The unification of the Romanian Principalities in 1859 created a new geopolitical situation in this part of South-East Europe, influencing not only Romania’s internal policy, but also the attitude of the authorities of the Habsburg Empire and of the Russian Empire towards the newly created Romanian state and towards the Romanian communities within these empires. In Bessarabia, the unionist movement of the 1850s and the unification of the Principalities generated two opposite processes. It was primarily about the revival and fortification of the Romanian national feeling among the Moldovan boyars and intellectuals. Secondly, as a reaction to the emergence of the new modern Romanian state, conceived as a danger, at the western border of the Russian Empire, alongside the Romanian-speaking Bessarabia, populated by ethnic Romanians, the Chişinău and St. Petersburg authorities resorted to a drastic tightening of the policy of Russification, and to the change of the national policy paradigm of the Russian Empire in Bessarabia. The previous policy of “tactical concessions”, promoted by Alexander I (1801-1825), Nicholas I (1825-1855), Alexander II (in the initial phase) (1855-1881), which more or less took into account the “local specificity”, was replaced in the 1860s with a totally restrictive national policy. Since 1862, all new initiatives of the Moldavian intellectuals and boyars, who predicted the assertion of the national language and culture in Bessarabia, were rejected because they “dreamed of a united and merged Romania”. In 1865, seeking solutions to tighten up and streamline russification policy, the governor of Bessarabia requested the subordination of the frontier guard and custom offices at the border with Romania to strengthen the political oversight of the border with Romania and turn the Prut in an unrelenting political barrier. In 1866, after publishing the schoolbooks full of “Romanianism” by Ioan Doncev, the process of exclusion of Romanian language from teaching began in all types of schools in Bessarabia. In 1868, at the request of the Minister of Education of the Russian Empire, Count D. Tolstoi, who, after the 1867 visit of the Odessa schools, was completely dissatisfied with the progress of russification of the Moldovan villages, began the process of restructuring of the primary education in Bessarabia, turning Moldovan parochial schools into Russian schools, building a new primary education system based entirely on Russian schools.