The idea's most active champion was Grigory Kotovsky, a revolutionary and native of Bessarabia, who in February 1924 co-signed a memorandum to the Bolshevik leadership urging the creation of a Moldavian autonomy on Ukrainian soil. The logic was openly strategic. Bessarabia had been lost to Romania in 1918, and Soviet planners hoped a Moldavian republic on the Dniester would radicalize pro-Soviet feeling across the river and bolster Moscow's claim to the territory. Propaganda cast the venture in shining terms, one contemporary voice describing the future republic as a lighthouse spreading 'the light of freedom and human dignity.' Organized first as an oblast in March 1924, it comprised four districts with Moldavian majorities, and in October it was elevated to a full autonomous republic within the Ukrainian SSR. Curiously, its declared capital was named as the 'temporarily occupied' city of Kishinev, which lay inside Romania and which the republic never actually controlled.

For ordinary people, the republic's early years were defined by upheaval and suffering. Collectivization here moved even faster than in the rest of Ukraine and was reported complete by the summer of 1931, a speed achieved at human cost: roughly two thousand families were deported to Kazakhstan. Then came the famine of 1932 and 1933, the same catastrophe known in Ukraine as the Holodomor, and tens of thousands of peasants starved. Desperate people tried to flee across the Dniester into Romania, knowing they might be shot for the attempt. On 23 February 1932, near the village of Olanesti, forty of them were killed, an incident survivors carried into the European press. The Soviet authorities dismissed the dead as subverted 'kulak elements.' Behind that dry official phrase were families who had chosen the risk of a bullet over the certainty of hunger.

The seat of government wandered before it settled. A provisional capital was established at Balta, a town that was only about two and a half percent Moldavian, and in 1929 it moved to Tiraspol, where it remained. From here the republic waged its war of words: in 1930 a radio station began broadcasting Romanian-language programming across the river, aimed squarely at Bessarabia, and a taller mast raised in 1936 extended its reach, prompting Romania to build its own counter-station. The republic's purpose was finally realized in 1940. After the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact cleared the way, the Soviet Union occupied Bessarabia, and on 2 August 1940 the autonomous republic was dissolved, its westernmost part folded together with Bessarabian counties to form the new Moldavian SSR. The bridgehead had served its function, and once the far bank was taken, it was no longer needed.