Moldovenism
Encyclopedia
Moldovenism is a political term used to refer to the support and promotion of the Moldovan
identity and Moldovan culture.
Some of its supporters ascribe this identity to the medieval Principality of Moldavia. Others, in order to explain the current differences between Romanian-speaking inhabitants of the two banks of the Prut river, ascribe it to the long incorporation of Bessarabia in the Russian empire and the USSR. The opponents, on the contrary, claim that Moldovans and Romanians are a single ethnic group and that the Moldovan identity was created by the Soviet Union.
Moldovenists claim that the people of Moldavia historically self-identified as "Moldavian" before the notion of "Romanian" became widespread
. The notion that the Romanians
and Moldovans in Bessarabia
and the Moldavian ASSR
(MASSR) formed two separate ethnonational groups, speaking different languages and possessing separate historical, cultural, and even biological traits was endorsed by the Soviet Union, and was used by it as an argument to support its territorial claim to the Romanian-administered Bessarabia during the interwar period
.
and the Ottoman Empire
signed the Treaty of Bucharest, by which Russia annexed the eastern part of the medieval Principality of Moldavia. This territory became known as Bessarabia. In 1917, when the Russian Empire was disintegrating, a Moldavian Democratic Republic
was formed in Bessarabia. In 1918, after the Romanian army gained control of the region, Sfatul Tarii
proclaimed the independence of the Moldavian Republic and, later, voted for the union with Romania
. The Soviet Russia
contested the outcome of these events and, in May 1919, proclaimed the Bessarabian Soviet Socialist Republic
as a government in exile. After the Soviet-organized Tatarbunary Uprising
failed, in 1924 a Moldavian ASSR (MASSR) was created within the Ukrainian SSR
, just east of the river Dniester
that then marked the boundary between Romania
and the Soviet Union.
For the purpose of giving MASSR its own identity separate from Romania, Soviet authorities declared the variety spoken by the majority of Moldavians to be "Moldavian language". The intellectual elites of the MASSR were asked to standardise a Moldovan literary language based on the local dialects of MASSR, which are similar to Romanian.
Until the 1920s the Russians did not argue that Moldovans and their neighbors in the Romanian Principalities somehow formed nations. One observer wrote in 1846 in the journal of the Russian foreign ministry that “the inhabitants of upper Bessarabia are essentially Romanians, that is, a mixture of Slavs and Romans
, and sons of the Greek Orthodox Church
".
In May 1917, at a congress of Bessarabian teachers, a group protested against being called "Romanians", affirming they were "Moldovans".
Representatives of the Romanian-speaking population living in Podolia
, and Kherson
participated in the Bessarabian national movement in 1917 and early 1918, agitating for incorporation of the territory across Dniester into the Greater Romanian Kingdom
. The Romanian government never took significant interest in these demands, which would have implied large-scale military operations, and settled in the end to leave behind those areas, which became part of Soviet Ukraine after the Russian Civil War
.
The calls from Transnistrian emigres continued into the 1920s asking for Romania
to fund schools in the region as there were schools and cultural organizations in regions inhabited by speakers of cognate Latin languages in the Balkans. Refugees flooded across the Dniester and special funds were put aside for housing and education.
Nichita Smochină
, an educator settled in Paris, founded the Associations of Transnistrian Romanians in order to assist 20,000 refugees from across the Dniester, and welcomed the creation of the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Republic.
Pavel Chior, the MASSR People's Commissar of Education, argued that literary Romanian borrowed too many French language
words during its standardization in the 19th century. According to Chior, this made it incomprehensible to the peasants both in the MASSR and Romania, demonstrating the division between the "ruling class" and the "exploited class". Soviet linguist M. V. Sergievsky studied linguistic variation in the MASSR and identified two dialects. One, similar to the spoken variety in Bessarabia, was chosen as the standard, to pave the way for the "liberation of the Bessarabians". Gabriel Buciuşcanu, a Socialist Revolutionary
member of Sfatul Ţării
who opposed the union with Romania
, wrote a new grammar compendium in 1925, but it was considered too similar to standard Romanian grammar, and was quickly pulled out of circulation.
In the 1920s, there was a dispute among the Soviet linguists between supporters ("Romanizators" or "Romanists") and opponents ("autochthonists", Russian: самобытники) of the convergence of the Moldavian and Romanian.
The "autochthonists" strove to base the literary Moldovan on local dialects from the left bank of the Dniester. Neologisms, mostly from Russian, were created to cover technical areas that had no native equivalent.
Then in February 1932, communists in the MASSR received a directive from the Communist Party of Ukraine to switch Moldovan writing to the Latin alphabet
. This was part of the massive Latinization campaign of minority languages in the USSR, based on the theory of Soviet linguist Nikolai Marr postulating the convergence to a single world language, expected to be a means of communication in the future classless society (Communism
). This directive was passively sabotaged by the "autochthonist" majority, until Stanislav Kosior
(General Secretary
of the Ukrainian Communist Party) and several MASSR communists visited Joseph Stalin
— who reportedly insisted on faster Latinization with the ultimate goal of the convergence of Moldavian and Romanian cultures, hinting at the possibility of a future reunion of Moldova and Romania within the Soviet state. Nevertheless, resistance to Romanization among communist activists persisted, and after 1933, a number of prominent "autochthonists" were repressed, their books destroyed, and their neologisms banned.
After the infamous February–March (1937) Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Plenum
, which escalated the Great Purge
, both "Romanizators" and "autochthonists" were declared "imperialist spies": "autochthonists", because they sabotaged the Latinization, and "Romanizators", because they were "agents of boyar
Romania" ("Боярская Румыния"), i.e. anti-Soviet.
In February 1938, Moldovan communists issued a declaration transferring Moldovan writing to the Cyrillic alphabet once again, which in August 1939 was made into a law of the Moldavian ASSR
, and after 1940, of the Moldavian SSR
. The motivation given was that the Latinization was used by "bourgeois-nationalist elements" to "distance the Moldavian populace from the Ukrainian and Russian ones, with the ultimate goal of the separation of Soviet Moldavia from the USSR".
and retook Bessarabia. Between 1941 and 1944, Romania also occupied the territory between the Dniester and Bug
rivers (historic Transnistria
). By 1944 the Soviets had taken back all the territories they lost in 1941, which remained in the Soviet Union on until the latter's dissolution
in 1991.
During the first years of Soviet occupation, the term "Romanian language" was forbidden. The official language for use in Moldovan schools throughout the entire MSSR (both in Bessarabia and Transnistria) during Stalinist period was based on a patois
variety
spoken in some areas of the former MASSR. The Commission for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in Moldova
is assessing this period.
In 1956, during the Nikita Khrushchev
's rehabilitation
of the victims of Stalinist repressions, a special report was issued about the state of the Moldavian language. The report stated, in part, that the discussions of 1920-30s between the two tendencies had been mostly non-scientific, since there were very few linguists in the republic; and that the grammar and the basic lexicon of the literary Romanian and Moldovan languages are identical, while differences are secondary and nonessential. Because the political situation in the People's Republic of Romania was now pro-Soviet, the planned convergence of the Romanian and Moldovan languages was once again approved.
During the entire period of Soviet rule, Moldovan speakers were encouraged to learn the Russian language as a prerequisite for access to higher education, social status and political power. Transfers of territory and population movements, including deportations of locals and state-encouraged immigration from the rest of the USSR, shifted the ethnic and linguistic makeup of the republic. By the late 1970s, the number of Russian speakers in the Moldavian SSR had greatly increased. These changes contributed to the proliferation of Russian loanwords in the spoken Moldovan.
While some Soviet linguists continued to deny the existence of a distinct Moldovan language, a new generation of Soviet linguists revived the debate in the 1970s. For example, one linguist, Iliasenco, compared the Romanian and Moldovan translations of a Leonid Brezhnev
speech from Russian and used them as a proof for the existence of two different languages. Mikhail Bruchis analysed this claim, and noticed that all the words of both translations are found in both dictionaries. Also, Iliasenco implied that "Moldovan" preferred synthetic syntagms, while "Romanian" preferred analytic ones. However, this claim was also proven wrong, as a book of Nicolae Ceauşescu
(the political leader of Romania at the time) uses mostly "Moldovan" synthetic syntagms, while a book by Ivan Bodiul
(the secretary of the Moldavian SSR
) uses mostly "Romanian" analytic syntagms. Bruchis' conclusion was that both translations were within the limits of the Romanian language.
, Eugen Doga
or Constantin Tanase, argues that Moldovans have always been Romanians, even if the modern history separated them from the rest of Romanians. Moldovanism is thus regarded as a Soviet attempt to create an artificial nationality with the goal of ethnic assimilation of Romanians living in the Soviet Union. The other side emphasizes the distinctiveness of Moldovans such as Moldovan historian and politician Victor Stepaniuc
states that Moldovans have always been different from Romanians. Some claim that, for Bessarabian Moldovans, the long isolation from the rest of Romanians (between 1812–1918, after 1940) was "more than ample time [...] to develop [their] own separate national identity".
After collaborating for several years with the Pan-Romanian Popular Front of Moldova
, acting president Mircea Snegur
moved close to the Agrarian Party of Moldova
, a strong supporter of the Moldovan identity. During his visit to Bucharest in February 1991, he talked about "Romanians on both banks of the Prut river", however, during the presidential campaign in 1994, Snegur stressed in the speech Our Home the existence of a distinct Moldovan nation as the foundation of the state. The speech was immediately condemned by the intellectuals. Representatives of The Writers' Union, the Institute of Linguistics, the Institute of History, Chisinau State University, and other institutions declared the speech an affront to the true identity of the republic's ethnic majority and an attempt to further “an invention of the Communist regime” by erecting a “barrier to authentic Romanian culture”. Nevertheless, Snegur's stance helped the Agrarian Party of Moldova
win an absolute majority in the Parliament.
According to a study conducted in the Republic of Moldova in May 1998, when the self-declared Moldovans were asked to relate the Romanian and Moldovan identities, 55% considered them somewhat different, 26% very different and less than 5% identical.
A survey carried out in the Republic of Moldova by William Crowther in 1992 showed that 87% of the Romanian/Moldovan speakers chose to identify themselves as "Moldovans", rather than "Romanians".
The 2004 census results
reported that out of the 3,383,332 people living in Moldova (without Transnistria), 75.81% declared themselves Moldovans and only 2.17% Romanians. A group of international observers considered the census was generally conducted in a professional manner, although they reported several cases when enumerators encouraged respondents to declare themselves Moldovans rather than Romanians.
This document faced criticism in Moldova as being "anti-European" and contradicting the Constitution which states that "no ideology may be adopted as official state ideology".
Moldovan historian Gheorghe E. Cojocaru
, in his book Cominternul si originile Moldovenismului, claims that "Moldovanism" and its dissemination among the Romance speakers living east of the Prut are of Soviet origin. On the occasion, Moldovan politician and historian Alexandru Moşanu
claimed that "The Moldovanist ideology appeared as a policy of ethnic assimilation of the Romanians from Transnistria
, then from the entire space of the former Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic. And now from the Republic of Moldova." On January 22, 2010, the Romanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs launched the book in Bucharest. At the release of the book, the Foreign Minister of Romania Teodor Baconschi
said: Marian Lupu
, leader of the Democratic Party of Moldova, rebuked him, declaring:
Moldovans
Moldovans or Moldavians are the largest population group of Moldova...
identity and Moldovan culture.
Some of its supporters ascribe this identity to the medieval Principality of Moldavia. Others, in order to explain the current differences between Romanian-speaking inhabitants of the two banks of the Prut river, ascribe it to the long incorporation of Bessarabia in the Russian empire and the USSR. The opponents, on the contrary, claim that Moldovans and Romanians are a single ethnic group and that the Moldovan identity was created by the Soviet Union.
Moldovenists claim that the people of Moldavia historically self-identified as "Moldavian" before the notion of "Romanian" became widespread
National awakening of Romania
During the period of Austro-Hungarian rule in Transylvania and Ottoman suzerainty over Wallachia and Moldavia, most Romanians were treated as second-class citizens in their country...
. The notion that the Romanians
Romanians
The Romanians are an ethnic group native to Romania, who speak Romanian; they are the majority inhabitants of Romania....
and Moldovans in Bessarabia
Bessarabia
Bessarabia is a historical term for the geographic region in Eastern Europe bounded by the Dniester River on the east and the Prut River on the west....
and the Moldavian ASSR
Moldavian ASSR
The Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic , shortened to Moldavian ASSR or, less frequently, Moldovan ASSR, was an autonomous republic of the Ukrainian SSR between 12 October 1924 and 2 August 1940, encompassing modern Transnistria The Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic...
(MASSR) formed two separate ethnonational groups, speaking different languages and possessing separate historical, cultural, and even biological traits was endorsed by the Soviet Union, and was used by it as an argument to support its territorial claim to the Romanian-administered Bessarabia during the interwar period
Interwar period
Interwar period can refer to any period between two wars. The Interbellum is understood to be the period between the end of the Great War or First World War and the beginning of the Second World War in Europe....
.
Creation of Moldavian ASSR
In 1812 the Russian EmpireRussian Empire
The Russian Empire was a state that existed from 1721 until the Russian Revolution of 1917. It was the successor to the Tsardom of Russia and the predecessor of the Soviet Union...
and the Ottoman Empire
Ottoman Empire
The Ottoman EmpireIt was usually referred to as the "Ottoman Empire", the "Turkish Empire", the "Ottoman Caliphate" or more commonly "Turkey" by its contemporaries...
signed the Treaty of Bucharest, by which Russia annexed the eastern part of the medieval Principality of Moldavia. This territory became known as Bessarabia. In 1917, when the Russian Empire was disintegrating, a Moldavian Democratic Republic
Moldavian Democratic Republic
The Moldavian Democratic Republic , a.k.a. Moldavian Republic, was the state proclaimed on by Sfatul Ţării of Bessarabia, elected in October-November 1917 in the wake of the February Revolution and disintegration of the political power in the Russian Empire.Sfatul Ţării was its legislative body,...
was formed in Bessarabia. In 1918, after the Romanian army gained control of the region, Sfatul Tarii
Sfatul Tarii
Sfatul Țării was, in 1917-1918, the National Assembly of the Governorate of Bessarabia of the disintegrating Russian Empire, which proclaimed the independent Moldavian Democratic Republic in December 1917, and then union with Romania in April 1918.-Russian participation in World War I:In August...
proclaimed the independence of the Moldavian Republic and, later, voted for the union with Romania
Union of Bessarabia with Romania
On , the Sfatul Ţării, or National Council, of Bessarabia proclaimed union with the Kingdom of Romania.-Governorate of Bessarabia:The 1812 Treaty of Bucharest between the Ottoman Empire and the Russian Empires provided for Russian annexation of the eastern half of the territory of the Principality...
. The Soviet Russia
Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic
The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic , commonly referred to as Soviet Russia, Bolshevik Russia, or simply Russia, was the largest, most populous and economically developed republic in the former Soviet Union....
contested the outcome of these events and, in May 1919, proclaimed the Bessarabian Soviet Socialist Republic
Bessarabian Soviet Socialist Republic
The Bessarabian Soviet Socialist Republic or Bessarabian SSR was a government formed by Bolsheviks as part of their plans to establish control over Bessarabia, which was united with Romania in the course of events after the Russian Revolution of 1917...
as a government in exile. After the Soviet-organized Tatarbunary Uprising
Tatarbunary Uprising
The Tatarbunary Uprising was a Bolshevik-inspired peasant revolt that took place on 15–18 September 1924, in and around the town of Tatarbunary in Budjak , then part of Greater Romania, now part of Odessa Oblast, Ukraine...
failed, in 1924 a Moldavian ASSR (MASSR) was created within the Ukrainian SSR
Ukrainian SSR
The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic or in short, the Ukrainian SSR was a sovereign Soviet Socialist state and one of the fifteen constituent republics of the Soviet Union lasting from its inception in 1922 to the breakup in 1991...
, just east of the river Dniester
Dniester
The Dniester is a river in Eastern Europe. It runs through Ukraine and Moldova and separates most of Moldova's territory from the breakaway de facto state of Transnistria.-Names:...
that then marked the boundary between Romania
Romania
Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeastern Europe, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian arch, bordering on the Black Sea...
and the Soviet Union.
For the purpose of giving MASSR its own identity separate from Romania, Soviet authorities declared the variety spoken by the majority of Moldavians to be "Moldavian language". The intellectual elites of the MASSR were asked to standardise a Moldovan literary language based on the local dialects of MASSR, which are similar to Romanian.
Until the 1920s the Russians did not argue that Moldovans and their neighbors in the Romanian Principalities somehow formed nations. One observer wrote in 1846 in the journal of the Russian foreign ministry that “the inhabitants of upper Bessarabia are essentially Romanians, that is, a mixture of Slavs and Romans
Ancient Rome
Ancient Rome was a thriving civilization that grew on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 8th century BC. Located along the Mediterranean Sea and centered on the city of Rome, it expanded to one of the largest empires in the ancient world....
, and sons of the Greek Orthodox Church
Greek Orthodox Church
The Greek Orthodox Church is the body of several churches within the larger communion of Eastern Orthodox Christianity sharing a common cultural tradition whose liturgy is also traditionally conducted in Koine Greek, the original language of the New Testament...
".
In May 1917, at a congress of Bessarabian teachers, a group protested against being called "Romanians", affirming they were "Moldovans".
Representatives of the Romanian-speaking population living in Podolia
Podolia Governorate
The Podolia Governorate or Government of Podolia, set up after the Second Partition of Poland, comprised a governorate of the Russian Empire from 1793 to 1917, of the Ukrainian People's Republic from 1917 to 1921, and of the Ukrainian SSR from 1921 to 1925.-Location:The Podolian Governorate...
, and Kherson
Kherson Governorate
The Kherson Governorate or Government of Kherson was a guberniya, or administrative territorial unit, in the Southern Ukrainian region, between the Dnieper and Dniester Rivers, of the Russian Empire. It was one of three governorates created in 1802 when the Novorossiya guberniya was abolished...
participated in the Bessarabian national movement in 1917 and early 1918, agitating for incorporation of the territory across Dniester into the Greater Romanian Kingdom
Greater Romania
The Greater Romania generally refers to the territory of Romania in the years between the First World War and the Second World War, the largest geographical extent of Romania up to that time and its largest peacetime extent ever ; more precisely, it refers to the territory of the Kingdom of...
. The Romanian government never took significant interest in these demands, which would have implied large-scale military operations, and settled in the end to leave behind those areas, which became part of Soviet Ukraine after the Russian Civil War
Russian Civil War
The Russian Civil War was a multi-party war that occurred within the former Russian Empire after the Russian provisional government collapsed to the Soviets, under the domination of the Bolshevik party. Soviet forces first assumed power in Petrograd The Russian Civil War (1917–1923) was a...
.
The calls from Transnistrian emigres continued into the 1920s asking for Romania
Greater Romania
The Greater Romania generally refers to the territory of Romania in the years between the First World War and the Second World War, the largest geographical extent of Romania up to that time and its largest peacetime extent ever ; more precisely, it refers to the territory of the Kingdom of...
to fund schools in the region as there were schools and cultural organizations in regions inhabited by speakers of cognate Latin languages in the Balkans. Refugees flooded across the Dniester and special funds were put aside for housing and education.
Nichita Smochină
Nichita Smochină
Nichita P. Smochină was a Transnistrian-born activist, scholar and political figure, especially noted for campaigning on behalf of ethnic Romanians in the Soviet Union. He was first active in the Russian Empire, serving with distinction in World War I, then in the Ukrainian People's Republic,...
, an educator settled in Paris, founded the Associations of Transnistrian Romanians in order to assist 20,000 refugees from across the Dniester, and welcomed the creation of the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Republic.
Pavel Chior, the MASSR People's Commissar of Education, argued that literary Romanian borrowed too many French language
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
words during its standardization in the 19th century. According to Chior, this made it incomprehensible to the peasants both in the MASSR and Romania, demonstrating the division between the "ruling class" and the "exploited class". Soviet linguist M. V. Sergievsky studied linguistic variation in the MASSR and identified two dialects. One, similar to the spoken variety in Bessarabia, was chosen as the standard, to pave the way for the "liberation of the Bessarabians". Gabriel Buciuşcanu, a Socialist Revolutionary
Socialist-Revolutionary Party
thumb|right|200px|Socialist-Revolutionary election poster, 1917. The caption in red reads "партия соц-рев" , short for Party of the Socialist Revolutionaries...
member of Sfatul Ţării
Sfatul Tarii
Sfatul Țării was, in 1917-1918, the National Assembly of the Governorate of Bessarabia of the disintegrating Russian Empire, which proclaimed the independent Moldavian Democratic Republic in December 1917, and then union with Romania in April 1918.-Russian participation in World War I:In August...
who opposed the union with Romania
Union of Bessarabia with Romania
On , the Sfatul Ţării, or National Council, of Bessarabia proclaimed union with the Kingdom of Romania.-Governorate of Bessarabia:The 1812 Treaty of Bucharest between the Ottoman Empire and the Russian Empires provided for Russian annexation of the eastern half of the territory of the Principality...
, wrote a new grammar compendium in 1925, but it was considered too similar to standard Romanian grammar, and was quickly pulled out of circulation.
Romanizators and autochthonists
The "autochthonists" strove to base the literary Moldovan on local dialects from the left bank of the Dniester. Neologisms, mostly from Russian, were created to cover technical areas that had no native equivalent.
Then in February 1932, communists in the MASSR received a directive from the Communist Party of Ukraine to switch Moldovan writing to the Latin alphabet
Latin alphabet
The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most recognized alphabet used in the world today. It evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome...
. This was part of the massive Latinization campaign of minority languages in the USSR, based on the theory of Soviet linguist Nikolai Marr postulating the convergence to a single world language, expected to be a means of communication in the future classless society (Communism
Communism
Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...
). This directive was passively sabotaged by the "autochthonist" majority, until Stanislav Kosior
Stanislav Kosior
Stanislav Vikentyevich Kosior, sometimes spelled Kossior was one of three Kosior brothers, Polish-born Soviet politicians. He was General Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party, deputy prime minister of the USSR, and a member of the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union...
(General Secretary
General Secretary
The office of general secretary is staffed by the chief officer of:*The General Secretariat for Macedonia and Thrace, a government agency for the Greek regions of Macedonia and Thrace...
of the Ukrainian Communist Party) and several MASSR communists visited Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
— who reportedly insisted on faster Latinization with the ultimate goal of the convergence of Moldavian and Romanian cultures, hinting at the possibility of a future reunion of Moldova and Romania within the Soviet state. Nevertheless, resistance to Romanization among communist activists persisted, and after 1933, a number of prominent "autochthonists" were repressed, their books destroyed, and their neologisms banned.
After the infamous February–March (1937) Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
The Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union , abbreviated in Russian as ЦК, "Tse-ka", earlier was also called as the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party ...
Plenum
Plenum
Plenum may refer to:* Plenum chamber, a chamber intended to contain air, gas, or liquid at positive pressure* Plenism, or Horror vacui...
, which escalated the Great Purge
Great Purge
The Great Purge was a series of campaigns of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union orchestrated by Joseph Stalin from 1936 to 1938...
, both "Romanizators" and "autochthonists" were declared "imperialist spies": "autochthonists", because they sabotaged the Latinization, and "Romanizators", because they were "agents of boyar
Boyar
A boyar, or bolyar , was a member of the highest rank of the feudal Moscovian, Kievan Rus'ian, Bulgarian, Wallachian, and Moldavian aristocracies, second only to the ruling princes , from the 10th century through the 17th century....
Romania" ("Боярская Румыния"), i.e. anti-Soviet.
In February 1938, Moldovan communists issued a declaration transferring Moldovan writing to the Cyrillic alphabet once again, which in August 1939 was made into a law of the Moldavian ASSR
Moldavian ASSR
The Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic , shortened to Moldavian ASSR or, less frequently, Moldovan ASSR, was an autonomous republic of the Ukrainian SSR between 12 October 1924 and 2 August 1940, encompassing modern Transnistria The Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic...
, and after 1940, of the Moldavian SSR
Moldavian SSR
The Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic , commonly abbreviated to Moldavian SSR or MSSR, was one of the 15 republics of the Soviet Union...
. The motivation given was that the Latinization was used by "bourgeois-nationalist elements" to "distance the Moldavian populace from the Ukrainian and Russian ones, with the ultimate goal of the separation of Soviet Moldavia from the USSR".
Moldovans in Soviet Moldova
In June 1940 Bessarabia was occupied by the Soviet Union. Most of Bessarabia and about half of the MASSR were merged into a newly-created Moldavian SSR, which became the fifteenth union republic of the USSR. A year later, in 1941, Romania attacked the Soviet Union as part of Operation BarbarossaOperation Barbarossa
Operation Barbarossa was the code name for Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II that began on 22 June 1941. Over 4.5 million troops of the Axis powers invaded the USSR along a front., the largest invasion in the history of warfare...
and retook Bessarabia. Between 1941 and 1944, Romania also occupied the territory between the Dniester and Bug
Southern Bug
The Southern Bug, also called Southern Buh), is a river located in Ukraine. The source of the river is in the west of Ukraine, in the Volyn-Podillia Upland, about 145 km from the Polish border, and flows southeasterly into the Bug Estuary through the southern steppes...
rivers (historic Transnistria
Transnistria (World War II)
Transnistria Governorate was a Romanian administered territory, conquered by the Axis Powers from the Soviet Union during Operation Barbarossa, and occupied from 19 August 1941 to 29 January 1944...
). By 1944 the Soviets had taken back all the territories they lost in 1941, which remained in the Soviet Union on until the latter's dissolution
Dissolution of the Soviet Union
The dissolution of the Soviet Union was the disintegration of the federal political structures and central government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , resulting in the independence of all fifteen republics of the Soviet Union between March 11, 1990 and December 25, 1991...
in 1991.
During the first years of Soviet occupation, the term "Romanian language" was forbidden. The official language for use in Moldovan schools throughout the entire MSSR (both in Bessarabia and Transnistria) during Stalinist period was based on a patois
Patois
Patois is any language that is considered nonstandard, although the term is not formally defined in linguistics. It can refer to pidgins, creoles, dialects, and other forms of native or local speech, but not commonly to jargon or slang, which are vocabulary-based forms of cant...
variety
Creole language
A creole language, or simply a creole, is a stable natural language developed from the mixing of parent languages; creoles differ from pidgins in that they have been nativized by children as their primary language, making them have features of natural languages that are normally missing from...
spoken in some areas of the former MASSR. The Commission for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in Moldova
Commission for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in Moldova
The Commission for the Study and Evaluation of the Communist Totalitarian Regime of the Republic of Moldova is a commission instituted in Moldova by acting President Mihai Ghimpu to investigate the Communist regime and provide a comprehensive report allowing for the condemnation of Communism as...
is assessing this period.
In 1956, during the Nikita Khrushchev
Nikita Khrushchev
Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev led the Soviet Union during part of the Cold War. He served as First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964, and as Chairman of the Council of Ministers, or Premier, from 1958 to 1964...
's rehabilitation
Rehabilitation (Soviet)
Rehabilitation in the context of the former Soviet Union, and the Post-Soviet states, was the restoration of a person who was criminally prosecuted without due basis, to the state of acquittal...
of the victims of Stalinist repressions, a special report was issued about the state of the Moldavian language. The report stated, in part, that the discussions of 1920-30s between the two tendencies had been mostly non-scientific, since there were very few linguists in the republic; and that the grammar and the basic lexicon of the literary Romanian and Moldovan languages are identical, while differences are secondary and nonessential. Because the political situation in the People's Republic of Romania was now pro-Soviet, the planned convergence of the Romanian and Moldovan languages was once again approved.
During the entire period of Soviet rule, Moldovan speakers were encouraged to learn the Russian language as a prerequisite for access to higher education, social status and political power. Transfers of territory and population movements, including deportations of locals and state-encouraged immigration from the rest of the USSR, shifted the ethnic and linguistic makeup of the republic. By the late 1970s, the number of Russian speakers in the Moldavian SSR had greatly increased. These changes contributed to the proliferation of Russian loanwords in the spoken Moldovan.
While some Soviet linguists continued to deny the existence of a distinct Moldovan language, a new generation of Soviet linguists revived the debate in the 1970s. For example, one linguist, Iliasenco, compared the Romanian and Moldovan translations of a Leonid Brezhnev
Leonid Brezhnev
Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev – 10 November 1982) was the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union , presiding over the country from 1964 until his death in 1982. His eighteen-year term as General Secretary was second only to that of Joseph Stalin in...
speech from Russian and used them as a proof for the existence of two different languages. Mikhail Bruchis analysed this claim, and noticed that all the words of both translations are found in both dictionaries. Also, Iliasenco implied that "Moldovan" preferred synthetic syntagms, while "Romanian" preferred analytic ones. However, this claim was also proven wrong, as a book of Nicolae Ceauşescu
Nicolae Ceausescu
Nicolae Ceaușescu was a Romanian Communist politician. He was General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party from 1965 to 1989, and as such was the country's second and last Communist leader...
(the political leader of Romania at the time) uses mostly "Moldovan" synthetic syntagms, while a book by Ivan Bodiul
Ivan Bodiul
Ivan Ivanovich Bodiul was a Moldovan SSR politician.- Biography :Ivan Ivanovich Bodiul was born on 3 January 1918, in Alexandrovca, Mykolaiv Oblast, Ukraine...
(the secretary of the Moldavian SSR
Moldavian SSR
The Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic , commonly abbreviated to Moldavian SSR or MSSR, was one of the 15 republics of the Soviet Union...
) uses mostly "Romanian" analytic syntagms. Bruchis' conclusion was that both translations were within the limits of the Romanian language.
Debates in independent Moldova
The debate surrounding the ethnicity of Moldovans has resurfaced after the collapse of the USSR. One side, rallying many prominent Moldovan intellectuals, such as Grigore VieruGrigore Vieru
Grigore Vieru was a Moldavian poet and writer. He is mostly known for his poems and books for children. His poetry is characterized by vivid natural scenery, patriotism, as well as a venerated image of the sacred mother...
, Eugen Doga
Eugen Doga
Eugen Doga is a Moldovan/Romanian composer. After the fall of the Soviet Union he lives in Moscow, Russia.-Biography:Doga was born on March 1, 1937 in the village of Mocra in the Rîbniţa district of the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic...
or Constantin Tanase, argues that Moldovans have always been Romanians, even if the modern history separated them from the rest of Romanians. Moldovanism is thus regarded as a Soviet attempt to create an artificial nationality with the goal of ethnic assimilation of Romanians living in the Soviet Union. The other side emphasizes the distinctiveness of Moldovans such as Moldovan historian and politician Victor Stepaniuc
Victor Stepaniuc
Victor Stepaniuc is a Moldovan historian and politician.- External links :* * http://chisinau.novopress.info/?p=338, Partidul Comunistilor din RM - lideri, grupari, interese...
states that Moldovans have always been different from Romanians. Some claim that, for Bessarabian Moldovans, the long isolation from the rest of Romanians (between 1812–1918, after 1940) was "more than ample time [...] to develop [their] own separate national identity".
After collaborating for several years with the Pan-Romanian Popular Front of Moldova
Popular Front of Moldova
The Popular Front of Moldova was a political movement in the Moldavian SSR, one of the 15 union republics of the former Soviet Union, and in the newly-independent Republic of Moldova. Formally, the Front existed from 1989 to 1992...
, acting president Mircea Snegur
Mircea Snegur
Mircea Ion Snegur was the first President of Moldova 1990-1996. Before that he was Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet 1989-1990 and Chairman of the Supreme Soviet from 27 April to 3 September 1990...
moved close to the Agrarian Party of Moldova
Agrarian Party of Moldova
The Agrarian Party of Moldova , formerly the Democratic Agrarian Party of Moldova , is a Moldovan political party, prominent from 1991 to 1998. Governing for most of this period, the party represented a large centrist multi-ethnic bloc led by former collective farm chairmen and village mayors...
, a strong supporter of the Moldovan identity. During his visit to Bucharest in February 1991, he talked about "Romanians on both banks of the Prut river", however, during the presidential campaign in 1994, Snegur stressed in the speech Our Home the existence of a distinct Moldovan nation as the foundation of the state. The speech was immediately condemned by the intellectuals. Representatives of The Writers' Union, the Institute of Linguistics, the Institute of History, Chisinau State University, and other institutions declared the speech an affront to the true identity of the republic's ethnic majority and an attempt to further “an invention of the Communist regime” by erecting a “barrier to authentic Romanian culture”. Nevertheless, Snegur's stance helped the Agrarian Party of Moldova
Agrarian Party of Moldova
The Agrarian Party of Moldova , formerly the Democratic Agrarian Party of Moldova , is a Moldovan political party, prominent from 1991 to 1998. Governing for most of this period, the party represented a large centrist multi-ethnic bloc led by former collective farm chairmen and village mayors...
win an absolute majority in the Parliament.
Moldovan self-consciousness
A poll conducted in the Republic of Moldova by IMAS-Inc Chisinau in October 2009 presented a detailed picture. The respondents were asked to rate the relationship between the identity of Moldovans and that of Romanians on a scale between 1 (entirely the same) to 5 (completely different). The poll showed that 26% of the entire sample, which included all ethnic groups, claimed the two identities were the same or very similar, whereas 47% claimed they were different or entirely different. The results varied significantly among different categories of subjects. For instance, while 33% of the young respondents (ages 18–29) chose the same or very similar and 44% different or very different, among the senior respondents (aged over 60) the corresponding figures were 18.5% and 53%. The proportion of those who chose the same or very similar identity was higher than the average among the native speakers of Romanian/Moldovan (30%), among the urban dwellers (30%), among those with higher education (36%), and among the residents of the capital city (42%).According to a study conducted in the Republic of Moldova in May 1998, when the self-declared Moldovans were asked to relate the Romanian and Moldovan identities, 55% considered them somewhat different, 26% very different and less than 5% identical.
A survey carried out in the Republic of Moldova by William Crowther in 1992 showed that 87% of the Romanian/Moldovan speakers chose to identify themselves as "Moldovans", rather than "Romanians".
The 2004 census results
2004 Moldovan Census
The 2004 Republic of Moldova Census was carried between October 5 and October 12, 2004. The breakaway Transnistria failed to come into an agreement with the central government in Chişinău, and carried out its own census during between November 11 and November 18, 2004...
reported that out of the 3,383,332 people living in Moldova (without Transnistria), 75.81% declared themselves Moldovans and only 2.17% Romanians. A group of international observers considered the census was generally conducted in a professional manner, although they reported several cases when enumerators encouraged respondents to declare themselves Moldovans rather than Romanians.
Political implications
On 19 December 2003, the Moldovan Parliament, dominated by the Party of Communists of the Republic of Moldova, adopted "The Concept of National Policy of the Republic of Moldova". The document claims that:- there are two different peoples (Romanians and Moldovans) that share a common literary language. "Sharing their source, having a common basic lexical foundation, the national Moldovan language and the national Romanian language each preserve their language name as an identifier of every nation: Moldovan and Romanian."
- Romanians are an ethnic minority in Moldova.
- the Republic of Moldova is the rightful successor of the medieval Principality of MoldovaMoldaviaMoldavia is a geographic and historical region and former principality in Eastern Europe, corresponding to the territory between the Eastern Carpathians and the Dniester river...
.
This document faced criticism in Moldova as being "anti-European" and contradicting the Constitution which states that "no ideology may be adopted as official state ideology".
Moldovan historian Gheorghe E. Cojocaru
Gheorghe E. Cojocaru
- Biography :Gheorghe E. Cojocaru was born on 8 February 1963. He graduate from Moldova State University in 1986 and got a PhD from University of Bucharest in 1996. Cojocaru is a scientific researcher and coordinator with the Institute of History, State and Law of the Academy of Sciences of...
, in his book Cominternul si originile Moldovenismului, claims that "Moldovanism" and its dissemination among the Romance speakers living east of the Prut are of Soviet origin. On the occasion, Moldovan politician and historian Alexandru Moşanu
Alexandru Mosanu
Alexandru Moşanu is a Moldovan politician, historian and professor.- Biography :Alexandru Moşanu was born on July 19, 1932 in Branişte, Romania . He was the first speaker of the Parliament of the Republic of Moldova between 1990 and 1993...
claimed that "The Moldovanist ideology appeared as a policy of ethnic assimilation of the Romanians from Transnistria
Transnistria
Transnistria is a breakaway territory located mostly on a strip of land between the Dniester River and the eastern Moldovan border to Ukraine...
, then from the entire space of the former Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic. And now from the Republic of Moldova." On January 22, 2010, the Romanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs launched the book in Bucharest. At the release of the book, the Foreign Minister of Romania Teodor Baconschi
Teodor Baconschi
Teodor Baconschi , is a Romanian politician. He is the current Minister of Foreign Affairs of Romania since December 2009.-Early years:Baconschi was born in Bucharest to the poet Anatol E. Baconsky and his wife Clara...
said: Marian Lupu
Marian Lupu
Marian Lupu is a Moldovan politician and is President of Parliament and Acting President since 2010.-Background and education:...
, leader of the Democratic Party of Moldova, rebuked him, declaring:
Further reading
- Argentina Gribincea Moldovenism: the State Ideology of the Republic of Moldova
- Monica Heintz Republic of Moldova versus Romania: The Cold Var of National Identities
- Argentina Gribincea Moldovenisti pentru linistea expansionismului rusesc sau cautatori de sine
- Evocare Eugeniu Coşeriu (22) Contrafort, October-November 2003
- Constitutional Watch A country-by-country update on constitutional politics in Eastern Europe and the ex-USSR, Summer 2002
- Constitutional Watch A country-by-country update on constitutional politics in Eastern Europe and the ex-USSR, Winter 2002/Spring 2003
- "Moldovan-Romanian Dictionary" by Former Communist Deputy Available for Sale July 29 2003
- Marian Enache, Dorin Cimpoiesu Misiune diplomatica in Moldova 1993-1997, Bucharest, Polirom, 2000 ISBN 973-683-443-3
- Eugen Holban - Dreptul la adevar Observatorul, Wednesday, Dec 20, 2006
- Mai multe literaturi, o limbă, mai multe limbi, o literatură. A treia Conferinţă internaţională a Centrului PEN Român, Iaşi, 21-23 aprilie 2000
- Matthew H. Ciscel (2007) The Language of the Moldovans: Romania, Russia, and Identity in an Ex-Soviet Republic", ISBN 0739114433 - About the identity of the contemporary Moldovans in the context of debates about the their language.
- Translation of Russian loans and irregularities of the spoken language in the Republic of Moldova by Eleonora Rusnac, President, Association of Professional Translators of Moldova.
- George Damian - Efectele moldovenismului si strategia regionala a Ucrainei Ziua Veche, Friday, Mar 26, 2010
- About moldovan/romanian language and identity see also, in French, Nikolas Trifon, "Guerre et paix des langues sur fond de malaise identitaire" in la République de Moldavie : un Etat en quête de nation, Paris : Non Lieu, 2010, pp. 169–276.