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This region, historically known as Bessarabia, has changed hands many times. After being Turkish for many years it became Russian in 1810. In 1917 it proclaimed independence before joining Romania in 1918. In 1940, under the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, it once more became Soviet. The territory was joined to the pre-existing Moldavian ASSR, a Soviet fiction carved out of Ukraine which in fact had very few Moldavians living there (this is the origin of the dispute between the modern Republic of Moldova and the self-styled Dniestr Republic, the largely Slavic-populated eastern region) and became the Moldavian SSR on 2 August 1940. From 1941 until 1944 Romania, allied to the Axis powers, once again ruled Bessarabia.

Post war, the Soviets created a largely artificial Moldavian language (largely accomplished by transcribing Romanian from the Latin alphabet into Cyrillic) and sought to encourage the creation of a separate Moldavian nation. This fiction could not disguise the fact that the Moldavians are essentially Romanian, and although Moldova's initially expressed aspiration of union with Romania is now much more muted, the Moldovan flag is basically that of Romania with the addition of the national coat of arms on the yellow stripe.

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