The article focuses on the debates concerning language and alphabet in late imperial Bessarabia. The main argument is that Bessarabia, in contrast to the other Russian borderlands, was not an object of a strictly determined “alphabetical policy”. Local writers and publishers were relatively free in the choice of the alphabet, orthography and literary standard for the local version of the Romanian language. In the early XX century several versions of the alphabet circulated in Bessarabia. The dilemma of Cyrillic vs. Latin was resolved in favor of the first alternative because the majority of the Moldavian population was not familiar with the Latin alphabet.