ABSTRACT
Russia had occupied the territories of Kishinev twice in the eighteenth century and once again in the nineteenth. Previously the Turks and Austrians had regained them, but after the Bucharest Treaty of 1812 granted Russia all the land on the left bank of the River Prut, it looked like the Russians had established themselves there once and for all. The process of Russification was beginning, in which Alexander Pushkin, as a state official, was bound to participate. One of the reasons for the colonization of this end of Russia, as explained by a contemporary historian, was that the population of Bessarabia under the Turks “had been unsure of tomorrow.” The populace of Kishinev was a mixture of East and West, with a predominance of Easterners. Bulgarians, Turks, Gypsies, French-men, Italians, and Greeks all lived there. In his poems of the Kishinev period, Pushkin portrayed himself as a “voluntary exile.”.
