Ukrainian Moldova

Well, in order to attract Bessarabia ( E Moldova) to USSR, the soviets always tried to create a separate ,,Moldovan,, identity. They even created a special Moldovan ASSR from Ukraine in order to expouse this ,,nationality,,. Simply making Moldova part of Ukraine wil simply nullify these efforts + when USSR would collapse, the situation might balcanise, as the ,,Moldovans,, wouldn't want to be part of a Ukrainian nation-state and , most likely, would try to take with them also the southern part (Budjak) and the northern region of Bucovina with them. Anyway, it could turn ugly, if not immediately, in 40 years time, almost certain
 

Peffy

Banned
What if they had made a Finn SSR? You know, made from the lands they conquered from Finland?
 
Even including Transnistria, Moldova has never been more than 14.6 percent Ukrainian according to any Soviet or post-Soviet census. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Moldova Anyway, from an early stage, the Soviets, who had never really reconciled themselves to the loss of Bessarabia, had created a Moldavian ASSR, showing their classification of "Moldavians" as a separate ethnic group which should someday be unified in a single Soviet republic. True, the Moldavian ASSR was made part of the Ukrainian SSR; but this really could not be avoided inasmuch as the Moldavian ASSR (1) was too small to constitute a Union Republic on its own, and (2) in any event was only 30.1 percent "Moldavian" (compared to 48.5 percent Ukrainian) according to the 1926 Soviet census. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moldavian_Autonomous_Soviet_Socialist_Republic Once Bessarabia was reacquired, making it into a "Moldavian" SSR (except for the Akkerman area in the south which was mostly Russian and Ukrainian) was really the only policy consistent with the USSR's whole stated rationale for demanding that Romania cede the area to them in the first place.
 
What if they had made a Finn SSR? You know, made from the lands they conquered from Finland?

Technically they did, in the form of Karelo-Finnish SSR. That area covered the Russian Eastern Karelia too though. However, in 1944, the Karelian Isthmus (the southern part of annexed area) was transferred to Russian SSR and became a part of Leningrad Oblast. One problem the Soviets had was that Finns completely evacuated the area (something they didn't seem to have expected) so the area wasn't ethnically Finnish anymore, as nobody lived there and it had to be re-populated by migrants from other areas of the USSR. The area was also very small, both in terms of population and area. For these reasons the area couldn't form such a SSR and would be even less a "real" SSR than the Karelo-Finnish one was.
 

Peffy

Banned
If the Kingdom of Romania had evacuated Basarabia in 1940, leaving only desolate lands on fire, then it could have been annexed into Ukraine with no problems, then resettled with ukrainians.
The leaders of Romania were a bunch of craven and corrupt types, so they didn't, instead abandoning a few million of their citizens to be russified.
 
What if the Soviets had made Moldova part of Ukraine, rather than establishing a separate SSR?
Then upon the formation of the USSR Ukraine should be reorganized as the Ukrainian SFSR, as an equal to the RSFSR and the then-Transcaucasian SFSR. As an SFSR, even if the federalism was notional, it should make it easy for Ukraine to accommodate its ethnic minority populations, of which the Romanians in Moldavia would be one. It would also provide precedent for including new territory in turn into Ukraine, such as Crimea and the Kuban, within an already accommodating framework.
 
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