Refugees in Bessarabia during the Civil War. Crossing the Dniester

The author examines a less studied way of the Russian emigration to Bessarabia during the Civil War. The attention is focused on the key moment of the "Bessarabian route" - crossing the Dniester, which has become a frontier river in the course of historical cataclysms. Using documents, fiction, memoirs and materials of Bessarabian periodicals, the author reveals the motives, circumstances and methods of crossing the border. The intensity and composition of the refugee flows was determined by the war actions in the south of Russia as well as by the policy of the Romanian Kingdom towards Russian refugees. Thus, the geographical frontier became a place of tragic events. In the minds of emigrants, the Dniester acquired some semantic and symbolic interpretations as of a frontier space. The category of space transformed into the category of historic time. The experience of refugees of that tragic epoch reveals a lot of problems that are topical even nowadays.

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