Monografia (document PDF) - Asociatia Tinerilor Istorici din Moldova

Presă şi cenzură în Basarabia. Documente şi comentarii
bessarabian press between Prut and Nistru has many shades that cannot be neglected as they
sadly interfere with social, political and cultural realities. Especially that actual level of understanding
of phenomenon of bessarabian press is very vague, is at it starting point. This situation
is caused by the absence of general synthetic works that analyses entire literature dedicated to
press and offer a global, integrated view of this issue. Our historiographic study is justified by
necessity to understand the level of historical knowledge about bessarabian press phenomenon.
Therefore, we can only attempt to synthetic overview of historical writings regarding bessarabian
press in order to underline what is already known about this issue and to try to identify the area of
future scientific research. In addition, we will underline – whenever it has needed – some important
ideas regarding our historical writings. We have to notice that analysis of historical literature
dealing with bessarabian press issue can be included rather in “Russian historiography” chapter
as most part of works in this field are Russian language studies. A distinctive feature of studies
on history of press, especially those published in SSRM (1944-1989), is their special periodization.
Phase of attempts (1918-1940). The only one synthetic historiographic work in this period that
refers strictly to bessarabian press is a Ştefan Ciobanu’s paper published in 1923, in work Romanian
Culture in Bessarabia under Russian domination (Cultura românească în Basarabia sub stăpânirea
rusă)
It is a very consistent work that presents, for the first time, an overview of Romanian periodicals
appeared in Bessarabia during 1867-1917, covering five decades. Onisifor Ghibu’s studies are
not exclusively dedicated to the issue of press, but are also valuable for this period.
For evolution of inter-bellum press – until ’30 – we have to mention the work of Constantin Mâţu.
This study presents a history of press in times dominated by political views of a non-native minority.
Between science and propaganda (1944-1989). History can be easily exploited for political
purposes and the history of written press in this period is extremely conclusive in this sense.
From the historiographical point of view, history of press in Soviet Socialist Republic of Moldova
is the most difficult and dubious for researchers. Main themes discussed in this period are those
imposed by ideologists of soviet regime. We can distinguish two separate areas of research, in
certain periods:
• years 60 – 70 of XXth century. During this period, investigations were focused exclusively on
researching of party press and all papers were written exclusively in Russian.
• years 70 –80 of XXth century. At the end of ’80-ies, the attention of researchers switched to
moldavian-russian-ukrainian relations and the role of Russian press in the process of consolidation
of bessarabian journalism writing is the main theme of studies. There are a lot of
bilingual – both Russian and “Moldavian language’ – publications.
Monographic works of Dumitru Coval form a separate chapter in history of bessarabian press.
1972 year was prolific for this researcher: he published and/or edited voluminous works based on
information from local and foreign archives, dedicated to Moldavian journalism.
Another category of contributions in mass-media area appears at the end of ’80-ies, XXth
century. Especially relevant and precious are researches of Alexandrina Matcovski dedicated to
“Moldavian literature of XXth century in Russian publications”.
Sources valorization (1989-2007). This period is special as it not only refuses false thesis of the
past decades, but also comment them with solid scientific arguments, valorizing documentary
sources referring to the history of bessarabian press. After 1989 various papers appears in specialized
periodicals. All these works were spread in various publications and never were collected
in dedicated volumes.
A study of “sociocultural history” of press that studies the period from 1906 till 1944, appeared
in 2003. For the evolution of bessarabian press in XIXth century we have to mention the study
published in collection named Pages about Bessarabia (Pagini despre Basarabia), in 1996 and 2001
Volumes include a series of publications appeared in Bucharest’s newspaper Telegraful (1880-
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