In 1993, Olivian Verenca published a glowing report/memoir on Romania's administration of Transnistria, the territory between the Dniester and Bug rivers that Romania occupied from mid-1941 to early-1944 (Administraţia Civilă Română în Transnistria, Chişinău, 1993). Verenca, former cabinet director of the governor of Transnistria, noted that no one before him had published such a study, which risked that the episode might be forgotten or falsified. A quarter century after Verenca's gross misrepresentation of Transnistrian realities, Vladimir Solonari's A Satellite Empire finally provides a serious exploration of the subject.
Solonari investigates Transnistria from three distinct perspectives: that of the Romanian national government; that of the civilian and military personnel on-site; and that of the local population. He frames essential questions associated with each perspective: Was occupation policy based on idealism or pragmatism? Were local policies designed to transform or to exploit? Did the local population accommodate or resist? The author brings to bear, in a manner unmatched in any prior treatment, primary source materials in all of the languages in which records were created at the time—Romanian, German, Russian, and Ukrainian (though not Hebrew, Yiddish, or Romani). Given this vast source material, it is not surprising that Solonari's study yields many new insights, while also confirming certain understandings and demolishing some long-cherished myths.
Solonari documents the myriad ways in which the Germans restricted Romanian freedom of action. He details German control of the rail system and other militarily significant assets. The Romanians were unable to prevent the expulsion of non-Germans, including ethnic Romanians, from localities with Volksdeutsch majorities; similarly, they could not prevent the unauthorized German seizure of foodstuffs to supply their armies further east. The two allies collided over treatment of the province's Ukrainian population. The picture that Solonari thus presents alters prior understanding of Romanian “rule.”
The speed with which Romania abandoned the aspiration to develop the province, in favor of exploiting it, and the systematic stripping of the territory of foodstuffs and virtually all movable economic assets leave no room to doubt a policy of systematic spoliation. Malnutrition, disease, and impoverishment were the result. Bribery, nepotism, greed, brutal treatment of the local population, and the regime's effort to conceal its violation of international norms definitively puncture all image of the Romanians as benevolent occupiers.
Two aspects of A Satellite Empire invite the reader onto terrain where mythologies about the past and its heroes come into play. The first relates to the ethnic nationalism of Conducător Ion Antonescu, to which Romanian nationalists make positive reference even today. Despite the regime's oft-asserted commitment to the 200,000 ethnic Romanians in Transnistria and the 120,000 beyond the Bug, Solonari reveals Antonescu's personal disdain and distrust of these populations. Solonari's nuanced treatment of accommodation, collaboration, and resistance, meanwhile, reveals a pattern of locals taking care to keep their options open, so that when events required, prior behavior could be explained and allegiance could pass easily from one “liberator” to the next. Contrary to Soviet dogma, in Transnistria accommodation to Axis rule was high, resistance limited and ineffectual.
A Satellite Empire definitely offers much that is significant and new. It is disappointing that the book is marred by an unusual number of typographical errors, and given the importance of its primary sources, it is disappointing that footnotes to archival documents are not fully spelled out. While the location of a cited document is clear, the precise nature of the document often is not.
Olivian Verenca dedicated just three pages to the Jews in Transnistria, omitting reference to the murder of approximately 250,000 Jews during thirty-two months of Romanian rule. In his introduction, Solonari describes the challenge of integrating the Holocaust into a study of occupation and opts to follow what he posits as “an established norm” among scholars to choose either one focus or the other (5). This is unfortunate. Transnistria's confined geography, the particularity of Romanian rule, and its limited duration, combined with Solonari's Holocaust expertise offered the possibility of pursuing successfully the integration of the Holocaust with its broader context.
Presenting the Romanians’ treatment of Transnistria's non-Jewish population, most of whom survived, without incorporating the broad behavioral impact on both occupier and local inhabitant of the regime's murderous policies directed at local Jews and Jews deported into Transnistria, most of whom perished, obscures the centrality of the Jewish question and skews this truly important volume by marginalizing a factor that exercised significant, even decisive impact on many aspects of Romanian administration that the volume addresses. In his conclusion, Solonari, challenging another myth, suggests that Romanian occupation policy in Transnistria may not have been any less ruthless than Nazi policy in regions the Germans administered. It is precisely the Holocaust that would make it clear that Solonari is right.
