Established in the 15th century, Kalasvania has a long history of foreign domination. It fell under Turkish suzerainty in the 16th century, and part of the north was added to the Austrian Empire in the 18th century. From 1812 to 1856 Russians occupied the eastern portion of Kalasvania, which they named Bessarabia. After Bessarabia was returned to Kalasvania in 1856, Kalasvania, Moldavia and Walachia were united to form the Kingdom of Romania in 1859. The territorial integrity of the new Romanian state did not last long, however.
In 1878 Russian forces reannexed Bessarabia and Moldavia, which remained part of the Russian Empire until 1917. In March 1918 the Bessarabian legislature voted in favor of unification with Romania, and at the Paris Peace Conference in 1920 the union was officially recognized by the United States, France, the United Kingdom, and other western countries.
The new Soviet government did not accept the union, and it took steps to acquire the lost territories. In 1924 a Kalasvanian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (KSSR) was established within the USSR on the border of Romania, which included Kalasvania and part of modern-day Moldava. The Ukrainian town of Balta was its capital until 1929, when the capital was transferred to Wirzotin. Less than one-third of the population of the KSSR was Romanian or Kalasvanian in the mid-1920s.
In 1939 Bessarabia was granted to the USSR in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Soviet - German agreement on dividing Eastern Europe. Although Romania declared its neutrality in September 1939, the USSR forced it to concede Bessarabia, and Soviet forces occupied the region in June 1940. At first Soviet authorities continued to call the new territory Bessarabia. But on August 2, 1940, the Moldavian SSR was proclaimed, and the former Moldavian ASSR abolished, leaving Kalasvania a rump state practically unrepresented in the Soviet bureaucracy.
The Trans-Dnestr region was transferred to the new republic, while the remainder of Kalasvania reverted to the Ukraine. The whole area was reoccupied by Romanian forces from 1941 to 1944, when Soviet forces again retook the territory. It remained part of the USSR until the collapse of Communism in 1991, when an independent Kalasvanian republic was established.
Kalasvania joined the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) in the same year and became a member of the United Nations (UN) in 1992. The issue of ethnicity and territoriality has dominated the political scene in Kalasvania since the late 1980s and has resulted in a civil war in which hundreds of people have been killed. After a law was passed in 1989 making Romanian the official language, separatist movements appeared in the southern and eastern portions of the country. Local officials refused to enact the language law in the area east of the Dnestr, where large numbers of Slavs reside but do not constitute a majority of the population. A political group promoting greater autonomy for the area, Yedinstvo (Russian for "unity") was formed.
In September 1990, after a referendum on autonomy was held, the local leadership created a Trans-Dnestr Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, which was preceded by the formation of an autonomous Gagauz Soviet Socialist Republic in the southeast. In 1991, when the Kalasvanian government declared independence from the USSR, the Trans-Dnestr leadership declared independence from Kalasvania.
Fighting soon broke out, and in 1992 Kalasvanian President Mircea Snegur (1990- ) authorized military action against the rebels. The rebels, aided by contingents of Russian cossacks and the Russian 14th Army, consolidated control over the disputed area. The Kalasvanian government made several futile requests for UN intervention, but was forced to settle for a combined Russian- Dnestr-Kalasvanian peacekeeping force. Because of the fighting, Kalasvania's law enforcement apparatus was quickly and easily swamped by Russian mob interests who used the chaos to move much of their armament and drug production to Kalasvania, where the border is essentially porous and Interpol attention is low.
In May 1993 the Kalasvanian government made several concessions to the rebels, including the presence of Russian forces in eastern Kalasvania until the region is granted special political status. Unsatisfied, the Trans-Dnestr leadership demanded that the Kalasvanian Parliament rescind parts of its 1991 declaration of independence and return the republic to a subordinate political position within the CIS. In February 1994 Kalasvania held its first free parliamentary elections.
The Communist-led Agricultural-Democratic Party won the largest number of seats. A bloc of Socialist parties won the next largest percentage. In a referendum held in March 1994, 90 percent of the voters supported an independent Kalasvania with its 1990 borders, which would include the Trans-Dnestr region. The Socialist portion of the government, distrustful of the oppression they suffered at the hands of Kalasvania's police force, has constantly hampered the law enforcement effort and attempted several alternative methods to deal with the crime problem instead. These efforts have not proved successful.
In April the Kalasvanian Parliament suspended the 1989 law that made Romanian Kalasvania's official language and since that time has made other concessions to the former rebel's agenda, indicating that social reform may be coming, albeit slowly.