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Part of a series on the
History of Moldova

Antiquity Chernyakhov culture Dacia, Free Dacians Bastarnae
Early Middle Ages Origin of the Romanians Tivertsi Brodnici Golden Horde Voivodeship of Maramureș
Principality of Moldavia Foundation Early Modern Era Phanariotes United Principalities
Bessarabia Governorate Treaty of Bucharest
Moldavian Democratic Republic Sfatul Țării Romanian military intervention
Greater Romania Union of Bessarabia with Romania Transnistria Governorate The Holocaust
Moldavian ASSR Moldovenism
Moldavian SSR Soviet occupation Soviet deportations Anti-fascist resistance
Republic of Moldova Independence of Moldova War of Transnistria Gagauz Republic History of independent Moldova
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Moldovenism is a term used to refer to the political view that Moldovans are an ethnicity separate from Romanians, primarily by critics of such views. (See also controversy over national identity in Moldova.)

Moldovan language in the Soviet Union

Creation of Moldavian ASSR

In 1812, the Russian Empire and the Ottoman Empire singed the Treaty of Bucharest by which the former annexed the eastern part of the medieval Principality of Moldavia, which became known as Bessarabia. In 1917, when the Russian Empire was desintegrating, a Moldavian Democratic Republic was formed in Bessarabia, and in 1918 it united with Romania. The outcome of these events was contested by the Soviet Russia. After the Soviet-organized Tatarbunary Uprizing has failed, in 1924, a Moldavian ASSR (MASSR) was created within the Ukrainian SSR, just east of the river Dniester that marked the then boundary between Romania and Soviet Union. MASSR was to serve the goal of expanding Soviet influence into the Balkans as well as to separate Bessarabia from Romania.

For the purpose of giving MASSR its own identity separate from RomaniaThe Soviet authorities declared the variety spoken by the majority of Moldavians to be "Moldavian language". The intellectual elites of MASSR were asked to create a Moldovan literary language, distinct from Romanian.

The local spoken, known as Moldavian variety, is one of the 5 major dilects of the Romanian language. It is distinct from the standard Romanian in regards to accent and pronounciation of some sounds, similar to the differences between American and British English. Moldavian variety is less different from standard Romanian than some other dialects within Romania proper.

Pavel Chior, the MASSR People's Commissar of Education argued that literary Romanian during its standardization in the 19th century borrowed too many French-language words, making it incomprehensible to the peasants both in MASSR and Romania, and that these differences should be used to empasize the differences between the "ruling class" and the "exploited class". Soviet linguist M. V. Sergievsky studied the linguistic variety in the MASSR and mapped two dialects, one of which similar to the spoken variety in Bessarabia being chosen as 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 in 1925 a grammar, but it was considered too similar to Romanian grammars, and was quickly pulled out of the circulation.

Romanizators and autochtonists

In the 1920s, there was a dispute among the Soviet linguists between supporters ("Romanizators" or "Romanists") and opponents ("autochtonists", Russian: самобытники) of the convergence of the Moldavian and Romanian.

The "autochtonists" 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 "autochtonist" majority, until Stanislav Kosior (General Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party) and several MASSR communists visited 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 "autochtonists" were repressed, their books destroyed, and their neologisms banned.

After the infamous February-March (1937) VKP(b) Central Committee Plenum, which escalated the Great Purge, both "romanizators" and "autochtonists" were declared "imperialist spies": "autochtonists", 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 MSSR. 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".

Moldovan in Soviet Moldova

In June 1940 Bessarabia was occupied by the Soviet Union. Most of Bessarabia and ca. one half of MASSR were merged into a newly created Moldavian SSR, which became the 15th union republic of the USSR. A year later, in 1941, Romania attacked Soviet Union as part of Operation Barbarossa and retook Bessarabia. Between 1941 and 1944, Romania also occupied the territory between the Dniester and Bug rivers (historic Transnistria). In 1944 the Soviets have 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 language used in schools throughout the entire MSSR (both in Bessarabia and Transnistria) was based on a primitive sub-educated level of the variety spoken in some areas of the former MASSR.

In 1956, during the Khrushchev's rehabilitation of the victims of Stalinist repressions, a special report was issued about the state of the Moldavian language, which stated, in part, that the discussions of 1920-30s between the two tendencies were mostly non-scientific, since there were very few linguists in the republic, and that the grammar and the basic lexicon of literary Romanian and Moldovan languages are identical, while differences are secondary and nonessential. Once again, the planned convergence of the Romanian and Moldovan languages was approved, bearing in mind the political situation in the People's Republic of Romania.

During the entire Soviet rule, Moldovan speakers were encouraged to learn the Russian language as a prerequisite for access to higher education, social status and political power. As a result of the transfers of the territory and the population movements, including deportations of locals and encouraged immigration from the rest of the USSR, by the late 1970s, the number of Russian speakers in Moldavian SSR greatly increased. All this contributed to proliferation of Russian loanwords in the spoken Moldovan.

While some Soviet linguists continued to deny the existence of a Moldovan language, in the 1970s, a new generation of Soviet linguists debated about Moldovan being a different language. For example, one linguist, Iliasenco, compared the Romanian and Moldovan translations of a 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 "Moldovan" preferred synthetic while "Romanian" preferred analytic syntagms. 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.

Moldovenism in independent Moldova

The debate surrounding the ethnicity of Moldovans has resurfaced after the collapse of the USSR. One side argues that Moldovans have always been Romanians, even if the region's modern history (after 1940) is separate from Romania. The other side emphasizes the distinctiveness of Moldovans. Among the latter, some argue that Moldovans have always been separate from Wallachians and that the Moldovans/Moldavians from the territories of the historic principality of Moldavia form a common ethnic group distinct from Romanians; others state that the Moldovans from Bessarabia have changed due to their long isolation from Romania and that nearly two centuries of political separation (1812-1918, and 1940-) was "more than ample time for each country to develop its own separate national identity"

Ethnicity and language debate

A 2001 survey by American professor William Crowther, showed that 87% of the Romance-speaking population of Moldova considers itself "Moldovan", rather than the "Romanian". It is unclear to what extent Moldovans currently consider themselves a subset of Romanians.

According to the 2004 Moldopvan census, the only census the country has had after the Soviet period, 97.2% of Moldovans/Romanians were registered as Moldovans, and only 2.8% as Romanians, but these numbers become 94.9% vs. 5.1% in urban areas and 98.4% vs. 1.6% in rural ones. Huge discrepances between urban and rural inhabitants are observed in regard to the name of the native language. 76.29% were registered with Moldovan language as native (58.93% in urban areas and 84.83% in rural ones), while 20.96 % of them declared Romanian language as native (34.3% in urban areas and 14.39% in rural ones). 73.95% of Moldavians/Romanians declared Moldovan as first language in daily use (53.59% in urban areas and 83.98% in rural ones), and 20.66% of them declared Romanian as first language (33.64% in urban areas and 14.27% in rural ones). The census data also show absence of correlation between ethnicity (Moldovan vs. Romanian) and native language (ditto), as a large number of those registered in the census as Moldovans are registered with Romanian as native language. There exist claims that these discrepances reveal an ongoing process of national emancipation.

Political implications

After the 2001 democratic re-election of communists to power, the controversy over national identity in Moldova has became one of the most accute political problems of the country.

On 19 December 2003, the Moldovan Parliament, dominated by the Communist Party of Moldova, adopted a document called "The Concept on National Policy of the Republic of Moldova", which defines the official national policy of Moldova. The document revolves around the following ideas:

there are two different peoples (Romanians and Moldovans) that live in both Moldova and Romania, speaking two different languages, Romanian and Moldovan.
Romanians are an ethnic minority in Moldova.
the Republic of Moldova is the rightful successor of the medieval Principality of Moldova.

This document has been criticised by the pro-Romanian press and authors for being "anti-European" and also "contradicting Article V of the Moldovan Constitution", that states that "no ideology may be pronounced as official ideology of the State".

References

Grenoble 2003, pp 89-93
Ana Coreţchi, Ana Pascaru, Cynthia Stevens, The Republic of Moldova: dimensions of the Gagauz socio-linguistic model, Linguapax Institute.
Elizabeth Blackwell, The Sovietization of Moldova, College of Political Science, James Madison University
A Country Study: Moldova (Language section), Library of the US Congress.
King, p.64
King, p.64
Borba
Ziua, 22 noiembrie 2007: Acum o jumatate de secol, doi renumiti profesori ai Universitatii din Moscova, romanistul R.A. Budagov si slavistul S.B. Bernstein, au trimis revistei Voprosi jazakoznanija (Probleme de lingvistica) articolul cu privire la unitatea de limba romano-moldoveneasca, articol ce a fost publicat abia in 1988, in revista Nistru. Cei doi savanti aratau in mod clar ca s-au irosit multe forte si mult timp pentru a demonstra teza eronata cum ca moldovenii si romanii vorbesc limbi romanice inrudite, dar diferite. Dovezi in favoarea acestei teze n-au existat si nu pot exista", se arata in comunicat.
Michael Bruchis. The Language Policy of the CPSU and the Linguistic Situation in Soviet Moldavia, in Soviet Studies, Vol. 36, No. 1. (Jan., 1984), pp. 118-119.
"Moldovan: An Identity but not a Language"
Charles King, "The Moldovans: Romania, Russia, and the Politics of Culture", Hoover Press, 2000, pg. 159
Gribincea A., Grecu, M. The Concept on National Policy of the Republic of Moldova UNHCR.

Argentina Gribincea, Mihai Grecu Moldova: Situation analysis and trend assessment commissioned by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, October 2004
Grenoble, Lenore A (2003) Language Policy in the Soviet Union, Springer, ISBN 1-4020-1298-5
M. Bărbulescu, D. Deletant, K. Hitchins, S. Papacostea, P. Teodor - Istoria României. Ed. Corint, 2004, ISBN 973-653-514-2