Moldovenism is the political support and promotion of a Moldovan identity and culture, including a Moldovan language, independent from those of any other ethnic group, the Romanians' in particular. The PN party has identified itself as "Moldovenist".
Some of its supporters ascribe this identity to the medieval Principality of Moldavia. Others, in order to explain the current differences between Romanian-speaking inhabitants of the two banks of the Prut River, ascribe it to the long incorporation of Bessarabia in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Opponents, on the other hand, claim that Moldovans and Romanians are a single ethnic group and that the Moldovan identity was artificially created by the Soviet authorities in the Moldavian SSR.
Supporters of a separate Moldovan identity contend that the people of Moldavia historically self-identified as "Moldavian" before the notion of "Romanian" became widespread. The belief that Romanians and Moldovans in Bessarabia and the Moldavian ASSR (MASSR) formed two separate ethnonational groups, speaking different languages and possessing separate historical and cultural traits, was also endorsed by the Soviet Union.Charles King, "The Moldovans: Romania, Russia, and the Politics of Culture", Hoover Press, 2000, pg. 62
Historical development Creation of Moldavian ASSR In 1812 the Russian Empire and the Ottoman Empire signed the Treaty of Bucharest (1812), by which Russia annexed the eastern part of the medieval Principality of Moldavia. This territory became known as Bessarabia. Between 1859 and 1866, Principality of Moldavia and the neighbouring Principality of Wallachia united into a single country called Romania. Histoire du congrès de Paris, Edouard Gourdon (1857) According to a recount by traveller in 1818, the Moldavians did not employ the endonym "Romanian" like the Wallachians did; travellers Francesco della Valle (1532)"...si dimandano in lingua loro Romei...se alcuno dimanda se sano parlare in la lingua valacca, dicono a questo in questo modo: Sti Rominest ? Che vol dire: Sai tu Romano,..." and further "però al presente si dimandon Romei, e questo è quanto da essi monacci potessimo esser instruiti" in Claudio Isopescu, Notizie intorno ai Romeni nella letteratura geografica italiana del Cinquecento, in "Bulletin de la Section Historique de l'Académie Roumaine", XIV, 1929, p. 1- 90 and also in Maria Holban, Călători străini în Țările Române, Editura Științifică, București, 1968, Vol. 1, p. 322-323 For the original text also see Magyar Történelmi Tár, 1855, p. 22-23 and Pierre Lescalopier (1574) attested the opposite, a shared use of the name among Moldavians, Wallachians and also Transylvanians."Tout ce pays la Wallachie et Moldavie et la plus part de la Transivanie a esté peuplé des colonie romaines du temps de Traian l'empereur...Ceux du pays se disent vrais successeurs des Romains et nomment leur parler romanechte, c'est-à-dire romain ... " cited from "Voyage fait par moy, Pierre Lescalopier l'an 1574 de Venise a Constantinople", fol 48 in Paul Cernovodeanu, Studii si materiale de istorie medievala, IV, 1960, p. 444 In 1917, when the Russian Empire was disintegrating, a Moldavian Democratic Republic was formed in Bessarabia. In 1918, after the Romanian army gained control of the region, Sfatul Țării proclaimed the independence of the Moldavian Republic and, later, voted for the union with Romania. Soviet Russia contested the outcome of these events and, in May 1919, proclaimed the Bessarabian Soviet Socialist Republic as a government in exile. After the Soviet-organized Tatarbunary Uprising failed, in 1924 a Moldavian ASSR (MASSR) was created within the Ukrainian SSR, just east of the river Dniester that then marked the boundary between the Kingdom of Romania and the Soviet Union.
For the purpose of giving MASSR its own identity separate from Romania, Soviet authorities declared the variety spoken by the majority of Moldavians to be "Moldavian language".Grenoble 2003, pp 89-93Ana Corețchi, 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 UniversityA Country Study: Moldova (Language section), Library of the US Congress. The intellectual elites of the MASSR were asked to standardise a Moldovan literary language based on the local dialects of MASSR, which are similar to Romanian.
In 1818, Hungarian traveller reported that Moldavians considered themselves to be "Moldoweni" (Moldovans) and rejected the theory about the Roman origin of Moldavians, unlike their neighbours from Wallachia that identified themselves as "Rumuni" (Romanians). In contrast, French traveller Pierre Lescalopier had reported in 1574 that in Wallachia, Moldavia and most of Transylvania, "they call themselves true successors of the Romans". However, until the 1920s the Russians did not argue that Moldovans and their neighbors in the Danubian Principalities somehow formed nations.Charles King, "The Moldovans: Romania, Russia, and the Politics of Culture", Hoover Press, 2000, pg. 26 One observer wrote in 1846 in the journal of the Russian foreign ministry that “the inhabitants of upper Bessarabia are essentially Romanians, that is, a mixture of Slavs and Romans, and sons of the Greek Orthodox Church". In May 1917, at a congress of Bessarabian teachers, a group protested against being called "Romanians", affirming they were "Moldovans".Stuart J. Kaufman, Modern Hatreds: The Symbolic Politics of Ethnic War, Cornell University Press, 2001, , pg. 134
Representatives of the Romanian-speaking population living in Podolia, and Kherson participated in the Bessarabian national movement in 1917 and early 1918, agitating for incorporation of the territory across Dniester into the Greater Romanian Kingdom. The Romanian government never took significant interest in these demands, which would have implied large-scale military operations, and settled in the end to leave behind those areas, which became part of Soviet Ukraine after the Russian Civil War.Charles King, "The Moldovans: Romania, Russia, and the Politics of Culture", Hoover Press, 2000, pg. 180 The calls from Transnistrian émigrés continued into the 1920s asking for Romania to fund schools in the region as there were schools and cultural organizations in regions inhabited by speakers of cognate Latin languages in the Balkans. Refugees flooded across the Dniester and special funds were put aside for housing and education.
Nichita Smochină, an educator settled in Paris, founded the Associations of Transnistrian Romanians in order to assist 20,000 refugees from across the Dniester, and welcomed the creation of the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Republic.Charles King, "The Moldovans: Romania, Russia, and the Politics of Culture", Hoover Press, 2000, pg. 181
Pavel Chioru, the MASSR People's Commissar of Education, argued that literary Romanian borrowed too many French language words during its standardization in the 19th century. According to Chior, this made it incomprehensible to the peasants both in the MASSR and Romania, demonstrating the division between the "ruling class" and the "exploited class".King, p.64 Soviet linguist M. V. Sergievsky studied linguistic variation in the MASSR and identified two dialects. One, similar to the spoken variety in Bessarabia, was chosen as the standard, to pave the way for the "liberation of the Bessarabians". Gabriel Buciușcanu, a Socialist Revolutionary member of Sfatul Țării who opposed the union with Romania, wrote a new grammar compendium in 1925, but it was considered too similar to standard Romanian grammar, and was quickly pulled out of circulation.
Romanizators and autochthonists
In the 1920s, there was a dispute among the Soviet linguists between supporters ("Romanizators" or "Romanists") and opponents ("autochthonists", Russian: самобытники) of the convergence of the Moldavian and Romanian.
The "autochthonists" 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.Charles King, "The Moldovans: Romania, Russia, and the Politics of Culture", Hoover Press, 2000, pg. 69
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 "autochthonist" majority, until Stanislav Kosior (General Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party) and several MASSR communists visited Joseph 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 "autochthonists" were repressed, their books destroyed, and their neologisms banned.
Moldovans in Soviet Moldova In June 1940 Bessarabia was occupied by the Soviet Union. Most of Bessarabia and about half of the MASSR were merged into a newly created Moldavian SSR, which became the fifteenth union republic of the USSR. A year later, in June 1941, Romania attacked the Soviet Union as part of Operation Barbarossa and retook Bessarabia (see Operation München). Between 1941 and 1944, Romania also occupied the territory between the Dniester and Bug rivers (historic Transnistria). By August 1944 the Soviets had taken back all the territories they lost in 1941, which remained in the Soviet Union until the latter's dissolution in 1991.
During the first years of Soviet occupation, the term "Romanian language" was forbidden. The official language for use in Moldovan schools throughout the entire MSSR (both in Bessarabia and Transnistria) during Stalinist period was based on a local variety spoken in some areas of the former MASSR. The Commission for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in Moldova is assessing this period.