In 1917, after the February Revolution in Petrograd, "Moldavian Revolutionary Committees of Soldiers" were organized in the major Russian cities where recruits from Bessarabia were concentrated: Odessa, Kiev, Sevastopol, Kherson, Novogeorgievsk, Moroski (Minsk gubernia) in Russia, as well as in Iași, Roman, and Bârlad on the Romanian Front, plus smaller ones.

[8] During April, May and June 1917, a series of Peasant Congresses were held at local levels, demanding land, administrative, and social reform, and the autonomy of Bessarabia.

July 16] 1917, the Moldavian soldiers' central committee in Chișinău called for the creation of a council of the province, which would create a Proposed Law for National and Territorial Autonomy.

[15] At the suggestion of P. Varzar, P. Harea, and lieutenant Gherman Pântea, leaders of the Central Soldiers Committee, the meeting set up elections for a provincial assembly, Sfatul Țării.

[16] Organizing elections was difficult due to the security situation, and because most able-bodied men between 19 and 48 were recruited into the Russian army, and stationed on the Romanian front (which saw action until December 1917), in Odessa and other Black Sea ports.

[16] In the meantime, the Ukrainian National Assembly in Kiev claimed Bessarabia as part of Ukraine, and in response, the Moldavians asked for protection from the Petrograd provisional government.

[18] The Central Soldiers Committee in Chișinău and Rumcherod both asked the Petrograd Government to separate Bessarabia from Russia by agreeing to its autonomy and self-rule in its historic and ethnographic borders.

During the first day, the main theme was the disaster in the security situation in Bessarabia, which was full of gangs practicing pillage, robbery, rapes and killings of the population.

On 23 October, the Congress discussed the administrative question, and proclaimed the setting of the parliament Sfatul Țării, composed of 120 delegates, 84 of which should be Moldavians, and 36 ethnic minorities, which should assume the national sovereignty.

Lenin is said to have replied that he was aware of the situation in Bessarabia, and was satisfied that the people managed to elect a parliament in an orderly fashion based on democratic principles.

December 2] 1917, Sfatul Țării proclaimed the Moldavian Democratic Federative Republic (Romanian: Republica Democrată Federativă Moldovenească), with Inculeț as president.

The Entente sent some Serbian and Czechoslovakian troops to no avail, but some squads of Romanian Transylvanians and Bukovinians, organized in Kiev, were sent to Bessarabia, and they resisted the Bolsheviks at the Chișinău train station.

His credentials could not be verified, as no-one at that time in Chișinău has met him in any former military unit of the Tsar, but he spoke clean Romanian, said he was from a Bessarabian village, and said he had long suffered under the Tsarist regime, and he was entrusted with responsibility.

He started to send groups of soldiers to pillage neighboring villages and bring to Chişinău oxen, cows, horses, cattle carts, taken from the boyars and peasants.

These were brought to the court of the Theological Seminary in Chișinău, where Catărău waited for their peasant owners to show up, and for payment would order to free the cattle, thus making thousands of rubles.

December 8] 1917 the session of the Council of Directors General, it was decided to send a delegation to Iași to demand the Romanian government and representatives of Entente military aid against Bolshevik influence in Bessarabia.

In Kiev, with the help of the Romanian government, several legions of Bukovinian and Transylvanian volunteers, soldiers and officers, were be organized to be sent to Bukovina and possibly Transylvania.

[38] The county councils of Bălți, Soroca and Orhei were the earliest to ask for the "holy, redeeming, much desired and eternal union with the mother country Romania"[39] On April 9 [O.S.

The Sfatul Țării's declaration listed 14 special privileges that Bessarabia would retain inside an enlarged Romania:[40] The first and main condition of undertaking agrarian reform was debated and approved by the Romanian Parliament in November, 1918.

On December 20, 1919, these men voted, along with the representatives of Romania's other regions, to ratificate the unification acts that had been approved by Sfatul Țării and the National Congresses in Transylvania and Bukovina.

Conditions 4 to 11 regarding human rights and freedoms, minority rights, the representation of Bessarabia in the Romanian legislative and executive, the type of suffrage for general and local elections, the legal continuation and conditions for modifications of the laws and regulations adopted by Sfatul Țării, the reform and organization of the military (recruitment on territorial basis), and the amnesty for crimes committed for political reasons in 1917–1918, were only partially absorbed into the Romanian Constitution and/or legislation.

The following decision was taken by unanimity of votes: The war of the peoples of Europe, that everywhere had as consequences fundamental changes, has created something entirely new for Bessarabia as well, where 100 years ago German colonists have founded their motherland.

The Congress of German Colonists makes this step of serious and of big responsibility with faith in God and asking the Almighty to bless it and to bring everything to a good end.

Bessarabia was not annexed by Romania, as the Ukrainian note states, but has declared "Union with the Motherland" on the basis of a decision taken by Sfatul Țării, the national assembly of the Moldavian Republic.

They have send a memo to the Paris Peace Conference, published several newspaper articles and brochures targeting the French public opinion, portraying the situation in Bessarabia as a Romanian military occupation.

Between the Russian administration in Bessarabia and the popular masses, not only the Moldavian ones, but also those of other nationalities, was a chasm (...) The Russificators have created a situation, that the peasant coming to the city found himself in an unknown black forest.

But in the boroughs, in the fairs and in the markets, one could see how the big mass of the Jewish merchants and shopkeepers, which barely spoke Russian or couldn't understand it at all, were speaking perfectly in Moldavian.

The population has used these gifts and hence the alienation of the masses from the Russian culture, from which it was already foreign and not interested in its preserver, is happening fast and without pain – with the passage of the time, so passes the Russia from Bessarabia.

[51] The original 135 Diet mandates were divided into 28 constituency groups: The increase to 150 members meant that several were added from the zemstvos and the cities of the various districts, and the government service of mail, telegraphs and telephones.

The Diet at any rate provided a welcome substitute for constitutional government, and indeed considered itself at the start a transitional body, preliminary to the establishment of a definite regime.