PRIZONIERII ROMÂNI ARDELENI DIN RUSIA ÎN ANII NEUTRALITĂŢII REGATULUI ROMÂNIEI (1914-1916)
Transylvanian Romanians in Russian Imprisonment in the Years of Romania’s Neutrality (1914-1916)

Summary/Abstract: From the almost 500.000 Transylvanian Romanians mobilised in the Austrian-Hungarian army during World War I, more than 100.000 fell prisoners in Russia, captured following the military operations on the front or reaching captivity due to the numerous desertions caused by the refusal to fight for the interest of an empire that oppressed the nation they belonged to. Most of the Romanian prisoners, and the prisoners from other nationalities, were assigned to different jobs in agriculture, the industry, transportation, considering their occupation in civil life, and the rest – mainly officers and non-commissioned officers - were put into the numerous prisoner camps across the whole of European and Asian Russia. In this study we have set for ourselves the goal to analyse, on the basis of the documentary information, a series of aspects that were little approached until now: the life of the Romanian prisoners in an environment that was entirely different from the one home, their feelings in the conditions of the captivity, the disputes unleashed on the Russian territory – after the resemblance with the ones from the period before the war – between the prisoners from the privileged people of Austria-Hungary and those from the dominated people and nationalities etc. Without rousing too much, as we have done this on other occasions, in other studies, we have underlined that even since the period of Romania’s neutrality, an initiative was born among the Transylvanian Romanian prisoners to organise themselves into units of volunteers, that would fight at the proper time, in the Romanian army for the liberation of Transylvania ant the Banat from the ruling of the dualistic empire and their unification with the homeland. This idea was successful in the years that followed, leading to the organisation on the Russian territory of two units of Transylvanian volunteers and volunteers from Bucovina, who contributed to Romania’s completion as a state in 1918.

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