Romanians Flood Into Moldavia for Reunion : Soviet Union: Republic’s border crossings opened. Another divided people testifies to desire for unity.

Hundreds of thousands of Romanians surged across the border with Soviet Moldavia on Sunday in what was intended as a ceremony of friendship but testified to a strong demand for unity among another of Europe’s divided people.

Eight border crossings were thrown open to Romanians without visas, allowing the first unhindered movement in 50 years between the divided halves of Moldavia.

The scene was as joyful as the mingling of East and West Germans when the Berlin Wall was opened last Nov. 9.

The six-hour reunion was billed as an occasion for cultural reunion among Moldavians divided in 1940, when Soviet dictator Josef Stalin seized part of the region under a secret deal with Nazi Germany.

Sunday’s revelers threw flowers into the Prut River that divides the region, and hundreds, frustrated by the wait to press across crowded bridges, jumped into the chilly waters to swim across for impromptu reunions. More than 300,000 were reported at Leuseny, about 40 miles west of the Moldavian capital of Kishinev.

Political changes in the Soviet Union under President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and in Romania since the toppling and execution of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu made Sunday’s events possible.

For decades, the Kremlin strove to limit contacts between Moldavia and Romania and steadfastly maintained that the Moldavians were a separate nation with a separate language. One of the Soviet officials who carried out that “de-Romanification” policy was the late President Leonid I. Brezhnev, who served as Communist Party first secretary in Moldavia before being brought to Moscow under Nikita S. Khrushchev.

The Soviet government agreed to the open-border event at the urging of Moldavian cultural organizations, which wanted to celebrate the republic’s switch from Moscow time to that of Bucharest, which is one hour earlier.

Moldavians won other concessions from the Kremlin last fall, including restoration of the Latin alphabet to write the language that they share with Romanians but which for 50 years they had been forced to spell with Cyrillic letters. They also have adopted Romania’s red, yellow and blue colors for the Soviet republic’s official flag.

Soviet Moldavians began agitating for reunion with their Romanian brothers last year, and the campaign has intensified since Ceausescu’s fall.

Romanian television Sunday night showed masses gathered along the tree-lined banks of the Prut, waving flags and flowers and chanting support for “a greater Romania.” The call to expand Romania’s borders to include the Soviet republic has also been a theme of the perpetual anti-government demonstration that has been staged in Bucharest’s Central University Square for two weeks.

However, interim Romanian President Ion Iliescu and other leaders of the National Salvation Front favored to win elections May 20 have carefully skirted the Moldavian question, fearing accusations from opponents that they foster nationalist and expansionist aims that could disrupt relations with both Moscow and Western Europe.

Local officials in Iasi sought to avoid a conflict with Moscow by inviting Soviet Moldavian officials to the border crossing for ceremonies marking the day of unity. Peasant women from the Soviet side brought loaves of bread and baskets of salt--traditional gifts of welcome in the Soviet Union.

Moldavia’s official ATEM news agency said that people from both sides of the river chanted, “Down with the border on the Prut! Let the border be on the Dniester!” calling for Moldavia to be reunited with Romania and the border shifted to the river that marks Moldavia’s present frontier with the Ukraine, another Soviet republic.

Moldavian People’s Front leader Yuri Rozhko said that at Leuseny and at seven other border crossings, more than 500,000 people from both sides came together.

“This is unique,” Rozhko said by telephone from the Moldavian capital of Kishinev. “Hundreds of relatives have met at last who hadn’t seen each other for 40 years and more.”

Williams reported from Bucharest, and Dahlburg reported from Moscow.