Prisma Ukraïna
2019/ 2020

Alexandru Leşanu

Refining Lives and Defining Sugar in the Transnistrian Borderlands (1898-2003)

Alexandru Leşanu is the Irmgard Coninx Prize Fellow for Transregional Studies in the framework of Prisma Ukraїna – Research Network Eastern Europe for the 2019-2020 academic year. During the fellowship, he will work on his book manuscript Refining Lives and Defining Sugar in the Transnistrian Borderlands (1898-2003). His research interests include Soviet history, post-Soviet de facto states, borderlands studies, transnational history and history of technologies. In 2018-2019, he was a Swedish Institute Visby Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies (IRES), Uppsala University. He received his PhD in East European and Digital History from the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University (Fairfax, Virginia, USA). In 2013-2014, he was a Black Sea Link Fellow at the New Europe College, in Bucharest, Romania. He was a lecturer at the Free International University of Moldova and received his Master of Arts in History from Central European University (Budapest, Hungary) in 2005.

 

Refining Lives and Defining Sugar in the Transnistrian Borderlands (1898-2003)

The project traces the interaction between the local infrastructure of sugar production with the various political and economic regimes throughout the long twentieth century at the Rybnitsa Sugar Factory in the Transnistrian region of the Republic of Moldova. This carefully chosen location offers a different kind of transnational history. From its founding in 1898, the Rybnitsa Sugar Factory never moved, but found itself consecutively subject to the authority of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union’s Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, the World War II Romanian occupation regime, the post-war Soviet Union’s Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic, and today’s contested Transnistrian region in the independent Republic of Moldova. Consequently, the study will analyze the capacity of the local sugar infrastructure to adapt or resist against the pressures of the multiple state formations. The choice to focus on Rybnitsa allows the study to offer many of the benefits of transnational history while maintaining a clear focus on history from the ground up. In addition, the project fills a gap in the study of the European sugar beet industry, which had an important role in the industrial development of European countryside.