When I am bored in Yerevan, I usually go to museums. Yerevan has lots of little museums dedicated to illustrious Armenian writers, composers, and painters. They can be hit-or-miss, but I’m usually pleasantly surprised. Tickets are usually $1.25, and for an extra $5 you can get a guided tour in Armenian. Even if the museum is completely boring, I can at least practice my Armenian with the guide.
"Armenia" by Martiros Saryan.
Today I set out to visit the Martiros Saryan museum. Martiros Saryan was a twentieth-century Armenian painter influenced by Paul Gauguin and Henri Matisse. I figured I would treat myself to an hour of colorful Armenian landscapes for an hour before going to Pilates class. To my dismay, the Saryan museum was closed for repairs, and I wasn’t in the mood for the 30-minute trek to another museum that was showing some of his paintings, so I decided to go to the Hovhannes Tumanyan museumdown the street.
Hovhannes Tumanyan was a poet and a writer of fairy tales in the late Imperial and very early Soviet periods. As he is considered to be the Armenian national poet, his museum was quite nice, with lots of artifacts from his life, a recreation of his apartment in Tbilisi with the originalfurniture, and a small, cute theater showing a 3-D cartoon of one of his fairy tales.
Hovhannes Tumanyan
(Image from Wikipedia)
Most museums here don’t have much in the way of explanatory placards, so I decided to pay for a tour to help me connect the dots even though I was running a bit short on time. My guide was a very nice middle-aged lady who made a great effort to ensure that I understood every Armenian word that she said. Maybe it was just because we were in a museum dedicated to a great Armenian writer, but it seemed like the other patrons and staff were particularly thrilled that I could speak Armenian.
All in all, it would have been just a pleasant way to kill an hour, but things took an unexpected turn toward the end of the tour. My guide showed me a book of Tumanyan’s saying translated into English, which I politely declined to buy as I already have way too many books to bring home with me in my suitcase. She asked me if I had bought any other Armenian books, and I mentioned a few that I had picked up, including one by the late Hrant Matevosyan, a Soviet Armenian writer of novellas about Armenian village life. I’ve been trying to read more of Hrant Matevosyan’s work lately because a friend recommended it to me, and it dovetails well with my long-term interest in rural life in the Soviet Union.
“You are interested in Hrant Matevosyan?” my guide asked, with a significant look. “Would you like to meet Hrant Matevosyan’s wife?”
Hrant Matevosyan
(Image from Wikipedia)
At first I didn’t know what to make of this, but at the end of the tour they took me into an important-looking office that presumably belong to the museum director and introduced me to an older woman sitting behind the desk. Strangely enough, my guide didn’t exactly say that this was Hrant Matevosyan’s wife so I wasn’t quite sure what to do or say at first. My interlocutor started grilling me about where I studied Armenian. Then when she found out that I also speak and read Russian, she wanted to hear all of my favorite authors, especially more contemporary ones (not my strong suit), but she was satisfied to hear that I have read some Solzhenitsyn and Brodsky in addition to Tolstoy and Bulgakov. When I told her that I was leaving tomorrow, she seemed very annoyed that she couldn’t offer me any help at this late date, but told me to look her up the next time I came to Yerevan. Only at the end when we exchanged cards and talked a little bit about the Hrant Matevosyan novellas that I’ve read was I sure that the museum director, Verzhine Movsisyan, was indeed the wife of the late Hrant Matevosyan. She informed me that Hrant Matevosyan’s novellas are difficult to read in Armenian, and that the Soviet-era English translation I had read was not very good as it was translated from Russian. However, she said his dialogue was great, which I can confirm having just started reading a Russian translation of his novella “We and Our Mountains.” In the end she graciously walked me to the door and again urged me to get in contact with her when I come back to Armenia, especially as they’ll be opening up a museum dedicated to Matevosyan soon.
By the time I left, I was sort of stunned at the strange luck of having stumbled into a meeting with a fantastic contact for future research on Hrant Matevosyan. The experience confirmed for me the wisdom of checking out any and all local museums when I'm traveling. Also, it once again proved that a decent knowledge of Russian literature will always pay off. All in all, not a bad reason to miss my last Pilates class in Yerevan!
Ever since I started spending serious time in the former Soviet Union, I’ve been interested in visiting villages. Luckily, in the intervening years I’ve made several friends who have graciously invited me to visit their villages to check them out. Welcome to a virtual tour of the two villages I visited this summer, Congaz in Moldova and Arevik in Armenia (with a few pictures thrown in from past travels). Congaz is a large village in the south of Moldova with approximately 12,000 people. Arevik, a much smaller village, is just a short drive from Gyumri, the second-largest city in Armenia.
We’ll start our tour with a relatively simple question: What do villages look like?
As I explained in a post about the village of Beșalma on my previous blog, Adventures in Bessarabia, Americans often have a hard time wrapping their heads around villages simply because we don’t have many places where families have been farming for generation after generation anymore. Moreover, the archetypical rural American homestead was somewhat isolated from its neighbors. People built houses in the middle of their land. In the former Soviet Union, village houses tend to be grouped together, and people have to travel a bit to get to the farmland.
The village of Beșalma
My suspicion is that this has to do with the lack of a true concept of private land in many parts of the Russian Empire. (In a traditional Russian peasant commune, the patriarchs redistributed the land every few years in order to give more to families that had increased in size, and thus in labor potential.) I’m not sure how this translates to places like Moldova that generally didn’t have serfdom, but at any rate, the organization of villages seems pretty similar. The closeness of the houses seems to make it possible for everyone to be involved in everyone else’s business (in good ways and bad ways).
Another thing that is surprising from the American perspective is the extreme gap between urban and village life. Most people who live in cities in the former Soviet Union live in a way that is recognizable to Americans. Sure, they might not have running water 24 hours a day, or they might have to permanently sleep on a couch in the living room because there’s not much space, but it’s still urban life. (At any rate, cramped quarters and high tenant-to-bathroom ratios are very familiar to grad students who live in Somerville!)
A road in Arevik
Arevik
Village life is significantly different than anything I have ever experienced in America. The material conditions of life are quite striking. As I wrote in my Besalma post, a good heuristic for knowing whether or not you are in a village (and not just a rural town) is that the bathrooms are outdoors. People usually have running water, electricity, and gas, but they are rarely hooked up to sewers. The roads barely deserve the name as they are pitted with potholes and gullies. (I’ve been on unpaved roads east of Phoenix and they’re a piece of cake compared to what I’ve seen in the former Soviet Union.) There are certainly people who live in similar conditions in the U.S., but not on this scale. In 1989, after years of rapid urbanization, a third of the Soviet population still lived in rural areas. Today the infrastructural contradictions can be pretty confounding—people may have decent internet, but they still get their water from a well.
Houses in Congaz
Given these conditions, it would be easy to think that the villages are unchanged relics of the past, but in fact peasant life in the twentieth century was characterized by radical upheaval. Sovietization entailed collectivization (or, as I have seen it called, the largest theft of property in history). Peasants were required to give up all their land and animals to the collective farm, where they became state employees. Those who opposed collectivization or happened to be a bit richer than the others were deported to Siberia or Kazakhstan.
The topic of collectivization brings us to the next stop on our virtual tour, the backyard garden. After collectivization, Soviet authorities eventually allowed peasants to have a private plot for their own use. It was a win-win: peasants could ensure their own food supply and the state could wash its hands of the responsibility of feeding them. Today, as in Soviet times, many people grow a significant part of their diet on the land in their backyard. The self-reliance that characterized the village continues in today’s post-Soviet villages, which are typically extremely cash-poor. (Your average school teacher in rural Armenia or Moldova makes about $200 a month.)
Backyard garden in Arevik
Potato field bordered by sunflowers
Potatoes recently dug out of said field
As a result, summer is one of the busiest times of the year in the village. With fruits and vegetables running riot this time of year, people take part in the time-honored tradition of figuring out what to do with them. It can be easy to forget that the very reason we turn fruits and vegetables into pickles, jam, and preserves is, well, to preserve them. While visiting the village of Arevik, my friend Marine’s mother was busy putting up a stock of kompot (a sort of juice beverage) for the next year. She filled jars full of currants from the backyard, poured hot sugar water into the jars, sealed them up, and put them in the pantry to wait until winter.
Many village homes also have ovens for baking bread. In the case of Armenia, clay pit ovens called tondir are used to bake a flatbread called lavash. The factory-made lavash in the city can’t hold a candle to it. A tondir can also be used to roast meat, as in the case of these delicious khorovats kebabs.
It can be easy to fall into the trap of thinking that village life is a rural idyll, but in reality it is a lot of plain hard work. Taking care of a vegetable patch is hard work, and in the village it is something you do on top of your regular job. (For more on the rural economy, check out my friend Derek’s post about his village in western Ukraine.) Many of the people I know who live in villages also work at the village school. The village school is often the heart of the community. After the Soviet Union instituted mass compulsory education (an innovation in place like Moldova and Armenia), the school was one institution that everyone was sure to pass through in the village.
My friend Oxana at her childhood school in Congaz
The Arevik village school, despite serving a rural community of about 2,000 people, manages to send students to study in capital city universities every year. This year, they even had a student qualify for the extremely competitive FLEX program, which sends high school students to study in the U.S. for a year on the American government’s dime.
Another institution that affected every level of Soviet society was the military. In times of relative peace, men were required to serve in the military for two to three years. When Axis forces invaded the Soviet Union in June of 1941, nearly 30 million men (and women) were sent to the front. Many of them never came home. Today, nearly every village has a war monument commemorating the Soviet victory and the many who died to ensure it.
War memorial in Congaz
Me and Hakop, my friend Marine's father, at the Arevik war monument.
Note that the names of the many soldiers from the village who died are
engraved on the monument.
In Moldova, Lenin sometimes makes an appearance as well.
A monument of Lenin in front of the boarding school for disabled children
where my friend Oxana's mother works.
The last stop on our tour will be one that was relatively marginalized in Soviet life: the village church. They were often used as storehouses or turned into museums of atheism. Today, many village churches like this one in Congaz have been restored.
One of three churches in Congaz
Well, it has been my pleasure taking you on a combined tour of Congaz and Arevik. If you ever have the chance, make sure to visit a village yourself!
Archival research is the basis of most academic historical research. For historians, archival research is the equivalent of running experiments for physicists or setting up chemical reactions for chemists. It gives us the raw data we need for our analysis. As first-year history graduate students, however, we often don’t have much of an idea of what archival research is actually like. In this post, I hope shed a little light on the mysteries of the archive by describing what daily life is like for archival researchers in the former Soviet Union based on my work in Moldova and Armenia this summer.
My window at the Armenian former Communist Party archive
One thing you have to understand first is that archives hold a vast amount of documents. I never really understood how bureaucratic modern states really are until I started looking through the stacks and stacks of documents the Soviet Union produced. One day the lovely staff of the former Communist Party archive in Moldova let me go beyond the door with a sign in Romanian that said “Foreigners strictly prohibited” (oops) to check out the storeroom [хранилище] of the archive. Even though the former Party archive is relatively small, their holdings still took up a floor of the Moldovan Ministry of Justice, where the archive is located. Bigger archives can take up entire buildings.
As you probably gathered from the above paragraph, archive staff normally don’t just let you wander around and find the documents you want. Oh no. You have to order the documents, and they will be delivered to you in the reading room usually in one or two days. The main challenge you face in the archives is figuring out where exactly the documents you want are located in their cataloging system. Imagine trying to find what you want in a library without being able to walk through the stacks or have access to a search engine or even a card catalog. Instead, you have to search, page by page, through large catalogs of documents. In Russian. Poorly mimeographed Russian.
A brief word about the organization of documents. In the former Soviet Union, the highest level in the taxonomy of documents is the fond [фонд]. Each fond is a big collection of documents—in Moldova, for example, the documents of the Ministry of Culture of the Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic can be found in fond R-3011. This fond alone contains 3343 files of documents.
The next level of taxonomy is the opis’ [опись], which is a catalog that contains a brief description of the documents. There are times when each opis’ is organized rationally—by the different divisions of the Ministry of Culture, say. And there are times when the opis’ is clearly just whatever random documents were being sent to the archive at the time (hint, hint, Armenian Ministry of Culture). So far I have been unable to find any logic to the organization of the Armenian Ministry of Culture documents. They constantly overlap chronologically for no apparent reason, so you can never really know if the documents you want simply don’t exist, or if they are located in some future opis’ you just haven’t looked at yet. And there’s always an opis’ you haven’t looked at yet. Even when the organization system isn’t a complete mess, you do sometimes have weird and inexplicable organization choices. Why, for example, was the Republican Artistic-Expert Soviet on Affairs of Monuments and Monumental Sculpture located under the accounting department of the Ministry of Culture? Good question.
Each opis’ contains a short description of what is located in a delo [дело], basically a stitched-together collection of documents. Unless you have something like an overview of the fond [обзор фонда] that tells you which opis’ or delo may relate to your topic, then you have to go page-by-page through the opis’, skimming the descriptions for something interesting. Sometimes the descriptions are fairly self-evident, like “Letters from Soviet citizens on the need to preserve the memory of the genocide of Armenians.” And sometimes there’s just a long list of vague categories that means that basically anything could be in there. If you think there might be something you’re interested in, you just have to order it and find out. But choose wisely, my friend—you only get to order 10 or 15 dela in a day. If you don’t pick the right dela, then you get to spend the next day sifting through the dross in a vain search for gold.
My color-coded spreadsheet of potential dela to order
So, as you might have guessed, researchers spend a good deal of time just trying to figure out what documents to order. And sometimes you’re just out of luck: as far as I can tell, nobody in Moldova knows the current location of Ministry of Culture documents after 1975. They’re just...lost. Literally a ton of paper appears to have gone missing.
When you can find the documents, they come to you looking something like this:
A file of my beloved Ministry of Culture of the Moldovan SSR
When you receive the delo, you get to start flipping through it in order to find something interesting.
Of course, every once and a while you hit paydirt. Last week I got to read a summary of comments at a hearing to determine the design of the Armenian Genocide Memorial, a project which was only initiated after huge protests occurred on the fiftieth anniversary of the genocide. Here was a group of architects, engineers, and sculptors in a highly charged political environment trying to decide the physical form that memory should take. How can a monument do justice to 1.5 million killed and hundreds of thousands of people driven from their homeland? Should it be decorated in the traditions of Armenian architecture? Or should it be austere? Should it reflect hope for the future? Or should it resemble a grave? It was a fascinating snapshot of people trying to understand what the past means for the future.
So that’s the agony and the ecstasy of working with documents. Many of your day-to-day anxieties in an archive may have nothing to do with documents, however. Staff and the material conditions of the archive and the reading room can take up quite a lot of your attention. Your research can live and die by the quality of the archivists that work in the reading room. It can often be difficult to explain what you need in Russian, so you just have to hope their patience doesn’t dry up. Sometimes, when an order mysteriously doesn’t show up on time or you’re having trouble finding something that should be simple, it’s easy to wonder whether you’ve offended the staff in some way. There are archives that are famous for fickle archivists who take it upon themselves to block access to the unworthy. (Word on the historian street is that the Moscow city archive is basically inaccessible to American historians simply because the head archivist hates Americans.) Want to complain? Unless you have a local patron who can smooth things over for you, you’re on the bottom of the totem pole.
Sometimes the archivist in Armenia makes me coffee
The material conditions of the archive can also vary considerably. Bathrooms often lack soap and toilet paper, so you’ll have to bring your own. Archives may have cafeterias, or they may not even have a room for you to eat lunch in. My favorite place to work was the Moldovan former Party archive because it was located in the Ministry of Justice, so they always had clean bathrooms with soap and (usually) toilet paper. It also had a great cafeteria that served a mean baba ghanoush! At the Moldovan National Archive I received a hot tip about walking over to the headquarters of the gendarmerie next door (apparently you can walk right in) and getting lunch at the cafeteria for the elite police force. A hearty meal could be had for under $3.
With highs hitting 100 this week in Armenia, my main problem right now is air conditioning. One archive building has it, the other does not. If I need to work in the one without air conditioning, I make sure I get a strategic seat near the window and have plenty of bottled water. Sometimes, if I’m lucky, someone upstairs will leave a window open and the conditioned air from the storage rooms above will waft down to me. This is heavenly.
Actually, come to think of it, my main problem right now is making sure that scans of important documents get done by the archive staff. They’re willing to inefficiently scan the documents for me (maybe) for the low, low price of 50 cents a page. If I write any more about this, I will start to get emotional.
All in all, working in archives isn’t so bad. It is an incredibly slow process, but until things get digitized (which, realistically, probably won’t happen in my lifetime), it’s indispensable. Also, considering that I don’t pay taxes in either of these countries, I appreciate that they let me work in their archives for free. And hey! Many countries (Uzbekistan) make it basically impossible for foreign researchers to work in their archives, and other countries (Tajikistan) like to imprison researchers on trumped-up charges (Alexander Sodiqov was freed yesterday!), so that makes my problems with A/C, toilet paper, and unreasonable rates for scanning seem rather mild. Basically, I get to rummage around in secret documents all day, which is pretty awesome. The Holy Grail of Soviet research is still out there though...the KGB archives.
Let us in! Let us in!
In Moldova, they now allow Moldovan citizens to access KGB files. Until they open them up to the rest of us, I’ll just have to pine away from afar...
One of my goals for this summer was to find Pilates studios in both Chișinău and Yerevan. After having to take a semester off from exercise last fall due to mono, I wasn’t going to take another hiatus again if I could help it! As it turns out, Pilates has been a great way to keep in shape and get some language immersion while I’m abroad. My Pilates classes are also a helpful prism for understanding the language situations in both Moldova and Armenia.
Chișinău, Moldova
In Moldova, I found a fitness studio just a few minutes’ walk from my house. While the owner of the studio was clearly a native Moldovan/Romanian speaker, she was happy to inform me that instruction was in Russian. My level of Romanian is pretty low, so I was happy to hear it. In the locker room, much of the chit-chat was in Romanian, but a fair amount of Russian was thrown in. The instructor, Katya, was a graduate of a local physical education department who took training courses in Pilates in Odessa. She taught the class entirely in Russian, which was probably how she learned to teach Pilates—although Odessa is in Ukraine, the instruction almost certainly would have been in Russian. I don’t remember her ever speaking to anyone in the class in Romanian, although I can’t rule out that she knew it. At any rate, the other ladies in the class were a mix of Romanian- and Russian-speakers, and all were quite happy to chat with me in either Russian or English, depending on their knowledge of the latter.
For Chișinău, having classes in Russian makes sense. Russian is the sort of lowest-common-linguistic denominator in Moldova. If you’re a Romanian-speaker over the age of 35, you definitely learned the language in school. If you went to school in independent Moldova, you may not have learned Russian in school (it is no longer a mandatory subject), but you certainly heard enough of it from watching TV and going about your daily life to pick up a working knowledge.
Chișinău has long been a multilingual city. In the days of the Russian Empire, Chișinău was an island of diversity in a sea of Moldovan villages. In 1897, its population was 45.9% Jewish, 27% Russian, 17.6% Moldovan, and 3.1% Ukrainian. Russian would have been the common language for the educated and upwardly mobile back then, although certainly Yiddish and Moldovan Romanian would have been spoken by those communities amongst themselves. After a major pogrom in 1903, many Jews fled the city. When Romania incorporated Bessarabia in 1918, Romanian authorities saw Russification as the enemy and implemented policies to promote the Romanian language, much to the chagrin of Russian-speaking minorities in the territory. During World War II, the Romanian/German authorities who occupied the city herded the city’s few remaining Jews into a ghetto before deporting them. The character of this one-time Jewish city had been dramatically altered in just forty years.
The Moldovan SSR (red) within the Soviet Union
After defeating Germany and its Romanian ally in the war, Soviet authorities set about rebuilding the capital of the new Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic. The devastated republic needed new factories, schools, and hospitals. By and large ethnic Slavs were sent to the new republic to establish them. Authorities in Moscow refused to let authorities at the republican level set limits on the flow of population. The increases in the ethnic Slavic population of Moldova and the Baltic republics of Estonia and Latvia at this time form the the foundation of accusation that Moscow intentionally diluted of the native population of these republics with ethnic Slavs. (Similar to the argument today that China has encouraged Han Chinese to move to Tibet.) Leaving those arguments to the side, we can say that the character of Chișinău remained quite diverse. The post-war period also was a time of urbanization in the Soviet Union, which meant that there were Moldovan migrants from the countryside flowing into the capital as well. Today they say that different regions of the capital have different linguistic identities based on when they were built and which ethnic groups happened to be moving into the city at the time.
Soviet educational policy after World War II encouraged a sort of lopsided bilingualism: non-Russians learned Russian, but it didn’t work the other way around. In the 1920s and ‘30s, before Moldova was part of the Soviet Union, it had been basically mandatory to receive your education in your native language. The study of Russian actually became compulsory in non-Russian schools only in 1938. In the postwar period, this changed. After 1959, parents were allowed to choose whether they wanted their child to be educated in their native language or in Russian. Because the best educational and career opportunities were in Russian, this had the effect of eroding attendance at native-language schools across the USSR. Meanwhile, ethnic Russians who lived in the non-Russian republics weren’t expected to learn the language of the republic they lived in. As a result, by 1989, only about 10% of Russians spoke Moldovan (as the language was called at the time). This contributed to common complaints about Russians who had lived in the republic for decades, but couldn't say much more than "bună ziua" [hello] in Moldovan.
Another factor contributing to this lopsided bilingualism was the fact that the Moldovan SSR also had one of the highest rates of intermarriage in the Soviet Union, which also tended to spread the use of Russian. Ethnic Russians weren’t expected to learn Moldovan, so a mixed household was likely to use Russian. As Russian was considered the “language of interethnic communication,” it was the default language in mixed social situations in general.
As the Soviet Union began to collapse, many Soviet republics, including Moldova, passed language laws to reverse the creeping linguistic Russification of the post-war period. Independence has reversed many of the postwar phenomena that were resented by the majority Moldovan population. In the 2004 census, the population of the city is now two-thirds Moldovan and about 20% ethnic Slavs. The tide seems to have turned back toward Romanian in Chișinău. Today on the streets you hear probably two-thirds Romanian, about one-third Russian. Most advertisements and signs are in Romanian. But Russian remains strong in many areas, including business. You can still speak to just about anyone on the street in Russian, and you’re likely to get a response. After spending about a month in the city, I only encountered a few people who didn’t know Russian at all.
For all of these reasons then, it’s a wise business decision for a Romanian-speaking business owner to run a fitness center with classes in Russian. Although Romanian is on the rise in Chișinău, if you want your services to be available to the largest number of people, Russian is the way to go.
Yerevan, Armenia
In Armenia, the situation is quite different. Here I go to Shoonch (“breath” in Armenian), a Pilates and Yoga studio located in the center of the city. Unlike my gym in Moldova, which was located in a neighborhood on a small street outside of the center of the city, this studio is considerably fancier (it has air conditioning!) and caters to a more elite clientele.
Can you feel the A/C?
The instructor Luci is definitely a classic Pilates instructor—she’s intense and no-nonsense, but she also clearly has fun teaching the class.
Pilates with Luci at Shoonch
Probably my favorite part of the class is when we get out the Pilates balls and basically bounce around on them in a semi-controlled fashion for about ten minutes while listening to Michael Jackson. (I never realized until I started coming to Europe that people actually liked his ‘90s stuff.) Whoever decided that bouncing on a ball while listening to pop music counted as exercise was a genius.
This is actually a pretty good song...
Almost equally fun for me is trying to follow the instructor as she weaves Russian into her Armenian. Although the class is taught in Armenian, Russian phrases often pop up in her sentences, and she sometimes slips into Russian for a minute or so before switching back to Armenian. She seems to use Russian for emphasis, another tool in her explanatory arsenal. The language switching seems mostly unconscious, but still purposeful: “Ok, you didn’t catch what I was saying? Here, I’ll give it to you another way.” Overall, I’d guess that the class ranges from 10-30% Russian. It would be challenging, although not impossible, to follow her without at least a decent grasp of Armenian.
In Yerevan, ethnic diversity doesn’t play nearly the same role in the linguistic scene as in Chișinău. Interestingly, however, the cities started from a similar place in the late nineteenth century. In the 1897 census, the Yerevan’s population of 29,000 was divided nearly evenly between Armenians and Azerbaijanis at 43% apiece. The balance had already started to shift in favor of the Armenians in the years before before the 1917 revolution. An influx of migrants fleeing the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire in 1915, the wrenching upheaval of the brief, chaotic period of Armenian independence from 1918 to 1920, and outbursts of intercommunal violence between the region’s Armenians and Azerbaijanis all played a role in the dramatic transformation of the city’s demographics. By the mid-1920s, Armenians were nearly 90% of the city’s population. Throughout the Soviet period, there were waves of migration to Soviet Armenia from other Soviet republics and the Armenian diaspora, which only increased the proportion of Armenians in the capital city.
The Armenian SSR (red) in the Soviet Union
Russians have never had a particularly strong population presence in the South Caucasus, even during the days of the Russian Empire. Armenia was also Sovietized several decades before Moldova, at a time when there was relatively less encouragement for ethnic Slavs to migrate to other Soviet republics. As a result, the Russian language came to Yerevan mostly through the educational system, and not the presence of ethnic Russians. The majority of Armenians attended schools where the language of instruction was Armenian, but toward the end of the Soviet period, perhaps a quarter of Armenians were studying at schools in which Russian was the language of instruction. Russian schools were thought to be better, and mastery of Russian opened doors to education and better jobs. My host mother in Armenia, no slouch in the patriotism department, told me she would have sent her sons to Russian schools if she had been able to—most of the Russian schools closed in the early ‘90s when they were in elementary school.
Another factor beyond the Soviet educational system, government, and mass media that brought the Russian language into daily life was the presence of Russian-speaking Armenians who had migrated to Soviet Armenia from other parts of the USSR. Like many minorities who had lived outside “their” republic, they had linguistically assimilated to Russian. So, for all of these reasons, it is not uncommon, even today, to encounter Armenians who speak Russian in the home or are more comfortable speaking Russian in certain circumstances. Even though Yerevan’s small communities of Azerbaijanis and Russians almost all left as a result of the war between Azerbaijan and Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh and the economic collapse after the fall of the Soviet Union, respectively, the increasing homogenization of the city did nothing to dislodge the place of Russian in Yerevan.
My Pilates instructor’s use of Russian thus makes a lot of sense in this context. During the Soviet period, Russian had been a ubiquitous part of life for urban Armenians, even those who spoke Armenian at home. Although the younger generation was educated in Armenian, they still learned Russian as a foreign language in school. Moreover, they grew up watching Russian cartoons, used Russian textbooks at the university, and almost certainly have relatives who work in Moscow. Here you don’t see the resentments that have developed between Romanian- and Russian-speakers in Moldova. There is no lopsided bilingualism here. Everyone knows Armenian, but most people are comfortable in Russian too. Bouncing back and forth between languages is natural for them.
As illustrated by the different linguistic situations in my Pilates classes in Moldova and Armenia, former Soviet republics can be surprisingly different. I find the Soviet Union fascinating to study because it has characteristics of both an empire and a modernizing state. While Soviet authorities did much to homogenize the population of their centralized, industrialized state, like imperial authorities they also used a variety of strategies to govern a very diverse population. They struck “separate deals” with different national groups. Russian became a ubiquitous part of life in both Armenia and Moldova as a result of the Soviet experience, but in very different ways.
Further Reading
Peter Blitstein, “Nation-Building or Russification?: Obligatory Russian Instruction in the Soviet Non-Russian School, 1938-1953,” in A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin, edited by Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin, 253-274 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Matthew H. Ciscel, "Reform and relapse in bilingual policy in Moldova." Comparative Education 46, no. 1 (2010): 13-28.
Michael F. Hamm, "Kishinev: The character and development of a Tsarist Frontier Town," Nationalities Papers 26, no. 1 (1998): 19-37.
Isabelle T. Kreindler, “Soviet Language Planning Since 1953,” in Language Planning in the Soviet Union, ed. Michael Kirkwood (London: Macmillan Press, 1989), 50-56.
So I know I promised to talk about the Russian language in Moldova, but I feel like I've done a fair amount of heavy-lifting on the blog this week so I thought I'd take a break to write about the perplexing underground shopping experience that I encounter daily in Armenia.
One of the quirks of Soviet city design is that city planners were rather fond of underground pedestrian crossings. I’m not sure exactly when this started, but given that there aren’t many of them in Moldova (which was incorporated after World War II), it might be a pre-war phenomenon. As long as the underground crossings are relatively well-maintained, it’s actually a brilliant idea. You don’t have the stressful experience of trying to cross a major street, and you don’t have to wait to cross, you just have to go underground.
Yerevan has several extensive pedestrian underpasses. One, until recently, held an large used book market, as well as what amounted to a department store. (Apparently, it’s being remodeled—it was quite dilapidated—and the booksellers have been displaced.)
I go through one of these underpasses on my way to the archives every day, and it never fails to confound me. In order to get to both archives, I have to go through one of the city’s major hubs—Barekamutyun [Friendship] Square. There are no crosswalks whatsoever aboveground, so you have to go underground. (Jaywalking here would be taking your life into your own hands.)
Descending into the underworld...ok, mall
Already when you are descending the stairs, you pass a small warren of shops. Shoe repair, vegetable sellers, clothing stores—you name it. Once you get underground, you enter what is basically become an underground mall. The underground crossing is circular, with turn-offs for the four major streets that meet at Barekamutyun. There is also a metro stop located on one side of the circle. Given that all pedestrians have to go through the underground crossing to go anywhere on this square, it’s sort of brilliant to have the thing lined with shops on both sides.
This picture is fairly terrible but I felt creepy taking pictures of shoppers. By the way, the upper sign (ЯРМАРКА) is in Russian, but the lower one is in Armenian.
The stores here are mostly your usual little market stalls. Places here sell linens, housewares, phone cases, beauty supplies, baby clothes that say “Half Armenian is better than nothing!”, soccer jerseys, shoes, nuts, and coffee. Since arriving to Yerevan, I have purchased corn, a cutting board, a paring knife, two towels, a peeler, wooden spoons, a nail clipper, and a pumice stone here. Most of these things I got while I was on my way to and from work. Oh, and there’s also a shop that sells shwarma where I got my lunch today.
I think the other secret to the success of these shops is that this thing is a maze. Since all the shops look more or less alike, it’s easy to lose track of where you are. (“Ok, last time I went to the former Communist Party archive, I exited near the shoe shop? Wait, this shoe shop? Or another one? Hmm, those shoes are kind of cute...” Etc.) There are signs, but not all exits have them. Moreover, because these are major streets and there are no crosswalks aboveground, you not only have to pick the exit for the right street, but you also have to make sure you’re on the right side of the street, or you risk going out of your way looking in vain for a place to cross the street aboveground.
All in all, despite the confusion I experience twice daily at the Barekamutyun underground passage, I do enjoy it. After all, where in the U.S. can you safely cross the street AND pick up a Chinese cutting board for the low, low price of 1000 dram ($2.50)?
Like most big cities, Chisinau has its fair share of graffiti. There are lots of spray-painted ads for tattooing and piercing services. Much like in Cambridge and Somerville, there are ubiquitous, artsy stenciled slogans: “Here even the sun isn’t visible” [Здесь даже солнце не видно] is on walls all over the city. (Deep, dude.) I even learned the Russian word for bike repair [велосервис] from another graffiti ad in my courtyard.
As a historian, however, my favorite graffiti is definitely the political graffiti, where people fight over what it really means to be Moldovan.
This particular piece of graffiti translates as “Moldovan, therefore Romanian.” For those of you who haven’t read Charles King’s The Moldovans: Romania, Russia, and the Politics of Culture—and I’m shocked, shocked that you haven’t!—this may be a bit of an incomprehensible statement. At the heart of this argument is the question of whether being Moldovan is a regional or a national identity. Are Moldovans simply a subset of the larger category of Romanians? To understand this, we need a bit of history.
The best map of the Danubian Principalities I could
find on Wikipedia
If we back up, say, 250 years, there’s no Romania on the map. Rather, there are two provinces under Ottoman rule, Moldavia and Wallachia, known collectively as the Danubian Principalities. Many of the people in these territories speak a language that is today called Romanian—although we’ll see that even that is disputed! In 1812, as part of a very long series of Russo-Turkish Wars, Russia incorporated part of Moldavia, which henceforth was known as Bessarabia. (If you look closely at a Risk board, it’s there!)
The green part is Bessarabia, post-annexation by Russia
The nineteenth century is rightfully famous as the age of nationalism. Ernest Gellner helpfully defines nationalism as the idea that the state and the nation (Romanians, English, French, what have you) should be congruent. Although it may be easy to forget now, there was a period of time when Italians and Germans were scattered in many small principalities and city-states. Italians were only united in one state 1860, Germans in 1870. (Otto von Bismarck declared the creation of a unified Germany from Paris after defeating the French in the Franco-Prussian War—truly, one of the more badass moves in history.) The idea that people who speak a common language form a nation and should be united under one state was an extremely powerful one. Even as nationalism motivated some nations to build their empires, the nationalism of subject peoples threatened to dismantle the entire imperial system. (Indeed, in the twentieth century, it did.)
Across the Russian imperial border, nationalism was gaining hold in Wallachia and the rump principality of Moldavia. In 1859, Moldavia and Wallachia united under the leadership of Alexandru Ioan Cuza. In 1866, the united principalities formally adopted the name Romania. Romania then became independent of the Ottoman Empire in a war that lasted from 1877 to 1878.
Meanwhile, Bessarabia was left out of the Romanian nation-building process. Unlike the Romanians across the border, most did not adopt a new national identity and continued to call themselves Moldovans. Considering that most of the Moldovan population at this time consisted of illiterate peasants, this is not particularly surprising. Russia, of course, had no interest in encouraging Romanian claims on their imperial possessions.
For Romanians, however, a Moldovan identity was purely regional. Noting that their brethren across the border spoke a mutually intelligible language, they argued that they are not “Moldovans” but truly Romanians. Romanian nationalists concluded that Bessarabia and the people who inhabited it were an integral part of their nation.
This is where I get to put on my academic hat and talk about how nations get formed. Most scholars working in the U.S. today subscribe to the notion that nations are “constructed.” Basically what this means is that there’s no essential essence of national belonging that exists in people. There’s the raw material of nations—ethnic group, religion, language, etc.—but at the end of the day, we’re the one’s who make the decisions of who is in and out of our national group.
These waters can get quite muddy. For example, for most of Ukraine’s history, Russian imperialist ideologues have claimed that Ukrainians are “Little Russian”—simply a regional branch of the big Russian family. Like the Moldovans, most Ukrainians throughout history were peasants, and in the absence of a well-established Ukrainian high culture, it was relatively easy for Russians to claim that their language was simply a dialect of Russian. Even today, a leading liberal Russian newspaper saw the need to run an article titled “Why Ukraine is Not Russia.”
What I’m trying to stress with this analogy is that there is always a certain blurriness to the nation, especially when languages are closely related. So while there is certainly a linguistic basis to Romanian nationalists’ claim that Moldovans “should” be part of Romania, it’s just that—a claim.
Where were we? Sometimes I get carried away when talking about nationalism. Oh yes, history.
Meanwhile, after experiencing not one, but two revolutions in 1917, Russia starts to lose its grip on its imperial possessions, including Bessarabia. By this point, some Moldovans have started to buy the claim that they are Romanians. In 1918, the Romanian army invades Bessarabia while the Sfatul Țării (Bessarabia’s National Council) votes for the union of Bessarabia with Romania. With the inclusion of Bessarabia into Greater Romania, Romanian nationalists came one step closer to uniting all “Romanian” people under one state.
Greater Romania.
(The Moldovan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic is in orange.)
During the interwar period, the Romanian government did its best to persuade Moldovans to be Romanians (while turning up their noses a bit at the habits of these peasant cousins of theirs). Whether or not the Romanian authorities would ever have been able to fully convince Moldovans that they were really Romanians became a moot point when Hitler ceded Bessarabia to Stalin in the 1939 Non-Aggression Pact. Because Romania was allied with Nazi Germany at this point, they just had to sit there and take it when the Soviet Union annexed the territory in 1940. But not for long. The Romanians came knocking in June of 1941 when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, a sucker punch to an unprepared USSR. A Romanian regime that had slid into fascism occupied Bessarabia with the Nazis until 1944.
The Soviet Union swallowed up Bessarabia in August of 1944 on its way to Berlin. Bessarabia was united with part of Transnistria, a territory that had a substantial population of Moldovans, to form the Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic (MSSR) under the umbrella of the Soviet Union. Soviet authorities, who had been busy during the interwar period promoting the idea of a Moldovan nation in the Moldovan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in Transnistria, them set about reversing Romanian policies of the interwar period. “Romanians? In Moldova? Surely you must be joking! This population is clearly Moldovan. And by the way, their language isn’t the same as yours! No, no, no. You’ve got this all wrong.” And so forth for the next, oh, forty years. Although Romania was also part of the socialist camp, in fact Romania and the Soviet Union were separated by a sort of second Iron Curtain. Fearing nationalist contamination, Soviet authorities made it very difficult to cross the border or even import books into the MSSR from Romania.
This graffito says “I am Moldovan! I speak the Moldovan language!” (Yes, the singular form of graffiti is graffito.)
For decades the Soviet regime vehemently denied that Moldovans and Romanians were one and the same nation. This included promoting the notion that Moldovan was a separate language from Romanian. Eventually, Soviet authorities more or less gave up trying to codify the peculiarities of the Moldovan dialect into a standard literary language and tacitly accepted Romanian literary standards. They never stopped calling it the Moldovan language, however. And, of course, Soviet authorities also attempted to teach everybody in the country Russian, which had the effect of bringing Moldovans closer to the other nationalities of the Soviet Union.
When the Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic sought independence from the Soviet Union starting in the late 1980s, many nationalists were motivated by a desire to unite with their Romanian brothers across the Prut River. This pro-Romanian fervor alarmed many minorities and Russian-speakers in the republic, including those in Transnistria. Transnistrian authorities fought a bloody war in 1992 to carve out a sort of independence from Moldova.
By the mid-nineties, the pro-Romanian sentiment had faded. I’m not sure exactly why this happened, but I suspect that ongoing economic chaos made identity debates seem somewhat trivial. Meanwhile, Moldovans who had the chance to visit Romania realized that over forty-five years of living in separate states with very different regimes had of course made a huge impact on the everyday cultures of the Moldovan and Romanian populations. Moldovans who spend significant time in Romania often come back feeling more “Moldovan” than when they left.
Today, to the chagrin of self-proclaimed Bessarabian Romanians who have discarded their Moldovan identities, most people in the country continue to call themselves Moldovans. For those who choose to identify themselves as Romanian, the so-called Moldovans are the sad victims of Soviet brainwashing. Most people can agree to call the language Romanian, but there are still many Moldovan speakers who continue to believe that it is a separate language. The tactful way to avoid this issue is to call it “the state language” [limbă de stat]. Most people in Romania are unaware of these ongoing debates and consider all people in Moldova to be Romanians (generally without consulting them).
In the end, neither the self-proclaimed Moldovans nor the self-proclaimed Bessarabian Romanians have been able to win the battle of national claims, and the country is more or less at a stalemate. For now, at least, this battle will continue to be fought on the city walls by people with spray paint and evidently lots of time on their hands.
My initial dismay at having an eleven-hour layover in Kiev was erased when I realized that I could use that time to venture into the city and visit Megan, one of my fellow graduate students in Soviet history. I was interested to see how Kiev had changed since I had last been there four years ago.
The first thing I noticed was that Borispol airport was brand new. It really looks fantastic, and it’s a shame that there won’t be too many tourists around to take advantage of the spiffy new place. (Tip for the adventurous: Ukrainian International Airways is having a fire sale on tickets!) Also, as I was passing through security, one of the Ukrainian security agents actually made a joke—in English! Definitely the first time that has ever happened to me in the former Soviet Union.
After a month in Chisinau, where it seems like about two thirds of the conversations I heard were in Moldovan Romanian, it was strange to suddenly understand all the conversations going on around me. For all the controversy about language politics, Kiev is still firmly a Russian-speaking city. I only eavesdropped (or rather, attempted to eavesdrop) on a few Ukrainian conversations all day. Certainly belies the notion that this is a battle of Russian speakers against Ukrainian speakers!
They’ve also rebranded one of their city bus routes as the “Sky Bus,” so it’s now very easy to find the right transportation to connect to the metro. Once I made it to the “Golden Gates” metro stop, I met up with Megan, who is doing archival research at an archive located in the St. Sophia Cathedral complex.
Statue of Yaroslav the Wise in front of Kiev's reconstructed Golden Gates.
Historians reunited in Kiev!
Our first stop was the Maidan, the epicenter of the protest movement and the site of major street battles in February between protesters and Berkut, the now-disbanded Ukrainian security services. After a successful regime change, the Maidan is no longer occupied but the barricades and tents remain as a sort of museum to history-in-the-making. With the annexation of Crimea and an ongoing civil war/anti-terrorist operation/undeclared Russian invasion (depending on your perspective) in some of the far-eastern regions, it remains to be seen whether the revolution will be a Pyrrhic victory. According to Megan, most people in Kiev seem to be taking a wait-and-see approach to the election of the new president Poroshenko. After all, they remind her, at one time they had also celebrated the victory of the now-deposed Yanukovych.
At first is was a shock to see the wide, open central square turned into a warren of makeshift tents and barricades topped with barbed wire.
Photo I took of the Maidan in June 2010
Maidan, July 2014
Maidan, July 2014
Memorials honored those who had died in the fighting with security services.
Makeshift memorial
On that sunny afternoon it was hard to imagine that just a few months ago, I had watched a YouTube video with Ukrainian priests on the same stage incanting prayers over the burning barricades as night battles with Berkut raged.
Main stage at the Maidan, now displaying photographs of the deceased
Among the Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar flags, there were also red-and-black UPA flags. The Ukrainian Partisan Army was the main Ukrainian nationalist anti-Soviet resistance in western Ukraine during World War II. They were sometimes allied with the Nazis, although the Germans also put UPA leader Stepan Bandera in a concentration camp (and promptly freed him when they thought he would be useful for battling the Soviets).
Poster of Stepan Bandera in the Maidan
They were advocates of what is called “integral nationalism.” UPA ideology argued that the Ukrainain nation was like a body that needed to be cleansed of impure elements—namely, non-Ukrainians. (As historian Amir Weiner points out, this predilection for cleansing the body politic was not so different from Soviet purges of class enemies and traitors.) UPA actively took part in massacres of Jews and Poles.
UPA ideology has little in common with the views of most Maidan supporters. The main far-right party polled in the low single digits in the parliamentary election. My impression is that pro-Maidan Ukrainians are much more likely to support a sort of Ukrainian civic nationalism instead. Considering that the Maidan movement has the full support of Ukraine’s Jewish and Crimean Tatar community, Russian propaganda that some sort of neo-UPA fascist junta has taken over the country is hardly persuasive. However, the portrayal of Stepan Bandera as some sort of national hero is certainly disturbing. It’s hard to decide who was worse—the UPA or the Soviet state. Neither provide much inspiration for way forward for Ukraine today.
The Maidan’s erstwhile Christmas tree, now covered in various banners and signs, could probably form the source base for an entire academic paper. Unlike Russian government propaganda, which seems to be actively stirring up hatred towards Ukrainians, there have been some efforts on the part of the Maidan movement to distinguish between Russians and the actions of their government. Hence the sign, “We love Russians—We despise Putin.”
Maidan "Christmas tree"
After our excursion into recent history, we dived into some not-so-recent history. Although I’ve already visited the St. Sophia Cathedral twice, it always merits another visit.
St. Sophia's Cathedral. The baroque exterior was commissioned in the seventeenth century by the great Orthodox metropolitan Peter Mogila, who by the way was from Moldova.
St. Sophia’s was originally built in the eleventh century by the royal family of Kievan Rus’, the Slavic state to which all three East Slavic nations (Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus) trace their origins. As such, it is essentially ground zero for East Slavic Orthodox Christianity. Made into a museum in the 1930s, the cathedral and its grounds are remarkably peaceful to wander through.
This is actually the entrance to the archive Megan is working in. Jealous...
On my way back to the airport, I bought the latest issue of a Ukrainian weekly, Kommentarii, tempted by its irresistible (to a historian, at least) headline—”Who will re-write the history of Ukraine.” I was treated to an excellent series of articles focusing on historical debates between Ukraine and its neighbors. The main article sought to demonstrate how the current Ukrainian historical paradigm tends to demonize Ukraine’s neighbors. The fact that Ukrainian journalists are doing some serious historiographical soul-searching at a time like this gave me hope for the future.
It may be pretty far down on the list of problems caused by the war in Ukraine, but the fact that fewer tourists are now likely to venture to Ukraine still saddens me. Kiev is a beautiful city, and I felt completely safe, as the city is far from the current conflict. I was glad to have the chance to spend even a few hours in Kiev.
Statue of Cossack leader Bohdan Khmelnytsky not far from the Maidan and St. Sophia.
