The Tiny Country Whose Problems Threaten International Peace : Moldova: Longstanding Russian-Romanian hatreds, fanned by inept leaders, could force Yelstin’s military hand. And Turkey may join the fray.

With 4 1/2 million people, Moldova comprises only 1.5% of the former Soviet Union’s total population. It occupies only .02% of the old empire’s territory. Yet what hap pens in this tiny, fledging nation-state has direct consequences for Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin’s hold on power and for international peace.

So far, more than 1,000 people have reportedly died in ethnic fighting there, the most dangerous to date. Why this is so requires a grasp of the region’s history.

Moldova first became part of the Russian empire in 1812, when Czar Alexander I seized it from the Turkish empire. At the time, possession of Moldova--then known as Bessarabia--conferred several advantages. Strategically, it placed Russian forces at the mouth of the Danube, the chief trade artery of Central Europe and the Balkans, and closer to the Turkish Straits, the vital outlet from the Black Sea. Also important to the czars, who regarded themselves as protectors of Orthodox Christians, the seizure of Moldova rescued hundreds of thousands of Orthodox Romanian peasants from Turkish Muslim rule.

Russia annexed Moldova before a Romanian national state, or even Romanian nationalism, existed. For much of the 19th Century, present-day Romania was ruled by Orthodox Greek agents of the Muslim Turks. Independent Romania came into existence only in 1878, largely owing to Russian military triumphs over Turkey.

Russia’s relations with the modern Romanian state have rarely been smooth. Hoping to gain Moldova, the Romanians fought against Russia in World War I and, in the wake of czarist Russia’s collapse in 1917, Romania incorporated the province.

For the next two decades, the Soviet Union was too preoccupied with its internal problems to pay much attention to Moldova, but Moscow was never fully reconciled to its loss. When the opportunity to retake the territory presented itself, the Soviet government, under Josef Stalin, seized it. In August, 1939, Stalin signed his nonaggression pact with Adolf Hitler and the following summer, with Hitler’s assent, Stalin reoccupied Moldova without a shot being fired. The Romanians were in no position to resist.

The roots of the current ethnic hatreds can be traced to 1940-45, during which time any earlier Romanian-Russian amity was buried under an avalanche of violence. Following their occupation of Moldova, the Soviets ruthlessly imposed their rule. They seized all private property and arrested, deported or shot many thousands of Romanian civic leaders.

The Romanians reacted enthusiastically in kind. After Hitler broke with Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union, the Romanians joined the Nazis and undertook their own reign of terror in Moldova, oppressing ethnic Russians, arresting or killing anyone accused of collaboration with the Soviets and handing local Jews over to the Nazis to be murdered in the death camps.

Following victory in World War II, the Soviets once again occupied Moldova, and they imposed what they must have believed would be a “final solution” to the region’s nationality problem. After purging the province of enemies real and imagined, the Soviets created an artificial “Moldovan” nationality. In reality, this was little more than a mask for Russian imperialism. Residents of Moldova were required to speak Russian when transacting government business; the Russian script, rather than the Latin alphabet used by Romanians, was deemed official, and, most important, ethnic Russians and Ukrainians were encouraged to migrate into the province to dilute the local Romanian majority. Any ethnic Romanian daring to speak out against these policies would be arrested instantly or sent to a psychiatric prison. Moldovians sullenly submitted to what seemed to be invincible Soviet might.

Perhaps, given sufficient time, this Draconian attempt to exterminate Romanian nationalism in Moldova would have worked. Certainly, the imposition of a Soviet-dominated communist system in Romania prevented that country from pressing effectively for a return of Moldova to Romanian control. Following the ouster and execution of Nicolae Ceausescu in 1989, and the collapse two years later of communist rule in Russia itself, however, the future of Moldova has once again come into question.

Understandably, the hatreds spawned by this unhappy history run deep. Romanians can easily recall all the evils of Russian imperialism and communist terror. Ethnic Russians and Ukrainians living in Moldova fear the resurgence of repressive Romanian rule. Neither side seems especially reflective about its own past sins, and the situation is aggravated by local politicians, the unelected remnants of Communist Party rule. Lacking any democratic legitimacy or answers to the intractable ecological, social and economic problems facing their post-communist societies, these leaders seem willing, like their counterparts in Serbia nearby, to inflame ethnic suspicions as a means of maintaining power.

The Moldovan problem cannot remain localized. The Romanian government, itself of dubious legitimacy and faced with staggering ecological and economic problems, feels unable to abandon its fellow Romanians. Bucharest aims at nothing less than the reincorporation of Moldova into the mother country, and it seems unwilling to countenance the secession from Moldova of Trans-Dniester, the portion of the province that lies to the east of the Dniester River and contains a majority of Russians and Ukranians.

Similarly, Russia and Ukraine cannot ignore pleas for assistance from their ethnic kin, who together comprise some 20% of Moldova’s population. To date, Yeltsin has taken a moderate line in dealing with ethnic and territorial disputes in neighboring republics. But critics of Yeltsin’s political and economic policies, such as Alexander Rutskoi, are deriding his moderation, arguing that he is betraying the interests of Russians outside Russia proper. The situation is further complicated by the presence in Moldova of 10,000 former Soviet troops--mostly Russians and Ukrainians--who have already fought alongside their local ethnic kin. This army’s leaders have threatened to continue fighting regardless of any orders to the contrary by Yeltsin. The president himself has said he will not sit idly by while Russians are attacked or killed.

As if trouble between Romania and its Slavic neighbors were not enough, Turkey is also worried by the Moldovan situation. Not only does fighting threaten the security of the Black Sea region, but within Moldova there is also a small population of Orthodox Christian ethnic Turks, the Gagauz, a leftover from the Turkish imperial period, whom Istanbul has been assisting with money and, according to Russian nationalists, arms.

Yeltsin’s meeting in Turkey with the leaders of Romania, Turkey and six former Soviet republics produced an agreement to settle disputes politically, not militarily. Given his remarkable record in smoothing over seemingly intractable disputes with Ukraine, he may succeed. But local hotheads may, for their own purposes, prevent a settlement, dragging an unwilling Russia into the fighting. If that happens, the post-communist order may face its severest test.

Given all these conflicts and threats, some will no doubt yearn for the seeming stability of the old Soviet order. That would be a great mistake, rather like longing for the return of Nazism because at least all Germans were employed. Many of the problems emerging so violently in Moldova and elsewhere are the direct result of communist misrule. In other instances, the Soviets were happy to aggravate existing tensions in order to divide and rule. What we are witnessing now is not the failure of non-communist governments, but rather the airing of diseases bred within the now-dead Soviet body politic.