We present an alternative, memory-efficient, Schmidt decomposition-based description of the inherently bipartite restricted active space (RAS) scheme, which can be implemented effortlessly within the density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) method via the dynamically extended active space procedure. Benchmark calculations are compared against state-of-the-art results of C2 and Cr2, which are notorious for their multireference character. Our results for ground and excited states together with spectroscopic constants demonstrate that the proposed novel approach, dubbed as DMRG-RAS, which is variational and free of uncontrolled method errors, has the potential to outperfom conventional methods for strongly correlated molecules.