Moldavian ASSR

Moldavian ASSR (Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Republic; Romanian: Republica Autonomă Socialistă Sovietică Moldovenească) was an autonomous region of the Ukrainian SSR between 12 October 1924 and 2 August 1940, encompassing Transnistria (now in Moldova) and parts which are now in Ukraine. The official capital was at the "temporarily occupied city of Chişinău", and there was an executive capital until 1929 at Balta, and starting 1929 until its disbanding in 1940 at Tiraspol.

The ASSR had a mixed Ukrainian and Romanian population which was estimated to be around 500,000.

In the first years after the creation of the ASSR, the Soviets took good care of the Romanians of Moldavian ASSR, perhaps in the hope of dissent from Bessarabia. The Romanians of the Moldavian ASSR had education in Romanian language, but starting with the early 1930s, the Soviet authorities created the Moldavian alphabet, which was a Cyrillic script, based on the the Russian alphabet and adapted to the Romanian language. This was the only official way of writing Romanian in the ASSR.

Also, the "Moldavian language theory" began to be developed here. This theory claimed that the Moldavians were a different nation from the Romanians, and that they were allegedly "oppressed by the imperialist Romanians". After World War II, this would be the official ideology of the Soviet Communist Party in Moldova.

The great famine of 1932–1933 of Ukraine (the Holodomor) affected greatly the Moldavian ASSR, too, with tens of thousands of Ukrainians and Romanians dying of starvation in the Moldavian ASSR.

In 1937, the Romanian intelectuals of the ASSR were accused by the Soviets that were spies and saboteurs and many of them were killed by Stalin's Soviet regime.

In 1940, the Soviet Union invaded Bessarabia, back then part of Romania and created the Moldavian SSR, which included most of Bessarabia and the western part of the Moldavian ASSR. The eastern part, which included the city of Balta was merged with the Ukrainian SSR, stripping the autonomy and language rights for the Romanians living there.