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previous: Chapter 11 This webpage reproduces a chapter of Twentieth-Century Ukraine by Clarence Manning published by Bookman Associates New York, 1951 The text is in the public domain. This page has been carefully proofread and I believe it to be free of errors. If you find a mistake though, please let me know! next: Chapter 13

 p115  XII

The Ukrainians and Romania

Those Western Ukrainians who had not passed under the control of Poland found themselves in either Romania or Czecho­slovakia. In neither of these countries did they form as large or as concentrated a minority as in Eastern Galicia but their numbers were not unimportant.

There were nearly one million Ukrainians living in the provinces of Bukovina and Bessarabia who went to Romania. In the early days these had sought to join themselves to the Western Ukrainian Republic but in both provinces their hopes had been quickly dashed to the ground by the energetic action of the Romanian army in seizing Chernivtsy and other centers before the Ukrainians could mobilize their volunteer detachments and cement their regime. From that point on, they were denied all opportunities of organization.

As a Latin-speaking race, the Romanians were suspicious of all Eastern Slavs. In past centuries the Zaporozhian Kozaks had had close relations with the people of Moldavia and Wallachia. Vasil Lupul, the hospodar of Moldavia, had given his daughter in marriage to Timosh, the son of the hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky. The union of the two Danubian principalities in the kingdom of Romania in the nineteenth century and the growth of Latin ties had changed this old feeling and the Romanians were perhaps the most unreasonably anti-Ukrainian  p116 of all the states which succeeded to their control.

Slowly but surely the Romanians liquidated practically the entire Ukrainian school system by introducing into it the Romanian language.⁠1 This was accelerated by a law in 1924 which declared the Ukrainians "Romanians who had forgotten their native language" — a highly original solution of the problem which flattered the Romanian argument that the entire population was descended from the ancient Roman settlers in Dacia.

The process was a little slower in Bessarabia, where there were conflicting political crises, arising from the fact that the United States did not fully recognize the Romanian occupation of the province, since it had formed part of the old Russian Empire.

After 1928 there came some small alleviation of the Ukrainian status. But Ukrainian political, journalistic and economic institutions were almost non-existent; in fact, during the entire period between the two world wars, it is hardly possible to speak of organized Ukrainian work in any field under Romanian rule. The Romanians, even more than the Poles, were firmly convinced that they had to repress all manifestations of Ukrainian activity, since it was motivated only by the desire to join the Soviet Union and might be regarded as indicating a lack of unity among the inhabitants of Greater Romania.

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The Author's Note:

1 Velyka Istoriya Ukrainy, p859 f.

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