„Valahii ne-au înșelat”. Chestiunea compensațiilor Iașului în acțiunea politică moldovenească după unire (1862-1874) (I)
“The Wallachians Deceived Us”. The Issue of Compensations in Moldavia’s Political Actions after the Union (1862-1874) (I)

Summary/Abstract: The paper analyses the issue of compensations solicited by the officials of Iasi, the capital of the Principality of Moldavia after the union with Wallachia (1859). Although the topic has often been mentioned, it remained little and fractionally approached by the historians, with unconcealed crispation, as this is one of the disruptive topics in relation to the national cohesion and the comfort of the collective memory. At the centre of the disputes in the analysed period (1862-1874) there was first of all the transfer of the Court of Appeal from Bucharest to Iasi, then, after this initiative was blocked, the provision of a total amount of 10 million lei. The compensation file brings to light breached promises between the Moldavians and the Wallachians, the economic disaster that the city of Iasi fought subsequently to centralisation; these reasons represented the well-grounded sources of discontent and the birth moment for a claiming type of political action that we would deem as regionalist today. At the centre of the political struggles there was the centralist architecture of the state, against which the Moldavians, but also some of the Wallachians, developed consistent criticism, together with the group of those who saw in centralisation a way to complete and to guarantee unifi-cation. The diametrically opposed positions were: 1. The Moldavian / decentralisation / compensation / Court of Appeal in Iasi interests, seen as a better-balanced working modality for the union and 2. Muntenian-Oltenian / centralisation / Court of Appeal in Bucharest as a modality to guarantee the union and to eliminate the so-called “separatist” risk. The significance of the compensations is different for the ‘regionalists’ and the ‘centralists’ respectively. If the regionalists interpreted them as a “duty taken over by the state”, a “transaction between the commune of Iasi and the state”, the centralists preferred to deem them as a “donation” in the sense of a “gift”, in order not to suggest the fact that Wallachia would have acknowledged the existence of some guilt towards Moldavia as regarded the inequitable results of the unification. Extracted from the triumphalist area of the unification, the dissensions on the compensation topic provide us with a raw image of the period, especially in relation to the incapacity of the state and of the political elite to administer, in an equitable way for Moldavia, the diplomatic success of 1859-1862.

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