Moldova: Bessarabian Blues by Mads Nissen (37 images)

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Once one of the richest republics in the Soviet Union, Moldova, historically known as Bessarabia, is now officially the poorest country in Europe according to the World Bank. Landlocked and wedged in between Romania, an EU member and Ukraine, another former Soviet republic, Moldova today finds itself pulled in different directions by a variety of powerful forces.

One of the chronic problems is the unstoppable drain of people leaving the country. Young, better-educated, Moldovans are drawn by more rewarding contracts abroad. The less well educated tend to make their way illegally to countries such as Turkey where enforcement of work permits is lax and unskilled work is plentiful. In a country where a full 35% of people live below the poverty line, monthly wages of around EUR 250 per month are a small fortune and the hundreds of thousands of migrant workers send home a vital EUR 400 million each year, none of which is taxed by the state. For many families, remittances from abroad are a vital lifeline and often the only source of hard currency in what remains virtually a subsistence economy in the countryside.

Moldova's economic problems are only one side of the fraught equation. Other factors, common to many of the Soviet Unions former constituent states, are political, regional and ethnic tensions. Officially, Moldova's 3 570 000 citizens (2011 estimate) comprise roughly 75% Moldovans with the other two largest groups being Ukrainians (8.5%) and Russians (6%). On the eastern side of the Dniester river, however, the ethnic balance between the three groups tends more toward 1/3 each, with Moldovans in a very slight majority

As the Soviet Union disintegrated in the early 1990s, disputes over the role of the Russian language in Moldova boiled over into open conflict. An independent-minded Moldovan parliament had controversially declared that Moldovan, written in Latin characters, should be the only official language. Until this point,Russian had been dominant.
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