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Refining Lives and Defining Sugar in the Transnistrian Borderlands (1898-2003)The research project shows how the community of a peripheral sugar factory from the East European borderlands lived through the repeated changes of borders and experienced the major social engineering experiments of the long twentieth century as local continuities rather than major ruptures of the European history. From its founding in 1898 to its demise in 2003, the seemingly inconsequential Rybnitsa Sugar Factory experienced and was shaped by the key events of twentieth-century European history, revealing in great complexity the impacts of two World Wars, the Holocaust, the Soviet attempt to build a “socialist” state, the Cold War, and the post-Soviet “transition” to a market economy.[caption id="attachment_2985" align="alignleft" width="300"] Alexandru Lesanu[/caption]Alexandru Lesanu received his PhD from the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University. He was employed as a lecturer at the Free International University of Moldova and received his Master of Arts in History from Central European University (Budapest, Hungary) in 2005. His research interests are: Soviet history, post-Soviet quasi-states, borderlands studies, labor history and history of technologies.