Moldovan emigration refers to the process whereby people of Moldovan heritage or ethnicity left Moldova to settle in other parts of the world. Establishing the precise contours of Moldovan emigration is a difficult task, as what is now Moldova was historically considered to be parts of Romania, Ukraine or the Russian Empire. In more modern times, Moldovan emigration was limited by concerted efforts by the government of the USSR to prevent migration from countries like Moldova to Western Europe and North America. It is only since the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War that Moldovan emigration has escalated in modern times, though even now Moldova is in a unique position in that it has not gained entry into the European Union like so many of its neighbors and Moldovans have less freedom of movement around Europe than do most other national groups of the continent. Still, the country’s population has declined drastically from a high of nearly four and a half million at the end of the Cold War to just three million people today. A Moldovan diaspora has emerged with strong presences in countries like Romania, Ukraine, Russia, Germany, Italy and France during the same time period.[1]
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Moldovan emigration chronology of eventsMoldovan emigration chronology of events
The history of Moldovan emigration is complicated by a debate over whether or not Moldovans constitute an ethnically distinct people from Romanians. In medieval times three distinct principalities developed covering most of what we now consider to be Romania and some adjacent lands in Hungary, Moldova and south-western Ukraine. These three principalities were Transylvania in the west, Wallachia in the south and Moldavia in the north. To further confuse matters, the region covered by Moldova today is not synonymous with medieval and early modern Moldavia. Instead it correlates primarily with another region known as Bessarabia. This region, Bessarabia, is the one most keenly associated with a group of people who viewed themselves as being ethnically distinct from the wider Romanian population. As elsewhere around Europe, in the nineteenth century a romantic nationalism developed here and Moldavians began to stress their distinct identity, even though they spoke Romanian and their history and culture broadly overlapped with that of the Romanian people to a considerable extent.[2]
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This Moldavian or Moldovan identity soon found political expression. For centuries Bessarabia and Moldavia were controlled as vassal territories of the Ottoman Empire of the Turks. Then in the early nineteenth century they were conquered and absorbed into the Russian Empire, while further south the Kingdom of Romania acquired its own separate independence from the Turks following the Russo-Turkish War of 1877 to 1878. The Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Russian Civil War that followed saw Bessarabia briefly become part of Romania. It remained part of that kingdom until 1940 when the Soviet Union occupied it as part of the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact agreed with Nazi Germany a year earlier. The Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic was therefore established. It was liberated in 1944 and remained a part of the USSR down to 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed at the end of the Cold War. At that juncture, the country established its modern independence as Moldova.[3]
Moldovan emigration is something of a modern phenomenon. During the era of the Cold War Moldovans were heavily restricted from moving in and out of their country and the population had grown considerably during the era of Soviet rule. Once the Cold War ended there was an initial wave of migration. This movement was facilitated by some association agreements with the European Union that have facilitated Moldovan movement around Europe, though not without considerable restrictions at the same time, as Moldova is not yet an EU member state, although it is in accession talks. Modern Moldovan emigration has been further augmented by an internal conflict through which Russia has encouraged the Transnistria region to break away from the wider Moldovan state.[4]
Extent of Moldovan emigrationExtent of Moldovan emigration
It is hard to assess the scale of any Moldovan emigration that might have occurred in the second half of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century. Most of those who arrived to New York, for example, during this period might have been recorded as Romanians or citizens of the Russian Empire during this time period. Moldovan emigration was curtailed during the Cold War. It is really only since the collapse of the Soviet Union at the start of the 1990s that Moldovan emigration has escalated, fueled initially by a severe economic crisis that impacted on many former parts of the Soviet Union in the 1990s and then by growing wealth disparities between Moldova and the rest of Europe ever since.[5]
We can get a good sense of how intense the emigration has been by simply looking at the overall decline of the Moldovan population during that time. There were nearly four and a half million people living in Moldova when the Cold War came to an end. By 2000 that had declined somewhat to 4.25 million and then to four million around 2005. This means Moldova lost around half a million people between 1990 and 2005. The fifteen-year period that followed that was the era of real change. During it the Moldovan population fell to three million people as hundreds of thousands of Moldovans left, availing of greater freedom of movement as partial agreements were reached with the EU thereon. In the early 2020s emigration from Moldova appears to have stabilized slightly, though the long term trend is unclear and the apparent stabilization might have been a temporary development attendant on the Covid-19 Pandemic.[6]
Furthermore, these figures are complicated by the breakaway nature of Transnistria. An estimated 450,000 people live here, meaning that the region over which the Moldovan government exercises effective control has a population of not much more than two and a half million people. If Moldovan emigration continues on its modern trajectory, studies suggest the population level could fall to two million people or less by the middle of the twenty-first century.[7]
Demographic impact of Moldovan emigrationDemographic impact of Moldovan emigration
Modern Moldovan emigration has resulted in a sizeable Moldovan diaspora abroad in other parts of Europe. As would be expected, there are many ethnic Moldovans and Moldovan-born individuals in Ukraine and Romania, over a quarter of a million in each instance. That being said, these are unusual cases given the historical elasticity concerning the respective borders of Ukraine, Moldova and Romania since the nineteenth century. Moldova’s historical links with Russia have ensured that over 70,000 people there are considered ethnic Moldovans today, while since the Second World War hundreds of thousands of Moldovans have lived and worked in Russia.[8]
Further afield the largest Moldovan diaspora communities are in Germany and Italy. The 2022 census in Germany revealed a Moldovan community of over 120,000 people, while there are just over 100,000 Moldovans in Italy. There is then a sizeable gap downwards to countries like France, Spain and Portugal, where between 10,000 and 25,000 Moldovans reside in each instance. The Moldovan American community is considered to have been historically quite small. The 2000 federal census recorded under 8,000 Moldovan Americans. This points to the problematic issue of recording Moldovans historically. There were probably many more people who entered the United States during the great wave of European migration to the western hemisphere between 1840 and 1924 who were recorded as being either Romanian or Ukrainian or as citizens of the Russian Empire. As such, the demographic impact of Moldovan emigration is harder to assess if we go back a century and more than it would be for regions in Europe which were established as independent parts of the continent already at that time.[9]
See alsoSee also
Explore more about Moldovan emigrationExplore more about Moldovan emigration
- Former Russian Empire, World War I Casualties records collection on MyHeritage
- Bessarabia, Jewish Births from JewishGen records collection on MyHeritage
- Bessarabia, Revision Lists from JewishGen records collection on MyHeritage
- Bessarabia, Jewish Marriages from JewishGen records collection on MyHeritage
- Researching Eastern European Archives from Your Easy Chair at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- Survival Skills for Eastern European Genealogists at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- Break Down Brick Walls in Eastern European Research – Tips, Tools and Tricks at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- Locating and Accessing Eastern European Church Records at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
References
- ↑ https://www.eurasian-research.org/publication/emigrant-moldova-and-the-changing-concept-of-migration/
- ↑ Andrei Cusco, A Contested Borderland: Competing Russian and Romanian Visions of Bessarabia in the Second Half of the 19th and Early 20th Century (Budapest, 2017).
- ↑ https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-17601579
- ↑ https://www.euractiv.com/section/politics/news/the-transnistria-crisis-explained/
- ↑ https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/moldova-seeks-stability-amid-mass-emigration
- ↑ https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/moldova-population/
- ↑ https://www.osw.waw.pl/en/publikacje/osw-commentary/2025-01-08/a-disappearing-country-moldova-verge-a-demographic-catastrophe
- ↑ Igor Caşu, ‘Moldova under the Soviet Communist Regime: History and Memory’, in Vladimir Tismaneanu and Bogdan C. Iacob (eds.), Remembrance, History, and Justice: Coming to terms with traumatic pasts in democratic societies (Budapest, 2015), pp. 347–372.
- ↑ Maria Simionov, ‘Shifting attitudes towards identity, borders and geopolitical choices: The case of Moldova’, in Regional Science Policy and Practice, Vol. 15, No. 1 (February, 2013), pp. 200–222.