Mircea Snegur
Mircea Snegur was the first president of Moldova and lost a war on its eastern bank in the first year of the country's existence. He was an agronomist who ran the republic's agriculture and became party secretary, then chairman of the Supreme Soviet as the independence movement grew. Independence came in August 1991, and the language question came with it: Moldovan and Romanian are the same language, the 1989 law restoring the Latin script had been the movement's first victory, and a substantial minority in the country spoke Russian and read the whole thing as a prelude to union with Romania. Transnistria declared its own republic. The strip on the left bank of the Dniester held most of Moldova's heavy industry and its power station, and a workforce that was largely Russian and Ukrainian, so the secession took the economy with it. The fighting in the spring of 1992 killed perhaps a thousand people. It ended when the Russian Fourteenth Army, stationed there since Soviet times, intervened on the separatist side and imposed a ceasefire. That ceasefire is still in force. Transnistria has had its own government, currency and border posts ever since, recognised by nobody, with Russian troops present as peacekeepers - the first of the frozen conflicts that later appeared in Georgia and Ukraine, and the model for them. Snegur turned against unification with Romania in the mid-1990s, which cost him the nationalist support that had elected him, and lost the presidency in 1996. Moldova has spent the three decades since as the poorest country in Europe, alternating between governments oriented towards Moscow and towards Brussels, with a fifth of its population working abroad.
- Lived: 1940 CE – 2023 CE
- Nationality: Moldovan
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
