Interwar Romania

This text discusses several aspects of the interwar history of the Orthodox Church in Romanian Transylvania through the lens of the early life and political achievements of Father Liviu Stan (1910–1973). By using a microhistorical approach, his life stands as proof of the ability of ideological reconversion to describe the various totalitarian challenges that defined the destiny of an entire generation of Orthodox theologians in the twentieth century. Rather than painting the biographical tapestry of Father Stan's life, the main focus of this text falls precisely on his interactions with various ideologies (Fascism and Communism), his ideological and professional reconversions, and Transylvanian Orthodox theologians’ ability to survive when confronted with various totalitarian challenges.

The present article deals with the scientific and political configuration of Criminal Law in Greater Romania, by focusing on three Criminal code projects (1928, 1933, 1934), together with the theoretical explanations that come along and political motivations that surface the penal discourse. Although Romania was victorious in the Great War, many analysts considered that the country was not yet „safe”, as further enemies were to be fought. The Criminal domain proves extremely important in the national venture of defense: the Criminal Code projects made in the epoch show a vivid preoccupation for „defending the society” (Foucault) from its internal enemies. I argue that the turbulent post-World War One social and political context and the success of the positivism-inspired Criminal law in interwar Europe, assumed explicitly or implicitly by the institutional actors involved, trigger significant changes in the Criminal law of interwar Romania. These changes, were part of a larger process of „somatization” (Cooter) that marks the modern culture and illustrate the process of medicalization of the Criminal law in Greater Romania.

After several failed projects to restore a conservative party in the 20s, Grigore Filipescu (son of Nicholas Filipescu) took a first step in this direction in 1929, when he established the „Vlad the Impaler” League. This group was transformed in 1932 into the Conservative Party. The first action by the new party was the boycotting of the agricultural debt conversion law, arguing that it attacks the right to property, which was sacred and inviolable. The new Conservative Party led by Grigore Filipescu has not played an important role in the political life of Greater Romania. In the 1932 election, the only one in which the party din not participate in an alliance, Filipescu's group obtained 0.62% of the votes, obtaining only 15th place. The party was involved, along with the People's Party and the Gheorghe Brătianu wing of the National Liberal Party, in the campaign against the palace camarilla and for the preservation of the constitution. Some members of the Conservative Party, aware that in the current situation the grouo could not play an important role in the political life, tried to form a large right-wing party, that would include the legionnaires and would be led by General Ion Antonescu. The project was a failure. Grigore Filipescu approached increasingly towards the National Peasant Party, and signed an alliance with them, so most of the party colleagues abandoned him. During this period the National Peasant Party was supported by the left-wing organizations, which were mostly camouflaged communist groups. So, the remains of the Conservative Party came to collaborate with the Communists, organizing various joint actions. The Conservative Party is dissolved in 1938 and in the same year Grigore Filipescu dies and and his newspaper „Epoca” is suspended. The group has, throughout its existence, a tiny party, which didnʼt play an important role in the Romanian political scene. The reasons for this failure were multiple. First of all, beeing a party that is based solely on its leader, its image has suffered due to the negative image that the group leader had. Public opinion was confused by Filipescuʼs attitude, an inconstant character, who supported dictatorship one day and the next day fought it, one day criticized Maniu and the next day organized a banquet in his honor, one day had an anti-communists attitude and the next day collaborated with them and so on.

The author of this paper is examining the publicist activity of Lucreţiu Pătrăşcanu during the period of 1921 – 1924 as it constitutes one of the best samples of raw wooden language in Romania. Early before and several years after Romanian
Communist Party was constituted, the writers of "Socialismul" and "Tineretul Socialist" implemented for the first time in our country, the so called double speak. Pătrşcanu was one of the most important left sided journalists as it was one of the editor in chief of the two newspapers mentioned earlier. The author focuses on syntax, vocabulary and linguistic style elements as it tries to find similarities and differences between the standard wooden language and the Romanian early interwar one.

The paper discusses how Fascist Italy conveyed its ideological messages through the propaganda films exported to Bucharest in the interwar period and, especially, in the 1930s. Mussolini’s dictatorship was in search of consent and praise both home and abroad and exporting movies that depicted favourable aspects of the regime was one of the means it used for this purpose. Il Duce strongly believed in the cinema’s power to bolster pride and raise popular support for its actions from the Italian diaspora and international elites, and Romania was one of the many destinations where the films were enthusiastically received. 
Keywords: Fascist Italy, Fascist propaganda, Interwar Romania, Fascist Cinema, Italians in Romania

This paper examines the influence of urban fashion ideas disseminated worldwide from France and how they impacted the Romanian ideas of style and beauty, as well as the nature of the communication between Paris and the so-colled ”Little Paris”. My aim is to decode the interwar Romanian interpretation of the new woman notion and assess what type of role contemporary French gender philosophies had played in its creation. For this, I will investigate the nature of this inter-capital dialogue in order to determine the intersections and contrasts, which I will integrate within the larger cultural, social, economic and political context in Romania, France, and worldwide. I will treat women’s fashion as the materialization of multiple factors pertaining to interwar Bucharest’s private and public life habits, as a capital embracing both modernity and tradition with an original tone. My sources include relevant local, national and international publications, including periodicals, contemporary books, guides and memoirs. These will also provide a clearer scope of the Parisian influence through articles and fashion spreads, but also through the multitude of ads published throughout interwar Romania. Furthermore, I will underline the theoretical and aesthetic influence Romanians had on Parisian fashion from two points of view. The first will be the case of women used by artists or public and private entities as models or passive agents in fashion creation and dissemination. I will use the Miss Romania pageants as a general example, alongside the more complex story of dancer Lizica Codreanu and her connection to Constantin Brâncuși and Tristan Tzara, and through him to Sonia Delaunay. For the second category I will use the example of Alice Cocea and Elvire Popesco as movie fashion icons, and of Princess Marthe Bibesco as both a style influencer and fashion theoretician

This paper proposes an overview of the intertwined streams of cultural, political, economic and social aspects that made up the fashion-consuming women’s interwar Bucharest, through the scope of fashion studies. For this, I will outline the extended methodological and conceptual scope which defines fashion studies in correlation with historical analysis. This wide range of research includes cultural anthropology, semiotics, sociology, cultural, gender and identity studies, adding to the technical, artistic, and philosophical implications already popular in pursuits of costume history. My paper will be centred around the idea of crafting illusions. I will use the word “craft” both in its magical and metaphysical sense, as in “witchcraft”, but also suggesting all aspects of craftsmanship. Therefore, my study deals with the conception, production, dissemination, consumption, and interpretation of fashionability. Drawing from this double-meaning, crafting illusions means invoking an idealised reality of prosperity, success, and power, which can hide a less glamorous reality. It can also be weaponised, from social control to building a national image. I will thus use the methods of fashion studies to interpret how the elegant Bucharester myth was constructed in an era of great upheavals. I aim to illustrate the fashion studies methodological and conceptual frameworks as a valid method of research, which has already been recognised as such in Western academia as a full-fledged discipline blending media, design, humanities, science, marketing, and politics. I will juxtapose the images seen in fashionable touristic spaces, such as Calea Victoriei, to the grim realities of a world recovering from past trauma, soon to delve into a new disaster. This will allow a snapshot of interwar Romania’s complexity through the lens of fashion.

Interwar Romanian Students' movement was well-known for its anti-Semitic beliefs. Throughout this article, we will try to present the most important aspects regarding The Second National Orthodox Students' Congress, which was held in Oradea in December 1927 and its consequences. Subsequently, this paper will present the Opening ceremony and some important issues that were discussed in the first two days of the Congress. Further, we will present some international reactions to this pogrom - as it was and it is largely considered in historiography. This article presents also the trial and some hypothesis largely spread about the way that turbulences had begun.

This paper explores the methodological and discursive transition in Aurel Voina’s theoretical conceptualisation of cosmetic science. The primary focus is the rewriting of personal and professional identity, assessing how Aurel Voina negotiated his conceptual and practical expertise from his role as eugenics ideologue and policy maker in the interwar era, to a much more marginal position as medical professional in Communist Romania. The aim is to identify common elements and how deep did the historical manipulation protrude. This paper thus offers a closer view of political changes determining calibrations in physical and conceptual self-representation, considering concepts of fluid identity and manipulation of memory.

This article deals with the emergence of a new type of crime prevention in  interwar Romania. Inspired by the Italian school of criminal law and by the Italian Criminal Code ”Rocco” (1930), the Romanian Criminal Code ”King Carol II” (1936) formulates a new type of criminal sanctions, explicitly designed to address and combat the social dangerousness. Regarded as a major challenge to the classic criminal system based on free will and guilt, the ”security measures” were formalizing new types of offenders defined as such not by their criminal acts but by their criminal potential, redefining the scope and the goal of the criminal prevention. Major debates in the epoch reveal the possible threats this new type of criminal sanctions and of a criminal policy orientated towards risk prevention, seen as closely connected with authoritarian tendencies, carried for individual freedom and the rule of law. The legal issues discussed in the epoch
prove significant for the current debates regarding the negative consequences the preventive War on Terror have for individual freedom and the rule of law.

Keywords:prevention, ”security measures”, interwar Romania, Criminal Code.
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Grigore N. Filipescu, engineer and lawyer, was a controversial and inconstant politician in Interwar Romania. He had passed through many political parties until 1929, when he founded his own political organization. He was also involved in other areas, being the president of the Romanian Telephone Company, conducting the constuctrion of the Câmpina-Constanţa oil pipeline and organizing the first international fencing contests in Romania.

In this study, we intend to present, using a socio-historical approach, the political and administrative aspects of the interwar Romanian society and state, as it has been investigated, from the perspective of monographic methodology, by the Sociological School of Bucharest, headed by Professor Dimitrie Gusti. The article aims at highlighting the existing legislative conflict between the traditional local government organization in the “old” Counties of Făgăraş and Vrancea, for example, and the modern administrative codes, adopted after 1864, by the “new” centralized Romanian state. Furthermore, we also highlight the negative perception of the population in the Romanian villages of Bessarabia and Transylvania (who lived under the tsarist and Austro-Hungarian rule until World War I) on the deficient administrative functioning of the interwar Romanian state. Although various projects of administrative reform attempted to correct these shortcomings, within the interwar period studied, excessive bureaucratization of the state and poor salaries of the public servants remained constant elements of the Romanian administrative political life.

This paper delineates the conceptual variations between the notions 'fashion', 'dress' and 'costume' in English-language texts on women's garment histories using relevant examples from interwar Romanian periodicals. The aim is to offer a more precise formulation, as these three terms have largely been used interchangeably. This paper is built on an interdisciplinary model stemming from fashion studies towards semiotics, sociology and cultural and art history. I define 'fashion' as a permanently changing progeny of modernity linked to capitalism and consumerism, but also to modernism and technological progress. 'Dress' is a generalised term for clothing worn in a variety of contexts connected more to identity or activity. 'Costume' narrows the scope of 'dress' to a particular style or outfit suggesting specific markers of social position, occupation or ethnicity and can often be deemed as necessary for admission, recognition or acceptability in certain contexts. 'Fashion' would then chiefly apply to cultural studies or history, 'dress' to anthropology or sociology and 'costume' to ethnology or media and art history. Using interwar Romanian examples, this paper offers a viable terminological clarification regarding genre, subject, scope and usability for historical sartorial themes.

Interwar Romania was a space of social-cultural contrasts which it wholeheartedly embraced. Bucharest, as the capital, was the perfect mirror of Romanian society, a liminal space, geographically and culturally. Women’s fashion and beauty in interwar middle-class Bucharest, offers a wide array of unexplored research questions which are addressed in the thesis. The timeframe begins with Greater Romania’s crystallization in 1919 and ends in 1939 with World War Two. The Introduction includes a general outline, aims, objectives and structure of the thesis. The Methodological Framework sets the study as an informed disciplinary discourse analysis, using fashion studies and cultural, urban, gender, media, literary, identity studies, and semiotics. The Literature Review outlines the context of the Romanian metropolitan and urban cultures within my thematic and theoretical framework. The following chapters comprise the analysis of the gathered primary material. The chapter Metropolitan and Urban Cultures: Bucharest offers a multidimensional portrait of Bucharest and its relationship with fashion. The chapter Gender, Body, Beauty summaries the theoretical aspects behind the interwar understanding of gender and beauty, the body, health, and the growing interest in social hygiene. The chapter Women’s Representation in Literature and Visual Arts is devoted to women’s textual and visual representations from personal and outer perspectives. The Conclusion synthesizes all these aspects within the larger scope of the phenomenon of Modernity. The thesis draws on the primary sources that have been absent or little used in the relevant research, thus making an outstanding contribution to the existing knowledge, and opening the path to interdisciplinary research on the subject. In this sense, the study transcends the specialized perspectives for a comprehensive image of interwar Romania seen through fashionable female Bucharesters.

This article looks at the situation of civil servants in interwar Romania, as a result of global economic and financial crisis, which led, during 1929-1933, to a significant deterioration in the level of wages and living standards for all state employees. As a result of bankruptcies, restrictions in economic activity or application of „sacrifice curves” [curbe de sacrificiu] in the public sector, poverty and unemployment amongst the branches of intellectual labor have reached an alarming rate. Confronted with economic difficulties and the necessity of budgetary compressions, the Romanian state was forced to impose three sacrifice curves (January 1931, January 1932, January 1933) and took various other measures of “harmonization” and “rectification” of the government employees’ remuneration, which resulted in the slashing by more than 50% of the salary of civil servants. As a result of these austerity measures, the specter of extreme hunger, disease, misery and despair (constantly lurking over the troubled, impoverished life of the petty civil servant, whose large families resided mainly in the shabby slums of the big cities) became an objective and recurrent reality for the destiny of this social class throughout the period studied. Dismissals on political grounds, abusive references to the disciplinary committee as a result of “anonymous” denunciation, interminable court processes, complete the picture of the sad miserable lives lived by most of the Romanian petty civil servants.

INTERWAR ROMANIA: NEW ASSESSMENTS Ionuţ Butoi's book represents an exciting and innovative contribution to the social, intellectual and political history of the interwar period. The extended commentary I have written with reference to this work, cluttered in several places with some constructively oriented critical remarks, pinpoints the relatively unusual character of the book within the contemporary literature regarding this topic, a literature where the interwar period is still praised and made the prey of ideology, on the basis of some shallow prejudices. Cartea lui Ionuţ Butoi (Mircea Vulcănescu. O microistorie a interbelicului românesc, Bucureşti, Editura Eikon, 2015) mi-a prilejuit o nesperată bucurie. Deşi expresia pare clişeistică, ea este perfect adecvată, în primul rând pentru că mi-a clarificat măcar o parte din numeroasele lacune şi prejudecăţi pe care le aveam despre interbelicul românesc şi, în al doilea rând, pentru că, deşi este o lucrare tributară unei viziuni conservatoare, opţiune ideologică pe care nu o împărtăşesc, aduce în prim-plan metode analitice prea puţin sau deloc utilizate la noi, cum ar fi aceea a microistoriei. Această disciplină pune judicios în context naţional şi internaţional diferitele curente, tendinţe, personalităţi şi categorii sociale ale interbelicului şi, nu în ultimul rând, oferă noi şi bogate deschideri asupra unei etape a trecutului recent pe care ne-am obişnuit fie să o privim în mod unilateral, reducţionist ori să o

In interwar Romania, the Bucharest School of Sociology, founded by academician Dimitrie Gusti, theorized and implemented the first integrated program of community development, financed from the state budget, through the “Prince Carol” Royal Cultural Foundation, under the patronage of King Carol II. In this article we will review the main causes leading to the failure of this project, aimed at culturally and materially lifting the Romanian village from its state of underdevelopment: on the one hand, peasants’ illiteracy, poverty, passivity and distrust of modernity and on the other, intellectual arrogance, lack of resources, Dimitrie Gusti’s utopian vision, combined with the inefficiency of the education system and failure of agriculture.

Studiul de față decodifică influența Hollywood-ului asupra femeilor consumatoare de modă în cazul particular al Gretei Garbo și identificarea impactului său concret după cum a fost reprezentată în presa interbelică. Aprofundarea acestor aspecte ale modei interbelice, folosind metodele inerent interdisciplinare ale studiilor de modă, oferă o imagine panoramică a capitalei și a României prin extensie, incluzând detalii despre realitățile de gen, economice, sociale, politice, dar și artistice. Astfel, voi folosi metodologii specifice studiilor culturale (studii de modă, gen, film), sociologiei, economiei și ale istoriei artei pentru analiza semiotică și discursivă a articolelor și imaginilor cu caracter instructiv sau descriptiv. Pornind de la ideea diseminării globale a ideilor americane în perioada interbelică, personificată mai ales prin mitul Gretei Garbo, acest eseu își propune să contureze portretul bucureștencei interbelice prin prisma influenței modelelor estetice și comportamentale venite din direcția Hollywood-ului.

After the collapse of the communist regime, Romanian education policy has taken a turn towards Europeanization. Drawing from fieldwork data collected in the multicultural district of Cluj, I focus on diversity as an aspect of Europeanization of schooling in Romania. My findings reveal that Europeanization works symbolically rather than substantially in educational establishments enrolling a multi-ethnic student body. Although diversity is embraced discursively by teachers and staff, school practices fail to demonstrate an incorporation of diversity into the Romanian national narrative which remains marked by the old structures of ethnocentric monoculturalism and self-victimization. Explanatory factors brought into discussion refer to institutional continuity (i.e. the persistence of old habits in everyday school practices) and institutional contradiction (i.e. the coexistence of the distinctive logics of multiculturalism as difference and of integration as social justice in the delivery of educational policy for Hungarian and Roma minorities)

After the First World War, numerous Romanian ex-combatants came to expect various material and symbolic rewards from their state, having fought for the latter. Consequently, in the interwar era the political stability of the Romanian nation-state ended up depending, to a relevant degree, on this state’s effectiveness in acknowledging the veterans’ claims to benefits.

In the first decade after 1918, Romania’s parliament played a relevant role in the political stabilization of the war returnees and the endurance of democratic institutions, as the main parliamentary parties at the time helped develop comprehensive veterans’ policies, thereby preserving the support of many ex-combatants and preventing extremist anti-parliamentary organizations from gaining a strong following among the latter.

In analyzing this dynamic, my proposed contribution surveys the ways parliamentary parties, in addition to the governments of this era, approached the former fighters’ requests, and how they created links to the ex-soldiers’ community by satisfying the latter’s aspirations. Additionally, in assessing the factors leading the parliamentary parties to achieve this policy success, my analysis points to the existence of a consensus, among these parties, on the need to reward ex-combatants, which stemmed from shared ideological beliefs and facilitated political cooperation toward satisfying the veterans.

The First World War with its immediate consequences that had enflamed Europe, led to the adoption by the Romanian state of a unitary law regarding the civil servants. The Civil Servants General Statute of the 19th June 1923 was a long time desideratum of the Romanian state employees. The new juridical framework established equal rights (admissibility
conditions, promotion, retirement – including mandatory retirement etc – for all the civil servants. Although this law had many shortcomings, it improved Romanian civil servants statute that other subsequent laws tried many times to escape from it.
The aim of this article is to demonstrate that the study of the civil servants can give a lot of answers and a better understanding of the Interwar Romania and its bureaucracy.

The article recounts major life experiences of the two Henri Stahl, father and son, in the period just prior to and during the difficult years of World War I. Seen through the sparse and sometimes vaguely outlined background of the nascence of sociology as a science in Romania, one gains insight into the future sociologist Henri H. Stahl. Although focus is placed upon the father, who was actively involved in the military conflict and whose emotional account of the Porumbacu battle is to be found in the Annex, several defining events in Henri H. Stahl’s early life are emphasized. Among those are: his first fieldwork experiences in the company of his father in the preliminary years of World War I; his first indirect contacts with a Romanian village and peasants viewed through volumes and journals from his father’s library (many inscribed in the Sămănătorism – “The Sower” movement); his eventual direct contract with peasant life through the military orderly Iordache and his wife, Voica, both from the village Fălăștoaca in Giurgiu County. The article thus focuses on lesser known aspects of the life of sociologist Henri H. Stahl, the experiences, events and encounters that marked his childhood and formative teenage years and ultimately played a role in determining his evolution into a researcher of rural life.

Sociologia proastei guvernări în România interbelică, Editura RAO, București, 2019 Sociologia interbelicului reprezintă un domeniu de studiu tot mai cercetat în ultimul deceniu. Mă refer în primul rând la așa-numita "Cooperativă Gusti" din jurul profesorului Zoltán Rostás, preocupată de reeditarea și continuarea activității monografice a lui Dimitrie Gusti, în special cea din anii 1930, apoi la lucrările lui Dragoș Sdrobiș sau Ionuț Butoi, ambii formați intelectual în jurul profesorului Rostás. Volumul de față continuă această direcție și în același timp o aprofundează, oferind o solidă incursiune în aspectele sociale, politice, administrative și juridice ale interbelicului. Metodic, precis și nedispus la niciun fel de concesii intelectuale, Bogdan Bucur creionează portretul unei epoci foarte diferită de cum este prezentată aceasta în general în scrierile unor istorici cu afinități monarhiste sau ale unor intelectuali publici vocal anticomuniști. Volumul având dimensiuni foarte mari, nu intenționez să fac aici o prezentare sistematică a conținutului și a argumentelor detaliate aduse în vederea sprijinirii ipotezelor de lucru. Îmi propun un scop mai modest dar, cred eu, util pentru cititorul care dorește să se familiarizeze cu volumul, și anume conturarea unei imagini a interbelicului așa cum reiese ea din prezenta lucrare, insistând asupra aspectelor pe care le consider definitorii pentru înțelegerea adecvată a materialului. Aș începe cu instabilitatea și corupția politică, aflate la nivele record în anii 1920 mai ales. Autorul arată cum guvernarea liberală dintre anii 1922-1926 a fost inițiată și a continuat printr-un uriaș proces de corupție politică, proces înscris în însuși sistemul legislativ al țării, care permitea monarhului să desemneze liderul politic urmând a se ocupa de organizarea alegerilor. Partidul Național din Ardeal, condus de către Iuliu Maniu, a apărut și ca reacție la abuzurile guvernării liberale din această nou alipită provincie a României Mari. Și în celelalte provincii, care fuseseră în trecut parte a Imperiului Austro-Ungar (Banatul, nordul Bucovinei) sau a celui țarist (Basarabia), guvernarea liberală, dar și cele care au urmat, au alienat profund populațiile locale. Planuri de dezvoltare comunitară și regională nu existau: dezideratul principal al administrației românești era acela de a se conecta cât mai rapid și eficient la resursele lăsate în urmă de fostele elite imperiale. Pe cale de consecință, majoritatea ardelenilor, bănățenilor, basarabenilor și bucovinenilor erau foarte nemulțumiți și ajunseseră să regrete administrațiile străine din trecut (pp. 364-380, 370-405, 388-389). În timpul celui de al Doilea Război Mondial, și populația Transnistriei s-a confruntat cu rapacea și incompetenta administrație românească. Aici, autorul se lansează într-o interesantă și convingătoare investigație, are ar merita cu prisosință continuată, și ajunge la concluzia că administrația sovietică a Transnistriei era mult mai ordonată și mai etică decât cea românească. Iraționalitatea politică prezentă uneori în politica sovietică "mare" nu reverbera decât în mod limitat la nivelul administrațiilor provinciale, făcând astfel viața suportabilă și chiar plăcută, așa cum o atestă numeroasele facilități cultural-educative, printre altele, și care au dispărut odată cu instalarea administrației românești. Aceasta din urmă putea fi coordonată pe baza unor principii politice aparent rezonabile, la nivel declarativ (deși dictatura antonesciană nu se încadrează desigur în această caracterizare, ci mai degrabă liniile directoare ale politicii românești din întregul interbelic)-dar, la nivelul implementării propriu-zise, era efectiv catastrofală (pp. 484-485). Nivelul extrem de scăzut al productivității agricole, datorat parcelelor mici de pământ, marea majoritate de sub trei hectare, dar și absenței tehnologiei agricole moderne, plasează România interbelică în coada unui clasament european în această privință, chiar și printre 1

In 1930, the Romanian State decided the privatization of the telephone services. International Telephone & Telegraph, a major american company, won the auction and took over the Romanian phone network. Thus was established “Societatea Anonimă Română de Telefoane”, led by a Council of Administration, presided by Grigore Filipescu, a Romanian politician. Filipescu used his position to find out, through phone tapping, important information about his political opponents. This was possible because of a modern machine that recorded phone conversations. Although everything was made public, King Carol II refused to dismiss Filipescu, as he was probably also using the modern equipment for his own political games.

The paper elucidates some little-known pages of the Romanian national and educational policy handled on the ethnic Ukrainian territories in the interwar period. After World War I Romania enlarged its territory having incorporated Bucovina, Bessarabia, Southern Maramures and Transylvania. The population of the country more than doubled and became more diverse, with national minorities accounting for 28 per cent. The estimated number of Ukrainians varied from 840 thousand to one million, among which about 650 thousands inhabited Bessarabia. The study is based on the principles of historical sociolinguistics and on the materials of the Romanian and Ukrainian periodicals of the 1920-30s. Namely the Galician newspaper "Dilo", the Bucovinian newspaper "Chas" and the Bes-sarabian specialized journal for school teachers "Şcoala Basarabiei" reveal certain facts and details concerning the number of Ukrainians in Bessarabia, their lifestyle, as well as their low national and language self-identity which was one of the key reasons for the Ukrainians to abandon their struggle for language rights. Nevertheless , the journal "Şcoala Basarabiei" sheds some light on the process of establishing secondary schools for national minorities with their native language of instruction, started in 1918. According to this project the Ukrainians were also supposed to have a few gymnasiums, which actually functioned in Khotyn, Akkerman and Bendery. Yet shortly, by 1923, all these schools discontinued, since the Romanian Kingdom
passed a new Constitution which divested the national minorities of their language rights. A valuable component of the proposed research is the linguistic analysis of the Ukrainian first primer, anonymously published in Khotyn in 1921. Its linguistic analysis reveals the author’s intention to cultivate Eastern (Dnieper) variety of Standard Ukrainian.