Following the Russo-Turkish war of 1806–1812, the eastern portion of the Principality of Moldavia between the Rivers Prut and Dneister was annexed by Russia. The province was given the name Bessarabia and remained under Russian control until the First World War when it was incorporated into the Kingdom of Romania. The Soviet Union, which had never acknowledged Romania's acquisition of Bessarabia, retook the province by force in June 1940. Following the end of the Second World War, regions in the north and south of Bessarabia with high Ukrainian populations were transferred to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. The rest of Bessarabia, together with a narrow strip of territory to the east of the River Dniester, became the Soviet Socialist Republic of Moldavia. In August 1991, the republic declared its independence as the Republic of Moldova. The republic is multi-national and includes Russian and Ukrainian minorities, but its majority population speak a dialect of Romanian that is commonly referred to as “Moldovan.” Whether the future of the Republic of Moldova lies in ever closer diplomatic and economic links with Romania and the EU or with Russia and the post-Soviet space remains a moot point.

Andrei Cusco's book provides the background to understanding the rival territorial claims made by Romania and the Soviet Union with regard to Bessarabia in the interwar era (the so-called “Bessarabian question”). In so doing, the book also provides the historical context for the competing claims of the Soviet Union/Russia and Romania in Moldova in more recent decades.

Following the union of the Romanian principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia in 1862, Bessarabia became an object of what Cusco describes as “symbolic competition” between the Russian Empire and the newly-emerging Romanian nation-state. The book highlights in particular a number of key events in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries when such competition was most acute. There is a detailed discussion of the Russian-Romanian diplomatic controversy surrounding the return to Russia of three districts in southern Bessarabia in 1878. These three districts had been transferred to the Romanian principalities following the Crimean War in 1856 in order to prevent the mouth of the Danube falling under Russian control. The festivities surrounding the 1912 anniversary of Bessarabia's incorporation into the Russian Empire are also highlighted by Cusco as the moment when Bessarabia really became part of the mental map of the Romanian intellectual community. A number of important Romanian publications were subsequently printed asserting the Romanian claim to the province. The 1905 Revolution and the First World War are also covered in depth as being formative for the antagonistic stances taken by Imperial Russia and the Romanian nation-state with regard to Bessarabia.

The book includes case studies of three important Bessarabian Romanian intellectuals who contributed to the creation of images of Bessarabia within Romanian nationalist discourse before the First World War: Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu, Dimitrie C. Moruzi, and Constantin Stere. As Cusco points out elsewhere in the book, however, Bessarabia never attained the centrality of Transylvania or Bukovina in the Romanian nationalist imaginary or as an object of Romanian irredentism before the First World War.

This is a thorough work that draws upon unpublished documents from the Russian State Historical Archive, the Archive of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Empire, the State Archive of the Russian Federation, and the National Archive of the Republic of Moldova. As the writing is quite dense in places, it is a work that will appeal to those with some prior knowledge of the history of Bessarabia and is a useful addition to the available works in English on this contested borderland.