On March 27, 2018, a century has passed since the first event that gave rise to the Great Union: the Adoption by the Country Council of Chisinau of the Declaration of Unification of Bessarabia with Romania. Bessarabians had thus started their own revolution by affirming the desire to go on a different road than that to which Bolsheviks were driven by Russia. For the Romanians, the implacable course of the history of 1918 was balancing the agony of the humiliating peace at Buftea-Bucharest, April 24 / May 7, 1918, and the joy of uniting all the Romanians, who until then were in the boundaries of some empire collapsed one at a time .

In human history there are times when divine intervention seems more present than ever. Certainly, the year 1918 can fit into such a register, because you can not report it differently at the time when the peoples of Europe have lived their own stories at extremes, from agony to ecstasy and vice versa. For the Romanians, the implacable course of the history of 1918 was marked by this register of balance between the defeat agony, initialed by the humiliating peace at Buftea-Bucharest on April 24 / May 7, 1918, and the joy of uniting all the Romanians still in the borders of empires that collapsed, one after the other, like the sand castles ephemeral.

In 1812, kidnapped from the body of Moldavia by the great voivodes, the land between the Prut and the Dniester, known as Basarabia, lived for a century the great drama of the uprooting of Babylonian slavery, like the biblical peoples. The ruse, the breakdown of Romanian culture and language, the displacement of the people in their villages, and the sending to areas forgotten by the world from the giant empire of the tsars were just some of the effects of the act of 1812. Bessarabia somehow lived a paradoxical history, the century of nationalities, when the peoples of Europe were waking up and claiming their own identity and demanding their rights, the Romanians were forced to live outside of history and, in fact, the ties with Romania, with the Romanians beyond the Prut, were forbidden and harshly punished . In addition, tsarism induced the false idea that they are Moldovans, that they form a peculiar people, distinct from the Romanian people, a theory subsequently taken over by the Soviets and circulated today in the public space.

The outbreak of the First World War was the moment that caused a rupture of this humiliating situation. More than 300,000 Bessarabians were enlisted in the Tsarist army and sent to fight at the front. Here they met with the other Romanians – with the Transylvanians in Galicia, Ukraine, with the Wallachians and Moldovans on the Romanian front in Moldova. All these Bessarabian soldiers suddenly realized that they were part of the same people, that they spoke the same language, and the veil induced to the consciences of the Tsarist empire stood up. After three years of war, Russia entered a crisis, and the two revolutions triggered in 1917 generated the collapse of the empire.

The ideas of the strong self-determination affirmed in those years were also drawn in the Basarabian space. The year 1917 found the Romanian intelligentsia here pendulating between an illusory participation in the Bolshevik revolution and the participation in its own revolution, that of the awakening of the national consciousness and the rupture of Lenin and Trotsky’s Russian space and ideology of the world.

Bessarabia lived in 1917 the moment of the syndicalist movement’s genesis, which was slowly and heavily routed, sprinkled with the blood of real martyrs who paid their beliefs at the cost of their lives, and Simeon Murafa, the unionist killed by the Bolsheviks in August of the same year is a relevant example. The establishment of the Moldovan National Party in April 1917 was undoubtedly the first significant step in the awakening of the blood, for only by a political party the Romanian national movement in Bessarabia could achieve its objectives. The next steps were those of congresses where the most important social categories met and decided to adhere to national ideas: teachers, priests and soldiers. During this time, the Transylvanian presence in the Bessarabian region proved to be a good one, because the Transylvanians were “teachers and teachers” of the awakening of the Romanian national consciousness, of the belief that Bessarabia are an integral part of the Romanian people.

Decisive was the end of 1917 when in Basarabia was created the Country Counsel, the legislative body that gave legal form to national aspirations, when it decided to create the Moldovan Federative Democratic Republic. Basarabians basically started their revolution, affirming their desire to go on a different road than that to which Bolsheviks were driven by Russia.

The chaos of the former imperial army troops, who, contaminated by Bolshevism, on their return from the Moldovan front stopped in Bessarabia to establish what they called the revolutionary order, in fact the disorder and plunder of the territory inhabited mostly by Romanians. For the Bolsheviks the desire of the Bessarabian fools was incomprehensible, although the revolution spoke of the legitimate right of the peoples to self-determination, in fact the “revolutionaries of the new world” perpetuated the ideas of the defunct empire. It was a prefiguration of the dictatorship and oppression of the peoples from the Urals to Vladivostok that was to take place during the Soviet era. For these reasons, the members of the council have always been under the terror of the Bolshevik threat and only the intervention of the Romanian army ended the crimes, robberies and abuses of the Bolshevik gangs.

In 1918, on a symbolic day, January 24, the Moldovan Republic proclaimed independence, this being the first major step on the road to Unirea with Romania. This is the moment when the idea of ​​union is debated with debate. On one side are representatives of the unconditional union, the other are the undead, but also those who oppose. The day of 27 March 1918 remained in history as the day of the Union. It is, in fact, the preamble announcing, at the end of the year, the unification of the other Romanian territories with the motherland.

The solemn sitting of the Country Council of March 27 remained a memorable moment of the Romanian national consciousness. Relevant are the words spoken by Constantine Stere in those moments: “Gonit from my native land through the blind power of the czar despot, today I am brought again here by the will of the liberated people … In the life of man as well as of the whole peoples, such moments There are not many who are uplifting … Today we proclaim the rights of the sovereign people not only here in Bessarabia, but also the rights of all our brothers, wherever they may be. ” The Union Act was voted 86 votes in favor, 3 votes against, and 36 deputies abstained. The ratification of the union was done by King Ferdinand I on April 9/22, and the international recognition came on October 28 in Paris. The Union of Bessarabia will remain forever in the history of some personalities such as C. Stere, P. Halippa, I. Inculet, D. Ciugureanu, I. Buzdugan, Vasile Stroescu, Alexe Mateevici, Simeon Murafa. Along with the royal family, the political class of that era, the “pantheon of the Union” is filled with the sacrifices of the Romanian soldiers on the fronts of the Great War, sacrifices that built Great Romania.