Nation-Building and Contested Identities - MEK

Contrasting/Conflicting Identities:Bessarabians, Romanians, MoldovansCRISTINA PETRESCUMoldova has been an interesting footnote to Sovietology, not only asa study of minorities under the Soviet regime, but also because ofits latent potential, unique among the Soviet Republics, to become thesubject of another socialist country’s irredentism, i.e., Romania. 1 Duringthe Cold War, Soviet or pro-Soviet authors argued for the existence ofa separate Moldovan language, and, implicitly, of a distinctive Moldovannation. 2 At the same time, many Western authors, including Romanianrefugees, supported the identity of the Moldovan and Romanian languages,underlining that the policy of mankurtization 3 undertaken byMoscow attempted to artificially create Moldovanness. Surprisingly forthe proponents of the latter viewpoint, after the fall of communism, theRomanian-speaking population of the former Soviet Moldova opted foran independent republic, expressing in this way its will to be a nationapart, neither provincie nor guberniia, as a leading politician of that timeput it. 4 According to the results of a survey made in 1992, when asked tochoose between Romanian and Moldovan, 87% of the interviewed indicatedthe latter as their identity. 5 In short, it seems that the Moldovannation is more than a Soviet fiction today.Obviously, this situation can be explained by taking into accountthe crucial role played by the Soviet propaganda in forging a distinctMoldovan identity. However, in relation to the self-identification of theRomanian-speaking population between the rivers Prut and Dnestr, 6 theproblems regarding the short period when the current Republic ofMoldova was a province in Greater Romania, 7 when the Bucharest politicalelite had its chance to convince its new subjects, re-united with the“mother-country” after more than a century under the Russian rule, thatthey are part of the Romanian nation, are much less examined. 8 Thispaper discusses the incorporation of Bessarabia, as this region wasknown in the Russian Empire and then in Greater Romania, not onlyfrom the perspective of the Bucharest-based politicians, but also fromthat of its inhabitants. In other words, it focuses on the underlying conditionsthat made the Romanian-speaking peasants of Bessarabia considerthemselves Moldovans, in spite of the homogenizing culturalefforts carried out by the central authorities. In an attempt to give153