New Europe College Regional Program Yearbook 2001-2002

TAMARA CÃRÃUª
exorcise nationalism and exalt Soviet patriotism has proven remarkably
ineffective”. 55
3.5 “Mistaken identity” at work
Beside the institutionalization of the nationalism in the unional
republic, some important conditions for the creation of a national identity
were fulfilled:
Standard education of the masses: Ernest Gellner argued that the
development of national awareness was possible only after the elimination
of illiteracy, when a common written standard culture (in the sociological,
not the elitist sense of the word) was shared by the masses. According to
Gellner, nationalism is
The general impositions of a high culture on society, where previously low
cultures had taken up the lives of the majority, and in some cases the
totality, of the population. It means the general diffusion of a schoolmediated,
academic supervised idiom, codified for the requirements of a
reasonably precise bureaucratic and technological communication. It is
establishment of an anonymous impersonal society, with mutually
substitutable atomized individuals, held together above all by a shared
culture of this kind, in place of the previous complex structure of local
groups, sustained by folk cultures reproduced locally and idiosyncratically
by the micro-groups themselves. 56
During the Soviet period, Moldova’s population received a standard
education, which was the main condition for a common Moldovan
identity. Moreover, there are many accounts which maintain that the
illiteracy was eliminated for the first time in the Soviet period. 57
Industrialisation: Nationalism was explained as the transition from
Agraria to Industria and Soviet efforts were considerable in this respect.
Soviet strategy of state building and mobilization “could not be
implemented without more effective control of the rural majority of the
population and the transfer of resources from the agricultural sector was
seen as essential to rapid industrialization”. 58 Although Moldova was
and still is an agricultural country, a form of industrialization was
nonetheless developed: a food processing industry, textile and wine
industries, and even heavy industry for different kinds of agricultural
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