Romania

After the First World War, Romania emerged as the second most populous state in East Central Europe (17,793,250 in 1930).⁹³ During the 1919-20 peace settlements, Romania acquired Bessarabia from Russia, southern Dobruja from Bulgaria, and Transylvania, Bukovina, and the Banat from Austria-Hungary, doubling its pre-war territory.⁹⁴ Like Poland, this state possessed a poor economy with 72 per cent of its population dependent on agriculture.⁹⁵ After annexing these territories, Romania acquired 500,000 to 900,000 Ukrainians, or approximately 3 per cent of its total popula- tion.⁹⁶ Romania’s post-war government gained Allied recognition of its control of Bukovina at the Treaty of Saint-Germain in September 1919 and of Bessarabia at the Treaty of Paris in October 1920.

The new Romanian state was not a nationally homogeneous one. According to its census of 1930, Romanians comprised 70.8 per cent of the total population and included sizeable minorities, such as Hungarians and Germans.⁹⁷

Of the three provinces Romania incorporated in 1918 (Bessarabia, Bukovina, and Transylvania), Bukovina possessed the smallest number of Romanians. Ukrainians resided in compact areas in the northern half of the region, where they barely outnumbered the area’s Romanians. The re­lationship between Ukrainians and Romanians in Bukovina paralleled in many ways the antagonism between Ukrainians and Poles in Galicia.⁹⁸

Much as the voivodeships of Lwow, Stanislawow, and Tarnopol dif­fered from Wolyn, Bukovina differed from adjacent Bessarabia. As part o the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Bukovina received a greater degree of self-government than any other Ukrainian region and nurtured a well-developed Ukrainian civil society before the First World War.

The new Romanian government dismantled Ukrainian achievements from the Austrian period. Officials prohibited the use of the Ukrainian language in public administration, in the courts, and in the schools and replaced it with Romanian. Post-war Romania acquired 216 Ukrainian- language schools from the Austrian period; within a decade the authorities converted all of them into bilingual Romanian-Ukrainian schools, then Romanian-language schools.¹⁰⁰ They abolished Ukrainian-language pro­fessorships at the University of Czernowitz (Romanian: Cernauti; Ukrainian: Chernivtsi) and banned the Ukrainian press and political par­ties. Although the government eased this state of siege in the Ukrainian areas in the late 1920s, they reimposed it a decade later, prohibiting all Ukrainian organizations and closing all Ukrainian-language schools. Its ministers and legislators sought to disfranchise its Ukrainian population linguistically and politically.¹⁰¹ In 1924, the Romanian parliament enacted a law that described Ukrainians “as Romanians who have lost the native tongue of their ancestors.”¹⁰² This official definition of Ukrainians set the tone for Romanian-Ukrainian relations during the interwar period. Within a few years after their incorporation into Romania, Ukrainians lost their status as a recognized national minority and were forced into the melting pot of Romanianization.

Yet, despite the enforcement of discriminatory measures against Ukrainians, the twenty- year Romanian control of Bukovina and Bessarabia did not succeed in denationalizing this group. Instead, the government needlessly antagonized its Ukrainian population and unintentionally pro­voked an irreconcilable hatred of the Romanians.