LAUSR

The book highlights in particular a number of key events in the nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries when such competition was most acute. There is a detailed discussion of the Russian-Romanian diplomatic controversy surrounding the return to Russia of three districts in southern Bessarabia in 1878. These three districts had been transferred to the Romanian principalities following the Crimean War in 1856 in order to prevent the mouth of the Danube falling under Russian control. The festivities surrounding the 1912 anniversary of Bessarabia’s incorporation into the Russian Empire are also highlighted by Cusco as the moment when Bessarabia really became part of the mental map of the Romanian intellectual community. A number of important Romanian publications were subsequently printed asserting the Romanian claim to the province. The 1905 Revolution and the First World War are also covered in depth as being formative for the antagonistic stances taken by Imperial Russia and the Romanian nation-state with regard to Bessarabia. The book includes case studies of three important Bessarabian Romanian intellectuals who contributed to the creation of images of Bessarabia within Romanian nationalist discourse before the First World War: Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu, Dimitrie C. Moruzi, and Constantin Stere. As Cusco points out elsewhere in the book, however, Bessarabia never attained the centrality of Transylvania or Bukovina in the Romanian nationalist imaginary or as an object of Romanian irredentism before the First World War. This is a thorough work that draws upon unpublished documents from the Russian State Historical Archive, the Archive of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Empire, the State Archive of the Russian Federation, and the National Archive of the Republic of Moldova. As the writing is quite dense in places, it is a work that will appeal to those with some prior knowledge of the history of Bessarabia and is a useful addition to the available works in English on this contested borderland.