Bessarabia occupies a special place among the Russian outskirts. Being the last territorial increment of the Romanov empire in the southwest, the Bessarabian region (later the province) combined the typological features of the western outskirts and Novorossiya. The complex interaction of the imperial center with local elites was combined in it with the policy of colonization, which largely determined the ethnic composition of the modern Republic of Moldova. The history of Bessarabia in the first half of the 19th century clearly illustrates the mechanism of integration of the newly acquired territory into the mental, political and social space of the Russian Empire. In the second half of the XIX - early XX centuries in Bessarabia, as well as on other outskirts, administrative, linguistic and political assimilation intensified. At the same time, this territory becomes a place of interaction between various projects for building an empire and a nation. The present work, published in the year of the bicentennial anniversary of the accession of Bessarabia to the Russian Empire, is an attempt to critically reassess traditional historical narratives in the light of the latest studies of empire and nationalism carried out by Russian and foreign historians.