SUMMARY:

This is a contribution to the discussion forum “Conceptualizing Society after the Modern Territorial State and Nation.” Svetlana Suveica presents the main takeaways from her book Post-imperial Encounters: Transnational Designs of Bessarabia in Paris and Elsewhere, 1917–1922 (De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2023). The book opens a unique window on the postimperial transition that Suveica characterizes as “in-betweenness” – in-between the crumbled Russian Empire and the yet nonexistent nation-state. She focuses on the old imperial and postrevolutionary Bessarabian elites, who were concerned that the new world order, increasingly dominated by nation-states, would obliterate Bessarabia’s particularity. The old elites were particularly prone to identifying this particularity with the Russian imperial regime and, therefore, they cherished plans for the restoration of the empire, siding with Russian monarchist émigrés. This was a major miscalculation, since the Russian Whites entertained a nationalist vision of Russia and had little concern for old imperial particularism. Thus, Bessarabian elites found themselves between the two nationalizing projects, Romanian and Russian, and became discontented with their competing claims for assimilating Bessarabia.