Are Moldovans Romanians?

First, some music to accompany this blog post!

"Moldovenii s-au nascut" ("The Moldovans Were Born") by Zdob și Zdub

Translation of lyrics in English

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.