SUMMARY:

This article discusses the celebration of the centenary of Bessarabia’s annexation to the Russian Empire in May 1912 and its significance for the conflicting rival Russian and Romanian discourses over this region in the early twentieth century. The authors argue that this event marked a defining moment in the consolidation of Bessarabia’s status as a contested borderland and had a powerful influence on the mutual Russian and Romanian claims to the province’s “symbolic inclusion.” On the one hand, it represented the high point of the attempts of the imperial authorities and the Russian public sphere to construct a coherent image of the province and to forge a representation of Bessarabia as an organic part of the imperial polity. On the other hand, it stimulated a “symbolic competition” between the Russian and Romanian visions of Bessarabia and its population, adding further complexity to Russian–Romanian relations both in the political and symbolic spheres. The Bessarabian case is an excellent illustration of the shifting patterns of identity politics and political mobilization in the late Russian Empire. The 1912 anniversary led to a “hardening” of the imperial discourse while also emphasizing its uneasy cohabitation with the “nationalizing motives” and its internal contradictions. The 1912 ceremonies performed in the Russian Empire also had consequences for the Romanian national narrative, including the firm placing of Bessarabia on the map of the Romanian intellectual community and the increased presence of Bessarabian topics in the political debates of the day. The peripheral Bessarabian context acted as a mirror for the dilemmas of state-building and identity construction in both cases. On the Russian side, the older concepts of dynastic loyalty and Orthodox unity had to adapt to the nationalizing vocabulary of ethnicity and “populist” rhetoric; on the Romanian side, the broadly shared national consensus was questioned in terms of priorities and ultimate goals. These processes intersected in May 1912, when the Russian and Romanian “scenarios of belonging” were enacted on the occasion of the festive ceremonies in Bessarabia and the opposing “rituals of commemoration” in the Romanian Kingdom.