This article discusses the various forms of resistance to and/or noninvolvement in strategies of national mobilization in early 20th-century Bessarabia. The region was the object of rival claims to inclusion in the Russian imperial and Romanian national space, with each of the two alternative centers competing for the loyalty of the local population. However, the extent to which the Bessarabian population responded to these signals and messages was limited at best. I specifically focus on three groups that, although the most politically active at the local level, were also reluctant to react to nationalist discourses and visions generated at the center: the majority of the Bessarabian intelligentsia, which was thoroughly integrated into the imperial system; politically conscious members of the local clergy, some of whom created a peculiar version of local “patriotism” explicitly opposed to modern nationalist propaganda; and the local nobility, which viewed its political role in terms of dynastic loyalty and conservative social values. I also discuss attempts to attract the local Romanian-speaking peasantry to Russian monarchist and right-wing organizations, which succeeded to a much greater extent than similar efforts by nationalist activists. This illustrates, on the one hand, the ambiguity and uncertainty of the local population’s self-identification and, on the other, the multiple forms that “national indifference” could take in the Russian borderlands before World War I.