimed within the Ukrainian SSR. The ASSR included today's Transnistria () and an area () to the northeast around the city of Balta, but nothing from Bessarabia, which at the time formed part of the Kingdom of Romania. One of the reasons for the creation of the Moldavian ASSR was the desire of the Soviet Union at the time to eventually incorporate Bessarabia. On 28 June 1940, the USSR annexed Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina from Romania under the terms of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, and on 2 August 1940 the Supreme Soviet of the USSR created the Moldavian SSR by combining part of the annexed territory with part of the former Moldavian ASSR roughly equivalent to present-day Transnistria.
In 1941, after Axis forces invaded the Soviet Union in the Second World War, they defeated the Soviet troops in the region and occupied it. Romania controlled the entire region between Dniester and Southern Bug rivers, including the city of Odesa as local capital. The Romanian-administered territory, known as the Transnistria Governorate, with an area of and a population of 2.3 million inhabitants, was divided into 13 counties: Ananiev, Balta, Berzovca, Dubasari, Golta, Jugastru, Movilau, Oceacov, Odessa, Ovidiopol, Rîbnița, Tiraspol, and Tulcin. This expanded Transnistria was home to nearly 200,000 Romanian-speaking residents. The Romanian administration of Transnistria attempted to stabilise the situation in the area under Romanian control, implementing a process of Romanianisation. During the Romanian occupation of 1941–44, between 150,000 and 250,000 Ukrainian and Romanian Jews and 25,000 Romanian Roma were deported to Transnistria; the majority were murdered or died from other causes in the ghettos and concentration camps of the Governorate.
After the Red Army advanced into the area in 1944, Soviet authorities executed, exiled, or imprisoned hundreds of inhabitants of the Moldavian SSR in the following months on charges of collaboration with the Romanian occupiers. A later campaign directed against rich peasant families deported them to the Kazakh SSR and Siberia. Over the course of two days, 6–7 July 1949, a plan named "Operation South" saw the deportation of over 11,342 families by order of the Moldavian Minister of State Security, Iosif Mordovets.
Secession
In the 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev's policies of perestroika and glasnost in the Soviet Union allowed political liberalisation at a regional level. This led to the creation of various informal movements all over the country, and to a rise of nationalism within most Soviet republics. In the Moldavian SSR in particular, there was a significant resurgence of pro-Romanian nationalism among Moldovans.Timeline: Moldova BBC Country Profile: Moldova The most prominent of these movements was the Popular Front of Moldova (PFM). In early 1988, the PFM demanded that the Soviet authorities declare Moldovan the only state language, return to the use of the Latin alphabet, and recognise the shared ethnic identity of Moldovans and Romanians. The more radical factions of the PFM espoused extreme anti-minority, ethnocentric and chauvinist positions,Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power, Anatol Lieven, Yale University Press, 1999, , pp. 246Can Liberal Pluralism Be Exported?, Will Kymlicka, Magdalena Opalski, Oxford University Press, 2001, , pp. 208 calling for minority populations, particularly the Slavs (mainly Russians and Ukrainians) and Gagauz, to leave or be expelled from Moldova.The painful past retold Social memory in Azerbaijan and Gagauzia, Hülya Demirdirek, Postkommunismens Antropologi, University of Copenhagen, 12–14 April 1996.
On 31 August 1989, the Supreme Soviet of the Moldavian SSR adopted Moldovan as the official language with Russian retained only for secondary purposes, returned Moldovan to the Latin alphabet, and declared a shared Moldovan-Romanian linguistic identity. As plans for major cultural changes in Moldova were made public, tensions rose further. Ethnic minorities felt threatened by the prospects of removing Russian as the official language, which served as the medium of interethnic communication, and by the possible future reunification of Moldova and Romania, as well as the ethnocentric rhetoric of the PFM. The Yedinstvo (Unity) Movement, established by the Slavic population of Moldova, pressed for equal status for both the Russian and Moldovan languages.Andrei Panici. Romanian Nationalism in the Republic of Moldova, Global Review of Ethnopolitics, vol. 2 no. 2 (January 2003), pp. 37–51. Transnistria's ethnic and linguistic composition differed significantly from most of the rest of Moldova. The proportion of ethnic Russians and Ukrainians was especially high and an overall majority of the population, some of them Moldovans, spoke Russian as their mother tongue.
The nationalist PFM won the first free parliamentary elections in the Moldavian SSR in early 1990, and its agenda started slowly to be implemented. On 2 September 1990, the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic (PMSSR) was proclaimed as a Soviet republic by an ad hoc assembly, the Second Congress of the Peoples' Representatives of Transnistria, following a successful referendum. Violence escalated when in October 1990 the PFM called for volunteers to form armed militias to stop an autonomy referendum in Gagauzia, which had an even higher proportion of ethnic minorities. In response, volunteer militias were formed in Transnistria. In April 1990, nationalist mobs attacked ethnic Russian members of parliament, while the Moldovan police refused to intervene or restore order.Modern Hatreds: The Symbolic Politics of Ethnic War, Stuart J. Kaufman, Cornell University Press, 2001, , pp. 143
In the interest of preserving a unified Moldavian SSR within the USSR and preventing the situation escalating further, then Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, while citing the restriction of civil rights of ethnic minorities by Moldova as the cause of the dispute, declared the Transnistria proclamation to be devoid of a legal basis and annulled it by presidential decree on 22 December 1990.Kolsto, et al. "The Dniester Conflict: Between Irredentism and Separatism", Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 45, No. 6 (1993): 108."Ukaz Prezidenta Soiuza Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik O Merakh po Normalizatsii Obstanovki v SSR Moldova", Sovetskaia Moldova, no. 295 (17249), 1990-12-23, 1. Nevertheless, no significant action was taken against Transnistria and the new authorities were slowly able to establish control of the region.