Hertsa Raion or Hertza Raion (, translit.: Hertsaiivs'kyi raion; ) was an administrative raion (district) in the southern part of Chernivtsi Oblast in western Ukraine, on the Romanian border. The region had an area of and the administrative center in the city of Hertsa. It was one of the three raions of Ukraine with the majority of the ethnic Romanian population. The raion was abolished on 18 July 2020 as part of the administrative reform of Ukraine, which reduced the number of raions in Chernivtsi Oblast to three. The area of Hertsa Raion was merged into Chernivtsi Raion. The last estimate of the raion population was
At the time of disestablishment, the raion consisted of two hromadas, Hertsa urban hromada with the administration in Hertsa and Ostrytsia rural hromada with the administration in the selo of Ostrytsia.
History
The Hertsa region was part of the Principality of Moldavia since its founding in the 14th century. After the unification of Moldavia and Wallachia in 1859, it became part of Romania (which gained its formal independence in 1877), as one of the five districts (plăși) of Dorohoi County.
The region was occupied by the Soviet Union in 1940 following the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany, and was added to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. It was recaptured by Romania in 1941 in the course of the Axis attack on the Soviet Union in World War II, but it was recaptured again by the Soviet Army in 1944. The annexation was confirmed by the Paris Peace Treaties in 1947 between the USSR and Romania.
The fact that neither the secret protocol (appendix) of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, which specified the expansionist claims of both sides, nor the June 1940 Soviet Ultimatum demanding from the Kingdom of Romania the adjacent territory of Northern Bukovina and Bessarabia included Hertsa makes the capture by the Soviets controversial in Romania. Furthermore, unlike Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, the region had not been a part of Imperial Russia or Austria-Hungary before World War I, but had been a part of Romania and one of its predecessor states, Moldavia, before that.
The number of deportees to the Soviet north and east from the Hertsa raion in its boundaries from earliy 2020 of the Chernivtsi oblast on June 13, 1941, was 1,373; 219 (15.95%) of them would later die in Siberia and Kazakhstan. Among the 1,373 deportees from Hertsa Raion, 120 were of unknown nationality; among the 1,253 people whose nationality was known, 1090 (86.99%) were ethnic Romanians, 125 were ethnic Jews (9.98%), 31 were ethnic Ukrainians (2.474%), 4 were ethnic Russians (0.32%), 2 were ethnic Germans (0.02%) and 1 was ethnically Polish (0.08%).
Almost all the Jews who lived in the town of Hertsa (1,204) and in the rest of the Hertsa area (14), which were under Soviet rule in 1940-1941 and in 1944-1991, on September 1, 1941, were deported to Transnistria by the Romanian authorities, where most of them died; only 450 were alive in December 1943, when the repatriation of the Jews to Dorohoi County by the Romanian authorities started, while about 800 Jews died. The Romanian army and authorities killed about 100 Jews on July 5, 1941, before the deportation to Transnistria. The Yad Vashem database lists the names of 102 Jews from Hertsa who were killed in Hertsa. Moreover, 483 Jews from Hertsa and the neighboring villages died in Ukraine, including Transnistria, because of the deportations according to the Yad Vashem website.
The Yad Vashem database lists the identities of 843 Jews from Herta who died during World War II.
The city of Hertsa has a Romanian-language newspaper, Gazeta de Herța.
Demographics
In 1930, the region had a population of 30,082, of which 27,919 (92.8%) Romanians, 1,931 (6.4%) were Jews, and 232 (0.8%) people of other ethnicities.
In 2001, the population of Hertsa Raion was 32,316, of which 29,554 or 91.45% identified themselves as Romanians, 1,616 or 5.0% as Ukrainians, and 756 or 2.34% as Moldovans (out of which 511 self-identified their language as Moldovan and 237 as Romanian), 0.9% as Russians, and 0.3% as being of other ethnicities (see: Ukrainian Census, 2001). Hertsa raion, within its boundaries at that time, had 32,316 inhabitants in 2001, including 4.83% Ukrainian-speakers, 93.82% Romanian-speakers, and 1.21% Russian-speakers. In the last Soviet census of 1989, out of 29,611 inhabitants, 1,569 declared themselves Ukrainians (5.30%), 23,539 Romanians (79.49%), 3,978 Moldovans (13.43%), and 431 Russians (1.46%). The decline in the number (from 3,978 to 756) and proportion of Moldovans (from 13.43% to 2.34%) was explained by a switch from a census Moldovan to a census Romanian ethnic identity, and has continued after the 2001 census. In 2001, in the Ostrytsia rural hromada (rural community) created in 2020, with a population of 13,868, 960 of the inhabitants (6.92%) spoke Ukrainian as their native language, while 12,796 (92.27%) spoke Romanian (out of which 12,428 or 89.62% called the language Romanian and 371 or 2.68% called the language Moldovan), and 89 (0.64%) spoke Russian. In the village of Ostrytsia in the Hertsa Raion, in 2001, 93.73% of the inhabitants spoke Romanian as their native language (93.22% self-declared Romanian and 0.52% self-declared Moldovan), while 4.96% spoke Ukrainian.