page_title: Alexis Nour
section_title: Germanophile press and Transnistrian ethnography
hierarchical_section_title: Alexis Nour / Biography / Germanophile press and Transnistrian ethnography
caption_attribution_description: 1916 ethnograph map of Bessarabia
context_page_description: Alexis Nour was a Bessarabian-born Romanian journalist, activist and essayist, known for his advocacy of Romanian-Bessarabian union and his critique of the Russian Empire, but also for controversial political dealings. Oscillating between socialism and Russian nationalism, he was noted as founder of Viața Basarabiei gazette. Eventually affiliated with Romania's left-wing form of cultural nationalism, or Poporanism, Nour was a long-term correspondent of the Poporanist review Viața Românească. Publicizing his conflict with the Russian authorities, he settled in the Kingdom of Romania, where he openly rallied with the Viața Românească group.
  During World War I, Nour agitated against any military alliance between Romania and Russia. He stood out among Germanophiles and local supporters of the Central Powers, agitating in favor of a military offensive into Bessarabia, and demanding the annexation of Transnistria. This combative stance was later overshadowed by revelations that Nour was spying for Russia's intelligence service, the Okhrana.
context_section_description: Soon after the outbreak of World War I, Alexis Nour was residing in neutral Romania, active within the Viața Românească circle from his new home in Iași. Like other members of this group (and primarily its founder Stere), he campaigned in favor of rapprochement with the Central Powers, recommending a war on Russia for the recovery of Bessarabia. Nour thought further than his colleagues, speculating about an alliance of interests between Romanians and Ruthenians (Ukrainians). His essay Problema româno-ruteană. O pagină din marea restaurare a națiunilor ("The Romanian-Ruthenian Issue. A Page from the Great Restoration of Nations"), published by Viața Românească in its October–November–December 1914 issue, inaugurated a series of such pieces, which talked about Ukraine's emancipation, the Bessarabian union, and, unusually in this context, the incorporation of Transnistria into Romania (with a new frontier on the Southern Bug).
  The latter demand was without precedent in the history of Romanian nationalism, and Nour is even credited with having coined the term Transnistria in modern parlance, alongside the adjective transnistreni ("Transnistrians"). Elsewhere, Nour argued that there were over 1 million transnistreni Romanians, a claim which endured as one of the largest, directly above the 800,000 advanced by Bessarabian historian Ștefan Ciobanu. The only larger such estimate came, twenty years after Nour's, from within the Transnistrian community of exiles: ethnographer Nichita Smochină claimed a figure of 1,200,000.
  Another one of Nour's analytical texts, titled Din enigma anilor 1914—1915 ("Around the Enigma of 1914—1915"), ventured to state that the German Empire and its allies were poised to win the war, ridiculed the Entente's Gallipoli Campaign, and suggested that a German-led Mitteleuropean federation was in the making. This prognosis also offered a reply to the pro-Entente lobby, who prioritized the annexation of Transylvania and other Romanian-inhabited regions of Austria-Hungary over any national project in Bessarabia. In Nour's interpretation, the German project for Mitteleuropa amounted to the dismemberment of Austria-Hungary, leaving Transylvania free to elect in favor of joining Romania. The notion, also supported by Stere, was hotly contested by Onisifor Ghibu, a Transylvanian. According to Ghibu, the Poporanists seemed to ignore the realities of Austro-Hungarian domination; their ideas about Bessarabian superiority were "provocative", "at the very least rude".
  Also in 1915, Nour designed and published in Bucharest an ethnographic map of Bessarabia on a scale of 1:450,000. Building on a cartographic model first used by Zsigmond Bátky in his "Lands of the Crown of Saint Stephen" ethnographic map and later adapted to the Balkans by Jovan Cvijić, Nour's map divided the regions depicted into communal entities, represented as pie charts of the various nationalities. The resulting majority (2 out of 3 million inhabitants) was Romanian, with a note explaining that these were known locally as "Moldovans"—being Nour's contribution to the debate on Moldovan ethnicity. Beyond Bessarabia, Nour's map states a claim about the Romanians of Transnistria, including their presence in a locality named Nouroaia.
  The pie-chart procedure as a whole was criticized by French geographer Emmanuel de Martonne, who viewed it as inaccurate in rendering the comparative numerical force of the individual populations. Martonne stated having personally verified the accuracy of Nour's map at some point before 1920, and concluded: "Although it is not exempt from all criticism, it is generally as exact as is permitted by the Russian documents on which it bases itself. As is the case with [Bátky's data on the Romanians in] Hungary, one presumes that any error is to the disfavor of Romanians." Bessarabian historian Ion Constantin sees the map as one of Nour's "meritorious" contributions to the cause of Romanian emancipation.
  Nour took his ideas outside the Poporanist clubs, and became a contributor to the unofficial Conservative Party press. He bec
caption: Ethnographic map of Bessarabia made by Alexis Nour in 1916
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