King Moldavian Language

8/3/2019 King Moldavian Language

1/27

The Ambivalence of Authenticity, or How the Moldovan Language Was MadeAuthor(s): Charles KingReviewed work(s):Source: Slavic Review, Vol. 58, No. 1 (Spring, 1999), pp. 117-142Published by: Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2672992 .

Accessed: 28/11/2011 07:00

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of

content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms

of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve

and extend access to Slavic Review.

http://www.jstor.org
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=aaasshttp://www.jstor.org/stable/2672992?origin=JSTOR-pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/stable/2672992?origin=JSTOR-pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=aaass


2/27

The Ambivalence fAuthenticity,or How the MoldovanLanguage Was MadeCharlesKing

The Bolshevikrevolution represented a remarkable opportunityformanyacademics and professionals. The demands ofgoverning a region as vastas the new Soviet statenecessitated officialpatronage ofthe sciences, andtheparty nd governmentprovided sources ofsupportfordisciplines thathad been underfunded, underdeveloped, or completely nonexistent be-fore1917. After herevolution, cartographers, inguists, eographers, eth-nographers, social hygienists, nd others found themselves the benefi-ciaries of a regime eager to learn about the lands that it had suddenlyinherited and to spread the news of revolution to the backward peoplesof the formerempire. As much recent scholarship has shown,farfrombe-ing the mere conduits forpolicies devised at the center, these specialistswere professionals ofvariable talent and trainingwith nterests,projects,and agendas of their own.' Government policy toward the nationalities,and perhaps towardscientificresearch in general, emerged not simply sa resultofMoscow's diktat, ut as a complex interplay mong the center'spatronage and attendant demands, the professional interests and pro-grams of the specialists dispatched by the center, and the local interestsof their colleagues and subjects in the outlying reaches of the Sovietstate. Current theorizingabout the construction of ethnic identitywouldhave seemed strange to these early Soviet specialists who embraced theIwould iketothankWimvan Meurs,MihaiGribincea,MaryMcAuley,nd Dennis Deletantfor heir omments n earlier ersions f this rticle. hreepatient nd highly rofessionalanonymous eferees lso providednumerous nvaluable uggestions.Because of the frequentMoldovan alphabet and spellingreformsn the 1920sand1930s, have not attempted o standardize pellingnthe citations.Works riginallyntheCyrillic cript ave been transliteratedccording oRomanianrules.In this rticle oftenuse the termMoldova s shorthand orthe Moldovan Autono-mous Soviet Socialist Republic (MASSR), the region properlyknown n Romanian asTransnistria.n other ontextsMoldovamight lso refer o thehistorical egionofMoldova(from he Carpathians o the DnestrRiver), he currentRepublic of Moldova (from hePrutRiver o the eastern dge of Transnistria), r the currentRomanianregionof Mol-dova (from he Carpathians o the PrutRiver). intendnothing olitical nmy hoice ofterms. urther, follow ndividuals' elf-designation henspeaking bout ethnicprove-nance; hence, major cultural iguresn the MASSR are described s "ethnicMoldovans,"although recognizethat uch a label is controversial. see no point,though,n callingthem omething ther hanwhat hey alled themselves.1. Susan Gross olomon, "The Soviet-Germanyphilis xpedition oBuriatMongo-lia, 1928: Scientific esearch on National Minorities," lavicReview 2, no. 2 (Summer1993): 204-32; Yuri Slezkine, From avagestoCitizens:The CulturalRevolutionn theSoviet arNorth, 928-1938," SlavicReview1,no. 1 (Spring1992): 52-76; YuriSlezkine,"The USSR as a CommunalApartment,rHow a Socialist tatePromotedEthnicParticu-larism," lavicReview 3, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 414-52; Michael Smith, The EurasianImperativenEarly ovietLanguage Planning:RussianLinguists t the Service f theNa-tionalities,"n Susan GrossSolomon, ed., Beyond ovietology:ssays n PoliticsndHistory(Armonk, .Y, 1993), 159-91.Slavic Review58, no. 1 (Spring 1999)


3/27

118 Slavic Reviewconcepts of language-building (iazykovoe troitelstvo), culture-building(kul turnoe troitelstvo), and nation-building (natsional noestroitelstvo) astheir conscious and proper tasks.The entire process of kul'turnoe troitel'stvoecessarily involved priv-ileging certain cultural forms over others: designating some linguistictraits s exemplary of new literary tandards and dismissingothers as dia-lects, establishinga canon of historical tales as representativeof the "true"ethnohistoryof a given group and rejecting others as apocryphal, anddrawing clear and immutable boundaries around groups forwhom cul-tural identities were often vague and highly situational.Just as local cad-res were instructedto indigenize the party and state apparat after1923,bringingmore members of local ethnic groups and speakers of local lan-guages into the institutions f power, early Soviet academics were engagedin a parallel effort o define who precisely the indigenes were supposedtobe-selecting and refining set of inguistic, ultural,and even anthro-pometric traits gainst which claims tomembership in a particularethnicgroup could be measured. Despite many academics' bona fide belief intheir own scientific bjectivity,he entire project of defining the indigenemeant that scientificmissions in the peripheral regions of the Soviet statewere also missions ivilisatrices,nterpriseswhose chiefgoal was the trans-formation of the primitivepeoples of the federation into an arrayofgen-uine, modern nationalities and nations.This article examines these processes within early Soviet culturalpolicy in a particularlycontentious case: the field of language construc-tion in the Moldovan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (MASSR),the precursor of the modern Republic of Moldova, which existed onthe Ukrainian-Romanian border from 1924 to 1940. The Moldovan casepoints to one ofthe centralproblems for students of thepoliticsof nation-building, particularly n the Soviet context. It has become a cliche to as-sert that ethnic and national identities are constructed or imagined,and that the particular content of such identities is as much the productof conscious intervention by state and quasi-state institutions s of more"natural"processes operating at the level of ndividuals and communities.But one crucial question has normally gone unasked: What are the limitsbeyond which efforts o constructhomogeneous communal identities outof the manifestheterogeneityof human speech and custom come to seeminauthentic and artificial? n the marketplace of identities, whydo onlysome visionsof the nation attractprospective buyers? n otherwords,howfar can identities be forgedwithouttheirappearing a forgery?The moral of the Moldovan story s that the answer maynot lie whereone would expect. That is, the "artificiality"f the identity's ontent- thedisjuncturebetween the codified notions ofthe nation offeredbyculturaland political elites and the actual cultural practices of a given popu-lation-is only one problem confrontingwould-be nation-builders. Aneven more serious obstacle to identityconstruction lies with the nation-builders themselves, and in particularwith their attempt to balance twopotentiallyconflictingvisionsof theirrelationship to the nations they im


4/27

How theMoldovan LacnguageWalsMade 119to build. Nation-builders often wear two hats: one of the scientist search-ing for "true" and "authentic" forms of folk culture to be sorted, tamed,and elevated to the level of high national culture, and another of thebearer of enlightenment, communicating back to the folk themselvesa new, homogenized cultural standard that can then be used for thepeople's edification. Balancing these twin tasks s never simple, for thereis a constant tension between two visions of the authentic: one defined asthose cultural formsthat most naturally ccord with the genuine practicesof the people themselves, and another defined by the degree to whichthese cultural formsfurther he ultimate transformative oal ofthe entirenation-building project.Cultural cadres in the MASSR justified their creation of a new lan-guage for the Moldovans on the grounds that the new idiom, based onpeasant speech patterns,was more democratic and more genuine thanthe French-influenced literary anguage used across the border in bour-geois Romania. Not onlywere the targetsof thisnation-building effort-the Moldovan peasants- oftenresistant o the language reforms, ut cul-tural elites were also reluctant to adopt a language based on formsof speech and writing hey themselvesfound uncultured. Building a newnation foundered not simply on the artificiality f the project's con-tent,but on the ambivalence of elites toward the culture theyset aboutconstructing.IdentityndArtificen theStudy fMoldovaAll standard languages and high cultures are artificial n so far as theyare products of human artifice,but the idea of a distinct Moldovan lin-guistic and cultural identityhas long been labeled artificial n a rather dif-ferentsense, as a cynical and illegitimate conceit of Soviet propaganda.The meaning of Moldovanness continues to be a controversialsubject inboth post-Soviet Moldova and postcommunist Romania.2 Most scholarshave seen Soviet cultural policy in Moldova as a vast exercise in Stalinistdenationalization, designed to construct a counterfeit Moldovan iden-tity nd to throwthe Moldovans into a state of collective amnesia abouttheir true Romanian heritage. Much of the existingwestern and, now,post-Soviet literature has treated the period of the MASSR-with itsheated debates over the relationship between the Moldovan and Roma-nian languages, itsfrequent alphabet changes, and itsstrange neologismsbased on indigenous roots or Slavic calques-as an amusing though sin-ister episode in Moldovan and Romanian cultural history.3 he architects

2. See CharlesKing, Moldovandentitynd thePolitics fPan-Romanianisnm1,"lavicReviezv3,no. 2 (Summer1994): 345- 68;WilliamCrowther, The Politics f Democrati-zation n Postcommunist oldova," n KarenDawisha and Bruce Parrott,ds.,DemocraticChani?gesnd Atahoritarian. eactions n,Russia, Ukraine,Belarts, and lVIoldova Cambridge,Eng., 1997), 282-329; Tom Gallagher, Roana,nia ifter eau.escu: The Politics of ntolerance(Edinburgh, 995), 185-90.3. Forwestern reatmentsf SovietMoldova, ee Michael Bruchis, nie tep) ack,TIOStep)sor-ward: n? heLanguage Policy f theConrnltunistartyof the ovietUnion in theNational


5/27

120 SlavicReviewof Soviet Moldovan identityare normally classed as political opportun-ists, at best, and willing executors of Stalinistnation-building and nation-destroying, t worst.4The origins of Moldovanness and of the much-maligned "Moldovanlanguage" are far more complex than these accounts allow, however.There is ample evidence that the Moldovans, those in the MASSR as wellas those whojoined Greater Romania in the territorial hanges after1918,did not thinkof themselves as unambiguously Romanian in the periodbetween thewars. Under both Romanians and Soviets, peasants referredto themselves and their language as "Moldovan" well into the 1930s, apractice that nfuriated pan-Romanian nationalists in Greater Romania.5Subjects of the Russian empire from1812 to 1918, these Moldovans hadmissed out on all the defining moments in the emergence of a pan-Romanian national consciousness in the nineteenth century.At each his-torical turning point, the Moldovans had been absent: the rebellionagainst the Ottomans in 1821, the standardization and Latinization of theRomanian language and alphabet in the 1850s and 1860s, the creation ofa unified Romanian state in 1859, the founding of a Romanian dynastichouse in 1866 and 1881, and the achievement of independence from thePorte in 1878. The Moldovan peasant's view of his own national identitywas not the product of Russian assimilationistpolicies but had insteadremained virtually rozen since the Russian annexation of Bessarabia in1812, a time when the idea of a "Romanian nation" stretchingfrom theTisza to the Bug was still n its infancy. n the interwar period, both Ro-RepublicsMoldavian:A LookBack, Survey,nd Perspectives,924-1980) (Boulder, Colo.,1982); andNicholasDima,From Ioldavia oMoldova:The oviet-RomanianerritorialDispute(Boulder,Colo., 1991). On identity ebates within hehistoriographicaliterature, eeWimP. vanMeurs, TheBessarabian uestionn CommunististoriographlyBoulder, Colo.,1994). The most mportant reatment ritten yboth Moldovan ndRomanian uthors sloan Scurtu, tal., storia asarabiei, d ed. (Bucharest, 998).4. The only western tudyof culturalpolicyin the MASSR is Klaus Heitmann,"Rumanische prache und Literatur n Bessarabien und Transnistriendie sogenanntemoldauische Sprache und Literatur)," eitschrifturromanischehilologie1 (1965): 102-56. Heitmann's reatment, owever,was based almostentirely n thehighlynaccurateworkofN. P. Smochina, "RepublicaMoldoveneascaa Sovietelor,"Moldovanoud1,no. 1(1935): 3-55, and 1, nos. 2-3 (1935): 131-237; and N. P. Smochina,RepublicaMoldove-neascd SovietelorBucharest, 938).5. Forevidenceof theuse of theethnicdesignation Moldovan," ee the travelers'c-counts nCharlesUpson Clark,Bessarabia: ussia nd Roumania n the lack ea (NewYork,1927); Charles Upson Clark, United omania New York,1932); Em. de Martonne,VWlatI Have Seen n Bessarabia Paris, 1919); HenryBaerlein,Bessarabiand Beyond London,1935); HenryBaerlein, n OldRomania London, 1940).Forrepresentativeritiques f the lack of Romaniannational consciousness mongMoldovans, ee Arhimandritul urie,"Moldovene, nvata-te te pretui,"Romriniaoua,4 February 918, 1; CassianR.Munteanu,PrinBasarabiaromaneascd:nsemndrie cdldtorie(Lugoj, 1919); Porfirie ala, Ce neam untem? ldmurireentruMoldovenii in Basarabia(Chi?indu, 920); T. Vicol, "Constataririste," asarabia: iarsdptdmdnalndependent,8 De-cember 1924, 1; I. Zaborovschi, Basarabia: Cate-va precizari storice,"Viata Basarabiei(journal), 1,no. 2 (1932): 25-28; Al.Terziman,Mizeria ulturalanBasarabia,"ViataBa-sarabieinewspaper), June 1933, 1;and Ion Pelivan, a vorbimomanesteChi?indu, 938).


6/27

Howzvhe Aloldovan anguage Was Made 121mania and the Soviet Union were thus engaged in intense efforts o definewho preciselythe Moldovans were supposed to be.6

As in other areas of early Soviet nationalities policy, central and localelites in the MASSR found common ground in the idea of an indepen-dent Moldovan linguisticand national identity.Linguistic "Moldovaniza-tion"emerged, not as a top-down, cynical,and capricious effort o dena-tionalize the Moldovans, but rather as a resultof the interplayof existingforms of indigenous identity,Moscow's foreign policy goals, and the localagendas and intellectual predispositions ofcultural and political elites in-side the MASSR. While the agents ofMoldovanization looked out fortheirown careers and political survival, he policies they advocated were morethan the product of political opportunism; theirviewson the role of sci-ence in socialist society, heirbelief in the fundamental linkbetween po-litical liberation and linguistic populism, and theirsense ofcivilizingmis-sion in the rural reaches of the Soviet Moldovan republic were central tocrafting distinct cultural identity-an identity hathas, in rather differ-ent form, asted even beyond the dissolution of the Soviet federation. Bythemid-1930s, the most radical proposals forcrafting newMoldovan na-tion had fallen bythewayside, but the origins and outcome ofMoldovannation-building had as much to do with the professional orientations ofthe nation-builders themselves and the practical problems theyfaced, aswith the vicissitudesofSoviet politics.Nation-Building and Soviet Foreign PolicyLocated inside Soviet Ukraine on the border with Romania, the MASSRstood on the edge of the capitalistworld and was formuch ofthe interwarperiod considered a serious threatbythe Romanian government.7 n the1920s and 1930s, Soviet planes dropped pamphlets above Romanian vil-lages, shotswere exchanged between Soviet and Romanian soldiers fromeither bank oftheDnestrRiver, nd Bolshevik agentsbased in the MASSRwere active across the frontier n the Romanian province of Bessarabia.According to Romanian figures, s manyas 118 separate Bolshevik incur-sionswestofthe Dnestrwere registeredbetween 1921 and 1925, and from1918 to 1925 the Romanian Foreign Ministry atalogued over 3,000 sepa-

6. The creationof a single Romanianstate uisheredn a period of intensenation-building, struggle o create unifiedRomaniannationfrom eoplesand territorieshathad spent the pastcenttuiyr more underHungarian,Auistrian,tussian, uLlgarian,rTturkishtule. n the difficultiesf nation-btuildingetween he wars, ncludingn Bessa-rabia, ee the magnificentlyich accountby rina Livezeanu,Cultur-aloliticst Greatero-manian:egionalismii,ation u.ilding,ndEthinict-rtggleIthaca, 1995).7. The MASSRwas formed n 12 October1924,on the east bank of the DnestrRiver.Althotughstensibly form f elf-determinationor thnicMoldovans, he MASSR's 1926populationof 572,114was nearly 9 percentUkrainian nd only30.1 percentMoldovan.The remainderwas composed of Russians 9 percent) Jews 8 percent),Germans 2 per-cent), Bulgarians 1 percent), nd othernationalities. ome 85,000 MoldovansremainedoutsidetheMASSR in otherpartsof Ukraine. Vsesoiztznaliaerel9is'aselenija 926 goda(Moscow, 929), 13:39; M\Ioldova:ValterialiletatisticeBalta, 1928), 304.


7/27

122 SlavicReviewrate "terrorist" ncidents sponsored by the Bolsheviks in Bessarabia, rang-ing fromspying and agitation to demonstrations and outright rebellion.8Soviet agents provocateurswere accused of fomenting risings n the Bes-sarabian townsof Hotin (Januaiy 1919), Tighina (May 1919), and TatarBunar (September 1924), briefjacqueries thatwere ruthlessly uppressedby the Romanian army.The creation of the MASSR ensured that the Bessarabian question-the statusof the formerRussian gubernijathatjoined Romania in 1918-remained a topical issue in southeastern Europe and a thorn in the sideof Romanian diplomats working to secure international recognition ofBessarabia's place inside Greater Romnania.Throughout the interwarpe-riod, both Romanians and Soviets saw ethnography as an instrumentof diplomacy. For the former, Bessarabia, whose majority populationnormallyused the ethnic self-designation"Moldovan," was as Romanianas anyother constituent of Greater Romania.9 Romanian educational andeconomic policy therefore focused on the process ofbringingthe inhab-itants of Bessarabia up to the cultural level of those in other parts of thekingdom and, where necessary, impressing upon them the fact of theirRomanianness.For the Soviets, though, the Romanians were merely using the rheto-ricofbourgeois nationalism to coverup thedeep fissures f anguage, cul-ture, and class thatdivided the Moldovans from the Romanians. Pointingto peculiarities of pronunciation and custom, Soviet propagandists ar-gued that the largelyruralromance-speaking population in the east-bankMASSR and in west-bank Bessarabia formed a single national and lin-guisticgroup-the Moldovans-separate from Romanians.10Hence, thelinchpin of Soviet claims to the Bessarabia region: Not only had Bucharestnever carried out a referendum on Bessarabia'sjoining the enlarged king-dom, but by attemptingto treat the inhabitants of Bessarabia as pure Ro-manians, Bucharest's "landlord-capitalists"were threatening the distinctMoldovan nation with cultural and linguistic annihilation. The MASSRwas to be thegermof a futureMoldovan state,a Soviet homeland fora na-tion facingextinctionbeneath the boyar's heel in Romania." Since Mos-cow never officially ecognized the 1918 union, Bessarabia was consid-

8. Antony Babel, La Bessarabie: tude historique,thnogralAiquet economiqueParis,1926), 212nl; Gh.Tatarescu,nternationaldIII-a i BasarabibaBucharest, 925), 30-34.See also the extensive reatment y the Romanian- ecret police inspectorgener-al orBessarabia,Z. I. Husarescu,Mi~careaubversivdinBasarabicaChi?indu, 925).9. For these arguments, ee Nicolae Titulescu, "Two Neighbours of Rtussia ndTheir- olicies: I) Roumania and Bessarabia,"NineteenthenturyndAfter5 (June 1924):791-803.10. The extent f the Moldovan "ethnic pace' wasalways ather onfusing n Sovietparlance. The area of the medieval Principality f Moldova actually tretched rom heCarpathianMountains o the DnestrRiver, region thathad historicallyncludedBessa-rabia btut ot Transnistria.oviet cholars nd propagandists eredivided verthedegreetowhichthe boundariesofSovietMoldova shouldmirror hose of the historicMoldovaregion.11. Nicolae Movileanu and Boris Stratulat, Cherez prizmudoktiunentov,"oldovai thii; 1992, nos. 6-7:30.


8/27

How theMoldovanLanguage WasMade 123ered an occupied portion of Soviet Moldova.'2 The MASSR's capital wasdeclared to be Chi?indu (Kishinev), the provincial center of Bessarabia,while the east-bankcity fBalta was named the "provisionalcapital" pend-ing the liberation of Bessarabia.'- As both Soviet and foreign observersnoted, the MASSR was meant to serve the same purpose vis-a-visRomaniathat the Karelian and Buriat-Mongol ASSRs served vis-a-visFinland andMongolia. 4The ftindamental problem for the Soviets,however, was that theMol-dovans were, at best, an inchoate nation. Little had been done withinthe Russian empire to develop an indigenous literaiy language or evento delineate the main features of Moldovanness, even though the 1897census had recorded over a million "Moldovan-speakers" in Bessarabiaand southwestern Ukraine.'5 Despite some interest n Moldovan ethnog-raphyin the mid-nineteenth centuiy, bythe time of the revolution therewer-eno specialist journals or other ptiblications devoted to exploriilgthe speech and customs of Moldovans in Ukraine and the Bessarabianguberniia.6 As Soviet propagandists argued, it was only the liberatingand organizing ideas of the Bolshevik revolution that could reshape theMASSR's amorphous melange ofregional dialects into a standard literarylanguage and raise the Moldovans to the level already reached byotherpeoples of the formerempire.'7 Because the MASSR was still n the stageof "primitive ccumulation" of cultural forces,a Moldovan linguisticandcultural identitywas to be, more than in any other part of the union, agenuine "child of the October revolution."18Local Elites and the Constructionof the Moldovan LanguageWhile the foreignpolicy significanceoftheMASSR was clear, the contentof Moldovan cultural policy owed much to the activities of cultural andpolitical elites within the republic. The cultural issue that received the

12. On this ssue, see Obrazovanlie VIoldavskoiSR i sozdlanie ommnnnnisticheskoiartiiMoldavii: bornik okumentovmaterialovChi?indu,1984), 104-5; V Dembo, SovetskaiaMIoldaviiabessarabskiiopros Moscow, 1925), 38; V Dembo,Respublikaez tolytsi:adi-ariskaMoldavshchjyna-AMSRR1Khar'kov,930), 22; and Kul'turne u ivnytstvonaMol-davii (Balta, 1929), 13.13. A. Repida,Obrazovanie oldavskoi SSR (Chi?iniu,1974), 112. See also themapin M.N. Bochacher,MIoldavvijaMoscow, 926), 58. The "provisional" apitalwasmovedtoTiraspol n 1929.14. "Cuvintaria ui t. Zatonski a plenumuComobului PK(b)U," Moldova ocialistd,24May1931,1.See also HamiltonFishArmstrong,heNezv alkans NewYork, 926),153.15. Henning Bauer,Anldreas appeler, nd Brigitte oth, ds.,Die Nationalitdtenesr,itssischeneichesn der- olksziihlungon 1897 (Stuttgart,991), 1:183.16. 0. S. Lukianets,Russkie ssledovatelimnoldavskaziatnog-aficheskaiaauka v XIX-'nachale X v. (Chi?indu, 986), 93. It is a myth, erpetuatednmuch Romanianhistori-ography, hat heRussian saristuthorities ttempted o create separateMoldovan den-tityokeep Bessarabia eparatefromRomania. That identitylready xisted.17. See ViktorGarskii, ru ovaiaBessarabiica sovetskaialast' Moscow,1921).18. K. N. Derzhavin, Literaturnoe troitel'stvo sotsialisticheskoi oldavii,"TritdlyInstitutalavianovedeniiakademii aukSSSR,1932, no. 1:239-96.


9/27

124 Slavic Reviewgreatest attention within the MASSR was the Moldovan language. EarlyMoldovan linguists concentrated on the tasks usually classified by socio-linguists as "corpus planning": mapping the language's phonemic struc-ture, creating a writing ystem,developing a standard grammar and or-thography, stablishingmorphological and syntactical ules, and creatinga modern vocabulary.'9 These taskswere seen as fundamentallypolitical.For scholars outside the SovietUnion, the speech formsprevalent amongthe Moldovans were littlemore than dialectal or nonliteraryvarieties ofRomanian.20 But for linguists n the MASSR, empowering the Moldovanpeople through language, representing orthographically and grammati-cally the linguistic diosyncrasiesnormallyseen byRomanian scholars assubstandard, was to be the linguisticequivalent of "Allpower to the Sovi-ets." Such a policy would not onlyaid in the creation of a distinctMoldo-van cultural and political identitybutwould also ensure that the messageof socialism could be more effectively mparted to the largely illiterateMoldovan masses. As the MASSR's chief linguist,Leonid Madan argued,"We are interested n language as a recent product, a product ofthe pres-ent [produkt oslednego remeni, astoiashchegoremeni]which we can useforour purposes."'2'Pavel Chior, an ethnic Moldovan and people's commissar of enlight-enment (Narkompros) in the MASSR from1928 to 1930, was clear on thepolitical significance of language standardization. In an early work onMoldovan orthography, Chior argued that standard literaryRomanian,controlled by Romania's rulingbourgeoisie, had, since the 1860s, becomeincreasingly riented towardFrance; theresulting "language ofthe city"-"not quite Romanian and not quite French"-had been rendered un-intelligible to the large peasant population (in the MASSR as well as inBessarabia and other parts of Romania), a development that languageplanners in the MASSR could use to their political advantage: "Languageis a form of communication among men. As such, the ruling class in Ro-mania cannot use its 'gallicized' language for political influence in thevillage, nor even among the workers of the city.We can use this differ-ence between the language of the rulingclass and the language ofthe ex-ploited class, ifwe do not lose sightof the political aspects of . . . our newspelling. 22

19. The distinction etween "corpusplanning" nd "status lanning" determiningthe appropriate use of different anguages in government, education, and other spheres)is analogous to the distinctionmade in Soviet inguistics etween language onstruction"(iazykovoetroitel'stvo)nd "language policy" (iazykovaiapolitika). See M. I. Isaev, Sotsioling-visticheskieroblemnyazykovnarodovSSSR (Moscow, 1982).20. See, for example, Lazar $aineanu, Dictionar universal al limbeiromanne,th ed.(Bucharest, 1925); I. Aurel Candrea-Hecht and Gh. Adamescu, Dictionarid enciclopedicilustrat CarteaRomndneascd"Bucharest, 1931).21. "Protokol asedaniiaMoldavskogoNatuchnogo omiteta t 14/11-1930," -hivaOrganizatiilor ocial-Politice RepubliciiMoldova,Chi?ina.uhereafter OSPRM), f.49,op. 2,d. 42,1. 1.22. P. I. Chior, Dislpri rfografiaingiimoldovinestiBirzula, 1929), 11. For similarviews,see also "ProtokolV-ogo ob"edinennogo Plenuma MoldavskogoObkoma i Ob. KK KP/b/U,"AOSPRM,f.49, op. 1,d. 516,11. -101. The descriptionfRomanian s a "gallicizedsalon language" (ofrcntsuzhennyialonnyi iazyk) remained standard in Soviet Moldovan


10/27

Hozw theMoldovan Language Was Mcade 125Since the need for a unified, standardized language in the Romanianlands had arisen alongside the development of an urban trading class in

the last century,Chior argued elsewhere, the "Wallachian language" (thatis, Romanian) was fundamentally tied to the development of the Roma-nian bourgeoisie.23 The language of the peasant, particularly n occupiedBessarabia and on the territoryfthe MASSR, was alienated from the lan-guage of the bourgeois class. The chief significanceof the MASSR was toprovide a political buffer gainst future Romanian influence among theMoldovans,just as Romanian culturalpolicies in Bessarabia-the attemptto "romanize" the Bessarabian Moldovans through the teaching of stan-dard Romanian in Bessarabian schools-served a similar political pur-pose forBucharest. According toMoldovan propagandists, cultural policyon the eastern and westernbanks of the Dnestr stood in stark ontrast:theliberating, democratic, proletarian policy of Soviet Moldova, and the as-similationist,francophile, bourgeois orientation of the kingdom of Ro-mania. In short,"twocamps-two policies."24The first asks facing scholars in the MASSR were to select a local dia-lect to serve as the basis for a Moldovan literary tandard and then to de-velop a comprehensive grammarbased on thepeculiarities ofthatdialect.During his four expeditions to the MASSR from 1925 to 1930, M. V Ser-gievskii,a romance linguist from Moscow, mapped two general dialectalregions in the autonomous republic, one centered in the north and theother in the south.25 In his own research, Pavel Chior identified fiveMoldovan dialects in the MASSR and Bessarabia, three of which were inwidespread use.26 As with the relationship between proletarian Moldo-van and bourgeois Romanian, however, the selection of a dialectal basewas a fundamentallypolitical concern.27 As Chior argued, the dialect pe-culiar to central Bessarabia was not onlythe mostwidely spoken variety fMoldovan in both Bessarabia and the MASSR, but selecting thisparticu-lar dialect as a literarybase (as opposed to a formspoken exclusively nthe east-bankMASSR) would also pave thewayforthe national liberationofMoldovans in occupied Bessarabia by creatinga linguisticbridge acrossthe Dnestr.28After the publication in 1925 and 1926 of a poorly received pre-liminarygrammar and dictionaries authored byGabriel Buciu?canu, thepublications nto the1970s. See, for xample,A. M. Lazarev,Moldavskaiaovetskaiaosu-darstvennost' bessarabskii opros Chi?indu, 1974), 275.Interestingly,omeRomanianauthorsmadeprecisely he same argumentn criticiz-ing their wngovernment'solicy n Bessarabia.See Al. David, "Scrisul omanesc n Basa-rabia," ViataBasaracbieinewspaper), 17 November1932, 1; V Prisacaru, Sa ne cinstimlimba!"ViataBasarabieinewspaper),23 September 933, 1.23. AOSPRM,f.49, op. 2,d. 42,11. ,9. The principalitiesfWallachia nd Moldovaunited n 1859 to form he precursor f modernRomnania.24. L. Pechenaia, Domti ageri-doul. politifi: Dispri zidiria nationalo-cultwtrnicdnR.A. S. S.M. 4i staria 'nBasarabia ocupati (Tiraspol, 1931).25. M.V.Sergievskii, Ioldavskie tiudy Moscow,1936), 11.26. Chior,Dispri, ; AOSPRM,f.49, op. 1,d. 516,1. 62.27. Chior,Dispri, 5.28. AOSPRM,f.49, op. 1,d. 516,11. 1,95-97.


11/27

126 SlavicReviewMASSR's firstNarkompros,29 esponsibility orperfecting Moldovan lit-erary anguage fell to the newly created Moldovan ScientificCommittee(MSC). Formed on 30 December 1926, under the auspices of theMASSR'sCentral Executive Committee, the MSC was the first tate scientificre-search body in Moldova and the earliest precursor of the Moldovan Acad-emy of Sciences.30 Its original statute,approved by the MASSR Councilof People's Commissars (Sovnarkom) in May 1927, described the MSC'schief task as the "comprehensive study of the region and culture of theMoldovan people, as well as the dissemination of scientific and appliedknowledge about them."'3'The linguistics ection, the onlyorganized de-partment of the MSC to function from 1926 to 1928, was charged withdeveloping the Moldovan language and establishinga new grammar to re-place the interimBuciu?canu textthathad been withdrawnfromcircula-tion in early 1926.Overseeing the section'sworkwas Leonid Andrei Madan, theMASSR'smost prominent linguist and one of the key cultural luminaries of the1920s. An ethnic Moldovan, Madan was firmly ommitted to the notionthat Romanians and Moldovans formed two distinctpeoples with theirown independent languages. He had begun work on a Moldovan gram-mar while still a student in the early 1920s at the Institute of Public Edu-cation in Kiev, long before the question of Moldovan-Romanian sepa-rateness had become politically salient. When he arrived in the MASSRaftergraduating in 1925, he continued his workin the philological com-mission of the MASSR Narkompros, the group that in December 1926would formthe nucleus of theMSC.32From late 1926, Madan headed theMSC's linguisticssection and served as deputy chair of the entire MSCunder the directorshipofPavel Chior, who had succeeded Buciu?canu asNarkompros in September 1928.33Aftercompleting a preliminarydraftof a comprehensive Moldovangrammar in 1924 in Kiev,Madan tested his initial conclusions against the

29. G. Buciu?canu, Gramatica imbii noldoveneEtiBalta, 1925); G. Buciu?canu, Slovarmwoldovo-rusescBalta, 1926); Buciu?canu, Slovar ruso-nioldovenescBalta, 1926). The Bu-ciu?canutexts,n addition to containingnumeroustypographical rrors,were criticizedbytheparty eadership s being too "Romanian" n theirorientation, ven though theyused the Cyrillic cript. Protokol asedaniia Komissiipo rassmotreniiu rammatikimol-davskogo azyka t 26 marta1926 goda,"AOSPRM, f. 49, op. 1, d. 776,11. -3.30. Afully unctioning oldovanAcademy fScienceswas not naugurated ntilAu-gust 1961. On thevarious tagesfrom heMSC to the creation f the academy, ee 0. Iu.Tarasov, Jzstorii rganizatsii ervykh auchnykh sentrov SovetskoiMoldavii,"n XXVs"ezd KPSS i problem.yazvitiia nauki (Chi?indu, 1977), 20-30; 0. Iu. Tarasov, Ocherhi storiiorganizatsiinauki v Sovetskoi lIoldavii 1924-1961) (Chi?indu, 1980); V I. Tsaranov, "Raz-vitie storicheskoi aukiv Moldavskoi SR," nV I. Tsaranov, d., storicheskaiaauka Sovet-skoiMoldavii: K 60-letiiu o5razovaniiaAIoldavskoi SR i sozdaniia Kompartii espublikiChii?i-nau, 1984), 5-22.31. "Polozhenie o MoldavskomNauchnom Komitetepri NarkomproseAMSSR,"AOSPRM, f. 49, op. 1, d. 951,1. 35.32. Nicolae Movileanu, "Din istoria Transnistriei1924- 40) (II)," unpublishedmanuscript.33. Tarasov,Ocherki,2; "Spisok-MNK," AOSPRM,f.49, op. 1, d. 1249,1. 28; D. E.Shemiakov and V P. Isak, eds.,Luptdtori entrufericiria opordtlutiChii?inau, 1985), 145.


12/27

Howt)heMoldovan LangutageWasMade 127results of fieldwork n the MASSR at the end of 1925. In Julyand August1926, Madan organized a series of summer seminars for local school-teachers, at which specialists solicited examples of differences n gram-mar and vocabulary between standard Romanian and Moldovan peasantspeech. In November, as a result of these courses, the MASSR Narkom-pros elaborated a project on the standardization of Moldovan grammarand encouraged debate on the project in the pages of the republic's mainnewspaper, Phugarul os The red plowman). Over the followingmonths,the MSC revised the project and issued a newversion in June 1927,whichin turnwas debated the followingmonth by more than 100 participants nthe summercourses. Finally, nJuly1927 the MSC produced a setofgram-matical guidelines based on actual peasant speech patterns thatwouldform the basis for a standard grammar.34An MSC plenum approved Ma-dan's draftgrammar in May 1929, and on the basis of reviewsbyBuciu?-canu, Sergievskii (himself an honorary MSC member although basedin Moscow), and other professionals in the republic, the MSC recom-mended that the grammar be adopted forgeneral use.35Madan's Moldo-van Grainniarwas published later in 1929 bythe Moldovan State Publish-ingHouse inTiraspol, witha second edition appearing thefollowingyear.In his introductionto the text,Madan setout hisgeneral theoryof in-guistics and his methodological strategy.His research, he argued, wasbased on "a truly cientific-Marxist iewof anguage." Language was not tobe understood as a thing n itself, ut rather as a "means" (sluzheblymred-stvom)bywhich a people could communicate for the purpose of improv-ing society. As a means of communication, language does not have aneternallyestablished form,but instead changes and develops in accor-dance with economic, historical, political, social, and other conditions.The laws bywhich language operates reflect these conditions; the lan-guage of a people does not function according to rules established bygrammarians,but according to "internal laws peculiar to [the people's]nature, which is itself he result of the influence of the conditions of na-tureand of life."Grammar,then, should not be construed as an artificial,synchronic, purely scholarly construct; on the contrary, t should "fun-damentallywork according to the spoken language of the people and,over a certain period of time, alter in conformitywithdevelopment andchange in the spoken language."36For Madan, this view of language-which was consonant with con-temporarydevelopments in Soviet linguistics n general-had a specialresonance in Moldova.37Over the centuries,the Moldovan language haddeveloped as an admixture ofVulgar Latin and the language of the indig-

34. "Schiinbairilin gramatica nolcdoviniasci,nairiti i Comitetu di tiintiMoldovi-nesc dipi ingiComnissariatuiLuniniar-iab?tiasci iRASSM n?ddinta ila 26 iulii1927,"AOSPRM, f.49,op. 1,d. 1019,1. 16.35. L. A. Madan,Graniatica iioldovntiasciTiraspol, 1929),xiii-xvi.36. Ibid.,xi.37. For an excellent verview f inguistic heorynd itsrelationship o nationalitiespolicy,ee Michael G. Smith, Soviet anguageFrontiers: he StructuralMethod nEarlyLanguage Reforms, 917-1937" (Ph.D. diss.,Georgetown niversity,991).


13/27

128 Slavic Reviewenous tribes of the Carpathian basin, the Dacii or Getae. After he disinte-gration of the Roman empire, the Goths, Huns, Bulgars, Avars,Pechenegs,Polovtsy, atars, Poles, Turks, Greek Phanariots, Ukrainians, Russians, andothers also left heir mark. These multiple influences eventually ed to theemergence of a distinct Moldovan people speaking an independent (sa-mostoiatelr'nyi)oldovan language, a factconfirmed bythemost recent an-thropometric investigations. According to Madan, research had appar-ently shown that Moldovans, in the main, had "an oblong cranialstructure" whereas Romanians were "round-headed"; the "dark type"(eyes, hair color) predominated among the Romanians, while Moldovanswere "mainlybrown withchestnuthair, something like the northernRuss-ian type."38There were also, he held, considerable differences between"the Moldovan character" and the Romanian. While Romanians ("Wal-lachians") appeared "more mobile, more expansive," Moldovans weremainly "more leisurely n theirmovements."'39More immediate political changes had also contributed to the grow-ing gulf between Moldovans and Romnanians. n particular, Madan ar-gued, the October revolution and the establishment of the MASSR hadushered in a period of accelerated differentiation etween the two east-ern romance languages. At present, Moldovan was "distinctfrom the Ro-manian language and fromthe language of all Moldovan books publishedbefore the organization ofthe MASSR."40 The latest stage in the develop-ment of Moldovan could be established with precision: For Madan, thecreation of the MASSR in October 1924 was not a mere political event buta real watershed in the natural evolution of the Moldovan language. AsMadan noted at an MSC meeting in 1930, the very fact that the MASSRexisted, that the Moldovans had their own state, was itself sufficient oprove the existence of "a separate people with its own separate lan-guage."'4' As Soviet Moldova and bourgeois-landlord Romania contin-ued to growfarther part politically, o too would the languages spokenon either side of the Dnestr become even more distinct.The real dangerlay n the factthatthe massive Moldovan population in Bessarabia, subjectto forced linguistic assimilation by the Romanians, might also move far-therawayfrom their brothersofblood and class in the MASSR.The linkage of politics and language had yet another dimension forMadan. Prior to the establishment of the MASSR, the natural develop-ment of a Moldovan literary anguage had been blocked by the reftisalof the Romanian and Russian authorities to acknowledge the sarmlostoia-tel'tnost'f the Moldovan people. In the Romanian case, as Chior hadnoted, a predilection forbourgeois gallicisms had polluted the languageand estranged the literary tandard from the workingmasses along the

38. AOSPRM,f.49, op. 2, d. 42,11. -3.39. Ibid., 1.3.40. Madan,Granmatica,ii.41. AOSPRM,f.49, op. 2, d. 42, 1.2. For a similar ituation egardingUzbek iden-tity,ee WilliamFierman, Language Development n Soviet Uzbekistan,"n Isabelle T.Kreindler, d., SociolingulisticPerspectivesn SovietNational Languages: TheirPast,Present, ndFuttureBerlin,1985), 205-33.


14/27

Howu heMloldovan anguage Was Macde 129banks of the Dnestr; the Russifying olicies of the tsars had likewise frus-trated the growthof a Moldovan literary anguage after 1812. Hence,Madan called for a revolution in the development of a Moldovan literarystandard; no longer would foreign words and grammatical constructionsbe used to suppress the Moldovan toiling masses, but his new revolution-ary grammar wotild be the first o represent "the spoken language of themajorityofthe Moldovan people."42Madan's grammar used the Cyrillic alphabet for written Moldovan.The choice of alphabet had been a topic of heated debate among Sovietscholars even before the foundation of the MASSR (a debate that, n fact,continued into the late 1930s and was resurrected n 1989). The alphabet,however, was never "imposed" on the Moldovans, as much western andRomanian historiographyhas maintained. Rather, the use of Cyrillicwasverymuch in line with ocal traditions.The Latinization and Gallicizationof Romanian in the nineteenth centuryhad had little nfluence in Bessa-rabia and Transnistria;the former had not been a part of a modern Ro-manian political entity ince 1812, while the latter had never been.43 Thebest-known prerevolutionary grammars and dictionaries published inBessarabia and other parts of the empire, both those thatused the label"Moldovan" and the fewthat used "Romanian," had normallyused a ver-sion oftheCyrillic lphabet.44Even in Bessarabia, publications sometimesappeared in Cyrillicwell after the 1918 union with Romania, in order tomake them more accessible to peasant readers.45Soviet Moldovan lin-guists owed a great deal to these prerevolutionary attemptsat codifyingMoldovan speech patterns,a debt that Madan acknowledged in the pref-ace to his grammar.46Problems of Cultural ConstructionAccording to Pavel Chior, who wrotea preface to the Madan text of 1929,the establishment of a standard Moldovan grammar had "great signifi-cance as the next, extraordinarilyvaluable brick in the creation of theedifice of the young Moldovan national culture-national in form andsocialist in content."47Even afterthe publication of the Madan grammar,

42. Madan, Grawatica,xii.43. On thecomplexhistoryfRomanianas a literaiy angtuage,ee ElizabethClose,TheDevelopmiientfMIodern uimianian: inguisticThleorynd Practice n Muntenia, 1821-1838(New York, 974).44. See Stepan Martsell, ossiisko-rumynskaiaramnmatikaSt. Petersburg, 827); Ia.Ginkulov, Nachertaniepravil valiakho-inoldavskoirammatiki St. Petersburg, 1840); Mi-hail Ciachir, Russko-moldavskiilovar' (Chi?indu, 1907). The most important ethnographicstudy fMoldovan peechpatterns eforeWorldWar was GustavWeigand, ie Dialekte erBukowina und Bessarabiens mit einem Titelbilde mnd usikbeilagen) Leipzig, 1904), a bour-geois scholaroften itedbytheSoviets orhis attempts o cataloguethe differencese-tweenMoldovan peechforms nd standardRomanian.45. See thediscussions f this racticen "FratiMoldoveni, nvatati lova atina,"ViataBasarabiei newspaper),1February 925, 1.46. Madan, Gramatica,xii.47. Ibid., x.


15/27

130 SlavicReviewvthough, linguistic issues that had arisen at the time of the MSC's foun-dation continued to preoccupy political figuresand academics. In manycases, the argumentsand denunciations ofrival theories became more vit-riolic as the most esoteric disputes over language were raised to the levelof high politics. Controversy urrounding the linguistic bases to be usedfor the constructionof neologisms (and, byextension, the language's re-lation to standard Romanian), the practical problems of carrying ut sci-entific research in the MASSR, and the pace and scope of linguisticre-formwould all eventuallyserve as ammunition in the political strugglesof the first nd second Five-Year Plans.The general question of the orientation of the Moldovan language, inparticular,the sources on which language planners were to draw fortheintroduction of new words and the consequent political effects thesesources might have,was ofparamount concern. Chior, Madan, and othermembers of the MSC's linguisticssection urged vigilance to ensure theproper political orientation in Moldovan language construction, that is,awayfromRomanian. As Chior argued in an article submitted to Bil'shovykUkrainyn 1928, even though the "Romanian language differs romMol-dovan just as Russian differs rom Belorussian or Ukrainian," therewerestill those in the MASSR who mistakenlyheld thatthe language questionwould be most easily resolved if the "'ready-made,' 'developed,' 'pre-formed' Romanian language" were taken as a basis for the developmentofMoldovan.48 These "romanizers" (rumynizatowy),s Chior called them,were no better than the Romanians themselves since both essentiallyworked towardthe forced denationalization of the Moldovan population.These comrades (such as Chior's predecessor, Buciuscanu) failed to un-derstand that, "forage-old economic and political reasons," the Roma-nian language had become "alien and unintelligible to the Moldovanpeople."49 As Chior argued elsewhere, the very concept of grammar it-self, fanalyzed from a revolutionaryperspective,was clearlya bourgeoisconstruct:

Only the bourgeoisie is interested n [grammar], n order to makethe sciences and books moredifficult,nintelligible, ivorcedfrom hepeople.We need to have a revolutionn thisfield s well-that is,tomakegrammar nd all the sciences as simple [proaste]nd as "democratic" spossible.50Once again, forChior, questions of language were more than purelyacademic. The revolution itselfwould be furtheredby raising the "truelanguage of the Moldovan people" (podlinnyinarodnyimoldavskii azyk)tothe level of literary tandard.5' Unlike in the restofUkraine, where evenbefore the revolution certain groups (albeit "petit bourgeois groupings48. Pavel Chior, "Natsional'nyi oprosna Moldavii,"manuscript, OSPRM, f. 49,op. 1, d. 1352,1. 6.49. Ibid., 11. -7.50. P. Chior, Pe drumulmoldovenizarii,"ltugaridoy, December1926, 2.51. Chior, Natsional'nyiopros," .7.


16/27

How theMoldovanLaanguageWas A/Iade 131Table 1Examples of MoldovanNeologisms,1929

StandardRomanian Russian Moldovanautoadministrare samoupravlenie sin-gurcirmutiricontemporan sovremennlyi amuLvremniccravata galstuik galstuhdictionar slovar' slovarienglez anglichanin anglicianfebruLarie fevral' faurarihidrogen vodorod apariiantLiarie ianvar' jerariulmartie mart mdrti?ormonoton odnoobraznyi unofelnicmuLltisecuLlar mnogovekovoi multovacnicobicei obikhod zilnictreburioxigen kislorod oxighen, crarivoluntar, enevol samovol'nyi sinovolinicescNote:None of thesetermswaseverused consistentlyn Moldovan puLbli-cations; ndeed, itwas the inconsistency fuse as muLchs anythinglsethatprevented heneologismsfrom vergaining cceptance.Moreover,in the context fTransnistria n-dBessarabia n thisperiod,some of thenewwordswould not have seemed nearly s bizarreas they ppear to-day.Since Moldovanspeech was alreadyhighlynfluencedby Slavic an-guages, nd also containedmanyRomanianarchaicforms, galstuLh,"slo-vari," nd even"amuLvremnic"ouldcertainly avebeen more ntelligibleto a Moldovanpeasantthan the French-influencedcravata,"dictionar,"and "contemporan."Source: ists fneologisms reparedbyMSC staffnAOSPRM,f.49, op. 2,d. 44,11. - 43,andvariouLsssuLesfPlhgarlroy.

and parties") had cultivatedUkrainian national culture, the taskof con-structingMoldovan culturewas "absolutelynew."Hence, the need for the"hands of theparty" o directthe development oflanguage and culture intheMASSR was paramount.52The hands of the partycould be seen in the selection of the popu-lar roots used as basic building blocks for the wide range of neologismsintroduced in the MASSR in the late 1920s. Chief responsibilityfor thiseffortaywith theMSC's linguistics ection, particularly he subsection onterminologyheaded by the Moldovan linguistand educator I. A. Malai.From the summer of 1929 to the summerof1930,Malai's subsection com-piled lists ofnew terms n the fields ofhistory, olitics,geography,chem-istry, nd zoology-a total of some 7,500 words-and submitted theproposed lists to the linguisticssection for approval.53As with languageplanning in otherpartsof the SovietUnion, the popular roots used bythesubsection were oftenRussian loan wordsor calques, but, as table 1 shows,

52. Ibid.,1. 14.53. See the ists f newwords nd protocols rom ariou-s eetings f the LingutisticsSection of the MSC inAOSPRM, f.49, op. 1, d. 1817,1.2; f. 49, op. 2, d. 44,11. -22; d. 43,11. -43.


17/27

132 Slavic Reviewsome represented real differencesbetween Moldovan peasant speech andstandard Romanian. Still others were calques from classical languagesbased on Moldovan roots.Although some of these neologisms would have been easily under-standable in the Moldovan countryside, many presented a serious prob-lem to the editors of Plugarul roy, he MASSR's main Moldovan-languagenewspaper. In 1926, before the publication of the Madan grammar andthe elaboration of a new indigenized vocabulary, there had been somesuggestion fromthe Moldovan committee (Obkom) of the CommunistParty f Ukraine thatPlugarulroiwas unintelligible to the Moldovan peas-ant because of the huge number of Romanian and Russian words it nor-mally contained.54 From late 1926 to mid-1927, in fact, the newspaperworked to counter this criticismby systematicallyntroducingmore "Mol-dovan" linguistic structures and publishing lists of genuine "Moldovan"words with their Russian equivalents. There was also a half-hearted at-temptto introduce new names forthe months of the year based on popu-lar usage and agricultural or seasonal roots.By the period of the firstFive-Year Plan, however, the tables hadturned. The Obkom criticized Pavel Chior (who had served as thepaper'seditorfrom1926 to 1928) and other members of the MSC for having ren-dered Plugarul roi too "Moldovan"; the Obkom questioned whether theneologisms, even though based on Moldovan or Slavic roots, were anyclearer to the peasants than the Romanian terms that had previously n-fested the newspaper. For Chior, however, such arguments were whollydisingenuous. Any peasant who read Plugarul roi systematically, atherthan picking itup once byaccident and then using it forcigarette paper,could easilyunderstand the new terms.55n any case, he argued, the ques-tion of Moldovan orthography and morphology was a scientific exerciseand not something to be carried out in the pages ofa newspaper.56WhileChior was able to rebuff hese criticisms nd continue with the Moldova-nization campaign, such early doubts about his overzealous indigeniza-tion of the Moldovan language would be resurrected in the 1930s andused as evidence of the MSC's attemptto subvert the nationalities policyof the party.Besides the introductionofnew terms, anguage planners in Moldovafaced a second setof problems: thepractical difficulties fcarrying ut re-search in the tinyMoldovan republic. Chior's 1929 pamphlet on orthog-raphy presented a genuine jeremiad on the thankless, nearly impossibletasks that he was obliged to perform as Narkompros. Even though theMSC was supposed to represent the most advanced forces of the Moldo-van intelligentsia,these forces turned out to be quite meager indeed: "Inour situation, .. the commissarofenlightenmentalone mustspend nightafternight makingdecisions on all the theoretical issues of Moldovan cul-ture; . . . you have no other kind ofadvice on academic problems excepta handful of Moldovan intellectuals; . . . [and] you can count on your

54. AOSPRM, f. 49, op. 1, d. 516,1. 53.55. Chior,Dispri, 3.56. Ibid., 15.


18/27


19/27

134 SlavicReviewcolleagues were thus given greater freedom in their scientificwork, theirresources were simultaneously curtailed. As Madan complained, of theseven salaried workers that the MSC was allowed to employ in 1929, onlythreeworked full time at the committee.64The restwere usually requiredtowork po sovmestitel'stvu,ervingpart-timeon the MSC while topping uptheirsalaries byholding additional posts elsewhere.65Reaching heMoldovan MassesBeyond the problems faced by Moldovan intellectuals, imparting thenewly constructed Moldovan high culture to the peasant masses provedextremely difficult s well.66Moldovan publishing expanded in the late1920s and duringthe first ive-Year Plan. In addition to Plugarul roy, hichhad been established inMay 1924 and antedated theMASSR, a Ukrainian-language version, Chervonyirach, egan appearing in September 1925. Bythe end of 1930, both papers had changed their names to "Socialist Mol-dova" and had a circulation of 8,000 copies per issue.67A range of otherperiodicals appeared in the following years in Moldovan, Russian, Ger-man, and otherlanguages sponsored byraion executive committees,raionpartycommittees, and machine tractor stations. A Moldovan-languagechildren's magazine, Scdnteiu eninist The Leninist spark), and an artis-tic ournal, Moldova literariLiteraryMoldova), also began publication in1930.68The question ofthe intelligibility f theMoldovan publications to themass ofthepopulation remained troublingfor cultural elites,however.Inthe mid-1920s,Plugarul roihad been harshlycriticizedforbeing too "Ro-manian." Although the paper was printed in the Cyrillic cript,the gram-mar and vocabularyused by the editorial staff, ased on Buciuscanu's textsof 1925 and 1926, were attacked as alien to the Moldovan peasant. "[Thenewspaper] is understood only by those who know Romanian," arguedone speaker at the fifthObkom plenum in 1926. "We need to publisha newspaper in the Moldovan language without Romanian words."69 Bymid-1927, however, with the adoption of changes to the Buciuscanugrammar and theworkof the MSC on preparing Madan's draftgrammarforpublication, the language ofPlugarul roihad become completelyMol-dovanized. Still, for some party leaders, the indigenization of the lan-

64. AOSPRM,f.49,op. 1,d. 1817,1.1.65. "Stenogrammvystupleniina plenurmeMoldavskogo Nauchnogo Komiteta[1933]," AOSPRM, f. 49, op. 2, d. 57,1. 13. See also "Scoateridin protocoli plenumuluilarg a Comitetului tiintinicMoldovenescdila 14-16 Octiabri nu 1929,"AOSPRM,f.49,op. 2,d. 44,1. 23; Tarasov,Ocherki,3.66. On thedifficultiesnvolvednbringingmoreethnicMoldovans ntotheMASSR'sinstitutions,ee CharlesKing, Ethnicitynd Institutional eform: he Dynamics f In-digenization' n theMoldovanASSR,"Nationalitiesap)ers 6, no. 1 (1998): 57-72.67. AOSPRM,f.49,op. 1,d. 1890,1.51.68. Ibid., 1.59. Moldova iteraviad previouLslyppearedas an occasionalsupplementto Plugai wlroy.69. AOSPRM,f.49,op. 1,d. 516,1. 53.


20/27

How theMoldovanLanguage Was Made 135guage used in Plugartul oi would never, on its own, lead to the goal ofenlightening the peasant masses. Even if the MASSR were to producean intelligibleMoldovan-language newspaper and affordable Moldovan-language books and pamphlets, agitprop workers and educators in thecountrysidewould still come up against the intransigentand backwardattitudes of the peasant himself.As one propaganda worker complained:"If a peasant reads something forhimself,he does not understand it. Butif I read it to him, he understands it. So the reason that people are notbuying many Moldovan books and newspapers . . . is not only the highprice, but also the factthat the peasants have not yet got into the habit ofreading."7Gettingthe peasant in the habit of reading was the goal of twootherareas ofMoldovanization-literacy pirograms (likbez) nd political educa-tion (politprosveshchenie).pecial series such as theMoldovan-language Li-braryof the Collective Farm Worker (Biblioteca olectivistului)nd the EasyFiction Library (Biblioteca ftini-literaturaudojnicd)were produced regu-larly n the late 1920s and 1930s bypublishing houses in Balta, Tiraspol,and Khar'kov.71 The newly standardized Moldovan language was pro-moted through village clubs, reading huts (khaty-chital'ni), ed corners(krasnye gly),the central library n Balta, an oblast museum in Anan'ev,and other cultural centers. By the 1926-27 academic year, a total of asmany as 265 centers involving 200,000 Moldovan peasants had been es-tablished.72Lessons in improved agricultural techniques, natural 1history,sanitation and hygiene, cooperatives, the internal situation of the SovietUnion, and the newwayof life (novyibyt)were conducted in each of thesecenters under the auspices of political education circles. Later, duringthe firstFive-Year Plan, Moldovanization brigades (moldbrigdzi) t theoblast, raion, local, and enterprise/institutionevels were organized to in-volve the entirepopulation in the taskof Moldovanization and to assist o-cal inspectors in carrying ut language raids on institutions hat failed touse the new language. Agitation wagons (aghitcdruti),mobile collectionsofbooks, newspapers, and small exhibitions were also used to reach areaswithoutpermanent educational centers.73By the early 1930s, however, attemptsat Moldovanizing the country-side had become bogged down in the same kinds of practical problemsthat frustrated hior and Madan. The inadequate resources of local insti-tutions,thepeasants' low level of education and theirsuspicion of the po-liticaleducation programs,the lack oftrained instructors nd educationalmaterials, nd the often ncomprehensible neologisms used inPlugarulrosand other publications all impeded the workof the Moldovanization or-gans. Even in theprintedmaterials that did eventuallyreach the peasants,innocent grammatical and typographicalerrors n Moldovan and Russian

70. AOSPRM,f.49, op. 1, d. 734,1. lob.71. Examplesfrom hese series nclude:Kh.Bogopol'skii,Omnrifaci ASSMh?nolec-tivdilaolait1 Tiraspol, 1929); S. Dumitra?cu, A noastrf-iozitiia (Tiraspol, 1931).72. AOSPRM,f.49, op. 1,d. 1082,1.34.73. Anmintelitiarigadulhi ultu7nic-massnicTiraspol, 1932), 39-40.


21/27

136 SlavicReviezvhad the potential to create serious misinterpretations f the party'spoli-cies. The slogan "Acow to eveiy collective farmworker,"for example, hadsometimes been rendered "Eveiy collective farmworker s a cow."74The keyproblem remained the peasants themselves. "Religiously n-clined, distrustful f any new undertakings," noted a report on politicaleducation programs, "[the peasant] does not attach great significance toany institution n which lessons are given that fundamentally contradicthis way of life and spiritual constitution."75There was a constant tensionbetween the constructed "language of the people" advocated by culturalcadres (narodnyi azyk) and the actual linguistic practices characteristicof the peasant's "vernacular speech" (zhivaia rech'). For Pavel Chior, thechief attractivenessof peasant speech formswas that theywere "simple"(proaste), a word that has the same ambivalent meaning in English as inRomanian/ Moldovan. The language formsdismissed by Romanian intel-lectuals as unintelligent or stupid were, forChior, "simple" in the sense ofbeing uncomplicated, pure, more genuinely democratic than those usedin Bucharest.Yet there was a general skepticismon thepartofmanyMASSR culturalcadres about the degree to which the Moldovan peasant was capable ofcontributingto his own cultural and political liberation. Despite the rhet-oric that surrounded their goal of taking the peasant's spoken and au-thenticallyMoldovan language as a literarybase, native speakers of thelanguage withinthe culturalelite stillfound it difficult obringthemselvesto adopt the simple usage common in the countiyside. "When I talk witha peasant," noted the Moldovan linguistVasile Popovici in 1926, "I godown to his level."76 Similar complaints were voiced already in the mid-1920s in the pages ofPlugarulroos, ith etterspointing to the "spoiled lan-guage" on streetsigns as evidence of the "growingpains" experienced bythe Moldovan language.77Bythe late 1930s, cultural planners had begun to offer ven less san-guine assessments of simple village speech. In a prominent 1938 article,I. D. Cioban, one of the MASSR's foremostyoung linguists,offeredex-plicitcriticismofthe "Madanists" and theirenchantment withthe spokenidiom of the Moldovan peasant: "A few words about those who say weshould write ike theMoldovan villagersspeak,without eavingout a singleword. This is a mistaken view. The Moldovans speak in many differentways,withall kinds of words thatcannot enter into the literary anguage.We must worktobringthe literary anguage as close as possible to the lan-guage of the toilingmasses, butwe mustnot setabout makingitsimple. 78Both Cioban and Chior, writing n the same newspaper a decade apart,used the same word-simiple-to describe the goals of the Moldovaniza-tion campaign. The difference n theirmeanings, however, is revealing.

74. AOSPRM,f.49,op. 1, d. 2475,1. 168.75. AOSPRM,f.49,op. 1,d. 1082,1.11.76. AOSPRM,f.49,op. 1,d. 516,1.68.77. M.-I., "Moldovenizatiai lucrulbun,-dar limba de stricat u trebue," lugarulroy, 4July 926, 2.78. I. D. Cioban, "Cite?evadespre imbM," oldova socialistd,6June1938,2.


22/27

Hozv theMoldovan Language WasMade 137What for Chior had been the redeeming virtue of radical Moldovaniza-tion, the simplification of the literary anguage by basing it on peasantspeech, was for Cioban its damning vice. Such a policy,wrote Cioban,could only lead to "linguistic tupidification" improstiriaiinbii).The riseof thisviewofthe new Moldovan literaryanguage signaled the reversal ofthe radical Moldovanization policies of the MSC.The PoliticalLimits f Radical IndigenizationThere was a clear recognition in the MASSR that political limits xisted onthe indigenization of the Moldovan language. Members ofNarkomprosand the MSC frequentlydebated whether the desire to eradicate great-power chauvinism had in fact led the MASSR down the dangerous pathof local nationalism. Even as earlyas 1926, only two years after the foun-dation of the MASSR, suggestionswere made at the fifth bkom plenumthat Pavel Chior, as MSC president, was doing little more than turningRussian-Ukrainian chauvinism on itshead. His workon indigenizing theMoldovan language, itwas argued, was being carried out at the expense ofthe Russian and Ukrainian inhabitantsofthe MASSR, who in factformedthe vastmajorityof the republic's population. By making the Moldovanhimself nto a "fetish," rgued one speaker, Chior seemed to have forgot-ten that "weunderstand [the idea of a] fatherlanddifferently:s a prole-tarianfatherland,not a national one."79Similar criticismswere made of Chior in connection with the contro-versial article he submitted to Bil'shovyk krainyn 1928.80 Entitled "TheNational Question in Moldova," the manuscript surveyedthe progress ofnational-cultural construction in the first our years after the establish-ment oftheMASSR; in particular,Chior concentrated on thevarious dis-putes within the cultural and political elite over the orientation of theMoldovan language and the pace of linguisticMoldovanization. Becauseof Chior's vitriolic denunciation of "recidivists" n the party and stateapparat who refused to learn the true language of the Moldovan peo-ple, the editor ofBil'shovyk krainysked local Moldovan officials o editChior's article since itstone might eave the reader with an incorrect viewof socialist construction n the MASSR: "Fora Ukrainian reader who doesnot know in detail the case of the MASSR, the impression could be madethatnothing is being done in Moldova in the field of nationalities policy.It seems to me thatthere is a certain Moldovan Shums'kyistdeviation onthe part of the author."'8'The charge of "Shums'kyism"was extremely serious indeed. Olek-sander Shums'kyi,the Ukrainian commissar ofenlightenmentfrom1925to 1927, argued like Chior that Soviet power should aim, not only at thesocial liberation of the toiling masses, but at their national liberation aswell. His zeal in promoting "Ukrainization," however, ed to his eventual

79. AOSPRM, f. 49,op. 1, d. 516,1.66.80. Chior, Natsional'nyiopros," 1. -14.81. Letter rom ditor, il'shovykkrainy,o Staiyi, 9 Februaiy 928,AOSPRM,f.49,op. 1, d. 1352,1.3.


23/27

138 SlavicReviezvfall from grace in the firstwave of attacks on national deviationists.82nUkrainization, as in Moldovanization, there were thus clear limits. FromMoscow's perspective, the goal of cultural and administrative ndigeniza-tion was not simplyto fosterthe development of local cultures,but to cre-ate a networkof trained, literateworkers in state and party organs, anindigenous elite that would ensure Moscow's influence in the nationalrepublics. Shums'kyi's mistake, as losif Stalin himself noted in his famousletter to Lazar Kaganovich, was to forgetthat, in certain circumstances,Ukrainization could lead to "extremism" (krainost').83 By losing sight ofthe importance ofparty eadership in the Ukrainization drive,Shums'kyifailed to understand that the policy's ultimate goal was not merely to cul-tivateUkrainian culture for tsown sake, but "to transform he developedUkrainian culture and society nto Soviet culture and society."84 he sug-gestion thatChior entertained similarlymisguided views represented a se-rious warning to the Moldovan cultural elite. The hint of Shums'kyism nMoldova was all the more significant n that it came fromthe editors ofBil'shovyk k,rainy;ndeed, it was an article by Mykola Skiypnyk, ublishedin the journal in 1927, that coined the term Shurns'kyisrnnd therebylaunched the full-scale attackon the Ukrainian commissar.85In the article thathe submitted to the ournal, Chior had attemptedto steel himselfagainst precisely this sort of criticism. "Those comradeswho are for an increased tempo in Moldovanization often have to listento suggestions about a 'deviation' toward Moldovan 'Shums'kyismn,"' enoted.86On the contrary, rgued Chior, thereal danger in theMASSR wasnot the overzealous admonitions of theMoldovanizers, but the recidivismof those who stillargued that the Moldovan language should move closerto Romanian. For Chior, the threat of romanization was much greaterthan the potential for Shums'kyistdeviations, especially since Moldovansociety did not have the social roots necessary for the development ofchauvinism. Shums'kyismhad been possible in Ukraine onlybecause theattitudes of the petit bourgeois groupings and parties that controlledUkrainian culture before 1917 had often filtered nto the partyafter therevolution. Since Moldovan culture was a product of the revolution itself,and thusin the hands of the party, here was littledanger ofShums'kyismin the young MASSR.87Still, the fact that Chior had been linked with Shums'kyi, pegged asa potential local nationalist byofficialswithinthe MASSR and at the all-

82. See James E. Mace, Contiintnismttnid theDilemmwasf NaitionalLiberation:NaitionalCowtnutnisinn Soviet fkraine,918-1933 (Cambridge,Mass.,1983); and George 0. Liber,Soviet ationalityolicy, rbanGrowoth,niddentityhangen theUkrainianSR, 1923-1934(Cambridge, ng., 1992).83. I. V. Stalin, "Tov.Kaganovichu drugimchlenamPB TsK KP(b)U," Sochineniia(Moscow,1948), 8:149-54.84. Ibid., 153.85. M[ykola]Skrypnyk,IKhvylovizmhyShums'kizm?" il'shovykkrainy (1927):27-36, cited in Mace, Dilemmnas,11.86. Chior, Natsional'nyi opros," . 13.87. Ibid.,1. 14.


24/27

How theMoldovan Language Was Made 139Ukrainian level, would prove to be a fatal condemnation. The successivewaves of assaults on bourgeois nationalists and national deviationistsdur-ing the first wo Five-Year Plans-with the victors n one period becom-ing the victims n the next-are a familiar part of the historiographyofthe early Stalin period. In Belorussia the effort o replace Russian or Pol-ish loanwords with "nativist" exical constructs was labeled an attempt todrive a wedge between Belorussia and the rest of the Soviet Union.88 InUzbekistan the earlysuccesses of nativist iteraiycircles in the fieldoflan-guage construction and "Uzbekization" were likewiseundone.89Events in Moldova followeda similar course.90The Moldovan Obkom,with no input fromthe formerMSC, initiated tworadical policy shifts nthe 1930s: the sudden introduction of the Latin alphabet in 1932 andthe equally abrupt reversion to a revised Cyrillicalphabet in 1938. Bothreformswere aimed primarily gainst Chior, Madan, and the other engi-neers of inguisticMoldovanization of the 1920s, individuals who had longbeen criticized as overzealous advocates of Moldovan nation-buildingagainst the interestsof internationalism.In a series of denunciations and purges, local cultural cadres wereaccused of creating an artificial barrier between the workers of Mol-dova and Romania through linguistic ndigenization from1928 to 1932,and then of attempting to wrest the MASSR from the Soviet Union bypromoting the use of the Latin script between 1932 and 1938. By theend of the first ive-Year Plan, Leonid Madan had alreadyfallen into dis-grace, both his grammar and his work on a new Moldovan lexicon con-demned as an impediment to the liberation of Bessarabia; accused ofwreckingcultural construction in the republic, he was removed fromhispost as head of the MSC linguisticssection inJuly1933.9l Gabriel Buciu-scanu, he MASSR's firstNarkomppros, as also removed frointhe centerof Moldovan cultural life, condemned as a "romanizer" (by Chior) andexcluded fromthe party s earlyas 1930. Pavel Chior, once the most out-spoken figure n Soviet Moldovan cultural politics, likewise lost his postsas Narkompros and chair of the MSC. Appointed to head a raion partyorganization on the border withRomania, he was eventuallydenouncedforfailingto carryout a thoroughgoing purge of bourgeois nationalists,shelteringknownTrotskyites, nd endangering the securityof the Soviet

88. Paul Wexler, Belorussification,ussification,nd Polonization:Trends in theBelorussianLanguage, 1890-1982," in Kreindler, d., Sociolinguisticersp)ectives,7-56;Paul Wexler,PurismanidLangitage:A StutdynMIodern Ukrainiannd Beloartssian.atit.onalismll(1840-1967) (Bloomington, 974).89. William Fierman, LangtiagePlanning and NationalDevelopinent: hte zbek xperience(Berlin,1991), 128-29.90. On thedemiseofthe MSC,see CharlesKing, The MoldovanASSRon theEve oftheWATar:ultural olicyn1930sTransnistria,"n KGurtA. reptow,ed.,Romaniz'a nd WorldVWarIIIasi, 1996), 9-36.91. "Dokladnaiazapiska o natsional'nom-kul'turnomtroitel'stveMSSR [1933],"AOSPRM,f.49, op. 1, d. 2225,1.19. From thispoint,Madan's fate suncertain.He neverseems to have become a partymember, so there are no personal files on him in the Mol-dovanpartyrchives. ome historians peculate hathemanagedto survivehe firstounidofpurgesby eaving heMASSRbefore he mid-1930s.


25/27

140 Slavic ReviewUnion through his lack of political vigilance in the border region.92 Hewas excluded from the partyin April 1937, arrested in June, and sen-tenced to tenyears' imprisonment. He died sixyears into his sentence, in1943.93 The MSC as an institution, he organization at the center of cul-tural construction in the 1920s, ceased to exist as an autonomous unit inthe second Five-Year Plan, transformed n April 1934 into a government-controlled "Scientific-Research nstitute ofMoldovan Culture." Any traceof these cultural luminaries or theirworkin the 1920s was erased. By theend of 1934, all books by Madan and his colleagues on the MSC (some3,231 volumes) had been removed fromthe MASSR's libraries.94 ibrarystaff onducted periodic checks to make sure that none had been over-looked.95 The neologisms crafted by Madan and the subsection on ter-minology had likewise been purged from all publications by 1935, with"Madanisms" condemned as artificial bstacles to socialist construction.96Linguistic opulismand theAmbivalence f AuthenticityThe Moldovan case stands out in the arrayof culture-planning effortswithin Soviet nationalities policy.Whereas manyof the other efforts o in-digenize language use or to craftwhollynew literary tandards based ondialectal variants eventuallyfailed or fell by the wayside during the cul-tural revolution,97Moldovan was a new language that, until the waningdaysof the SovietUnion, seemed to succeed. The most radical indigeniza-tion efforts eased by 1932 with the reversal of the Madan reforms,butthe rhetoric surrounding the existence of a distinctMoldovan idiom re-

92. Letter from Siderskii o Malenkov,16 February 937, AOSPRM, f. 49, op. 1,d. 3754,11. -3.93. E. Romanova, Comisar l revolutiei," omunistul oldovei, 988, no. 10:30-35.94. Letter romGarmel' to Emlianov,n.d.,AOSPRM,f.49, op. 1, d. 2507,1. 25.95. See the lists f booksremovedfromMASSR libraries nAOSPRM,f.49, op. 1,d. 3880, 11. 9-61; d. 3881, 1. 22; d. 3883, 1. 134. As lateas summer1994, nmanyfthesebooks were tillncluded nthe "specialfund" fthe MoldovanNationalLibrary. had theprivilege fhelping o carry hemup from hebasement o be recatalogued hat ummer.96. On the removal f "enemywords" iromhe press, ee B. Lekhttman,Klassovaiabor'ba na nauchnomfronte," rasnaiaBessarabija, 1934, nos. 8-9:29-30; N. I. Golub,"Sarcinile urente le cladiriinationale culturale n RASSM," Octombzie,935,no. 1:13-21; M. A. Ariglelescu,"Rezultatele ctivitatiidituriide Stat a Moldovei in 1934,"Oc-tontibr-ie,935, no. 1:42-44.97. On theseprojects n-d heir eversal, ee Kreindler, d., Sociolinguisticerspectives;UrielWeinreich,The Russificationf SovietMinority anguages," roblemsfCom.m.unism2, no. 6 (1953): 46-57; E. Glyn Lewis, Multilingualism n the ovietUnion:Aspects fLanguagePolicq nd ts mplementationThe Hague, 1972); M. Mobin Shorish, Planning yDecree:The Soviet Language Policy in Central Asia," Language Problems nd Langutage lanning 8,no. 1 (1984): 35-49; Michael Kirkwood,Glasnost', The National Question,' and SovietLanguage Policy," SovietStudies 43, no. 1 (1991): 61-81; Gerhard Simon, Nationalism andPolicy oward heNationalities n theSoviet Union (Boulder, Colo., 1991); Michael Kirkwvood,ed., Language Planning in the ovietUnion (London, 1989); Paul M. Austin,"Soviet Karelian:The LanguageThatFailed,"SlavicReviezw 1, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 16-35. For an interest-ing comparative erspective,ee Tom Priestly,Denial ofEthnic dentity:he PoliticalMa-nipulation fBeliefs bout Language in SloveneMinority reasofAustria nd Hungary,"SlavicReviezv5,no. 2 (Sumimer 996): 364-98.


26/27

How theMoldovan Language Was Made 141mained in place nearly until the demise of the Soviet state itself. n theindependent Republic of Moldova, the effort o create a literary,non-Romanian Moldovan language is no longer taken seriously, ut the repub-lic's constitution tilltermsthe official anguage "Moldovan" (even thoughthere is nothing to distinguishit from what the rest of the world knowssimplyas Romanian). The roots of this remarkablypersistent deology oflanguage, based on the notion that Moldovans and Romanians form twodistinctpeoples, lie in the linguistic and culturaldebates of the 1920s andearly 1930s.The late 1920s marked thehighest stage ofMoldovan linguisticpopu-lism. Chior's manuscriptof 1928, the publication of the Madan grammara year later,and the elaboration of a revisedMoldovan scientificvocabu-lary n 1929 and 1930 represented collectively the most far-reachingat-tempt to raise the "true language of the people"-the particularitiesofpronunciation and grammarcommon to the inhabitants ofcentral Bessa-rabia and Transnistria-to the level of a national literary tandard. Thisorientation cannot be deduced simplyfromtheforeign policy goals oftheSoviet leadership. While the republic's strategicposition gave a certaingravity o the question of the Moldovan language and cultural identity,language policy and linguisticswere never mere by-products of Sovietforeignpolicy.The prevailing linguistictheories and methodologies; theprofessional interests of linguistsfrom the MASSR and fromoutside therepublic; the genuine belief in the power of language in forginga new,socialist community;the absolute confidence in the abilityof science andscientists to reshape human society; and, most important, what PavelChior called "a natural revolutionaryfeeling"were all powerfulforces inthe attemptto construct a distinctMoldovan language and identity n theearly years of the Soviet state. The policy reversalsof the 1930s, particu-larly the introduction of the Latin alphabet in 1932 and the returnto anew Cyrillic cript n 1938, put an end to the policies of the MSC, but theMoldovanization efforthad already run into severe problems much ear-lier on. Lack of interest among cultural cadres, meager resources, and es-pecially the inability ftheMoldovanizers themselvesto adopt the speechformstheyhad created were farmore important obstacles to building aMoldovan nation than the "artificiality"f the proposed cultural reforms.As in other parts of the Soviet Union, cultural cadres in the MASSRfaced the difficult ask of balancing the dual roles of linguist and "lan-guage strategist," f a scholar interestedin elaborating a scientifically c-curate formfor a newly tandardized language and a policymakerdevotedto using the language as an instrumentof enlightenment and mobiliza-tion.98Moldovan intellectuals aimed to provide an objective representa-tion of the linguistic practices of the Moldovan peasant and then to usethese peculiarities as the basis for a literaiy standard. Yet scholars weresimultaneously nvolved in designing prescriptivegrammars, ntroducingnew technical vocabularies, promoting the use of the newlyconstructed

98. BrianWeinstein, Language Strategists: edefining oliticalFrontiers n theBa-sis of Linguistic hoices,"Worldolitics 1, no. 3 (1979): 345- 64.


27/27

142 SlavicReviewlanguage in education and government-in short, making Moldovansmore Moldovan by formalizing the elements of their own linguistic andcultural identity.The shape of Moldovan cultural policy changed fundamentally afterthe 1920s,but the tension between these twoviewsof anguage would con-tinue to frustrate he efforts fcultural planners in the region. Even afterthe Soviet annexation of Bessarabia and the creation of a new MoldovanSoviet Socialist Republic in 1940, scholars were still called upon to provethe existence of a distinct Moldovan cultural and linguistic identity;thedepth and pace ofMoldovanization changed fromperiod to period, butscholars continued to seek out those elements ofpopular speech and cus-tom that were held to distinguishMoldovans fromRomanians, to builda new political identityon the basis of these traits, nd then to commu-nicate back to the people this new, formalized vision of Moldovanness.These projects became more and more difficult s the Soviet period pro-gressed. So long as linguistsmaintained that the "simple" language of thepeasant was preferable to the "bourgeois" language of Bucharest, the ex-istence of a proletarian Moldovan nation was not an unimaginable out-come; real differences between Moldovan peasant speech and literaiyRomanian existed in the interwar years, and imbuing these linguisticdifferences with political significance was the primary task of languageplanners in the 1920s. But by the mid-1930s, a rather different deology oflanguage began to emerge, one that focused on promoting "correct" and"educated" speech among the Moldovan peasants. The correct speechthat the post-Madan generation of linguists began to promote, the lan-guage they spoke in theirhomes, and the language they taught theirstu-dents, bore far more resemblance to literaryRomanian than to the neol-ogisms and archaisms oftheMadan grammar. By the late 1980s, there waslittleto separate Moldovan from Romanian except the Cyrillic criptandthe residual discourse of linguistic difference.Whereas the MSC hadsought to cultivate the differences between the two language varieties,later linguists and cultural cadres did little more than stipulate them.Throughout the later Soviet period, though, the efforts f intellectualswere plagued by preciselytheparadox that ayat theheart of cultural con-struction n the earlyMASSR: How does one carryout Moldovanization ifit turnsout to be the Moldovans themselveswho are most in need of it?

Documents

King Moldavian Language