Zwischen Arktis Adria und Armenien

218 Sovieto-Rossica
Romanian-speaking countryside. 16 Officially, in Moldova only Moldovan/Romanian
has the status of a state language with Russian having been downgraded in 1989 to a
‘language of inter-ethnic communication’.
III. The Transnistrian exception to the late Soviet rule
According to the political scientist David D. Laitin, the eastern part of the Republic
of Moldova represents “the only exception to the absence of ethnic conflict directed
at Russians in the union republics”. 17 Across the USSR, this was the only case of a
militant movement of Russians or Russian-speakers in the so-called Near Abroad –
an exception that even resulted in the foundation of a state-like entity. This course
of events differed considerably from the one in other regions such as Estonia, Latvia
or the Ukraine. Yet another feature also is unique about Transnistria: Before 1989,
nothing pointed to the building up of interethnic tensions in the Dniester valley. Accordingly,
during the Perestroika period, the region did not figure in any of the many
scenarios of late Soviet ethnopolitical conflict. Up until this point in time, even the
regional denomination ‘Transnistria’ existed, if at all, only as a geographical term,
not as an administrative, let alone a political one. 18
The main motive for the protagonists of the “Transnistrian revolution” 19 was (and
still is) the maintenance of privileged positions in administration, the economy and
other segments of society. The regional elites in the Dniester valley differ greatly in
their socio-professional, linguistic and demographic structure from those of the more
agrarian right-bank parts of the MSSR, the historical Bessarabia. Among the russophones,
the Moldovan claim for alterity triggered a process of regional identification
with the non-historical region Transnistria – a “reactive nationalism”. 20 As in other
parts of the Near Abroad, it was not the ‘beached’ imperial minority of the Russian-
16 According to the last census in the USSR, in 1989 in Tiraspol’ 88 per cent of the 196,000 inhabitants
were Russians or Ukrainians. 70 per cent of the 138,000 inhabitants of Bendery and 58 per
cent of the 700,000 inhabitants of Chişinău were non-Moldovans, i. e. mainly Eastern slavs. Even
the city of Bălţi with its purely Moldovan surroundings has an absolute Russian-Ukrainian majority
of 64 per cent. See Valerij Mošnjaga et al., Konflikt v Moldove: Opyt ėtnopolitičeskogo analiza
(Kišinëv, 1992), 21.
17 David D. Laitin, Identity in Formation. The Russian-Speaking Populations in the Near Abroad
(Ithaca, NY; London, 1998), 330. See also Id., “Secessionist Rebellion in the Former Soviet Union”,
34 Comparative Political Studies (2001), 839–861 and Louk Hagendoorn et al, Intergroup Relations
in States of the Former Soviet Union. The Perception of Russians (Philadelphia, PA, 2001), 70–71.
18 Uwe Halbach, “Die Nationalitätenfrage: Kontinuität und Explosivität”, in Dietrich Geyer (ed.), Die
Umwertung der sowjetischen Geschichte (Göttingen, 1991), 211.
19 D. F. Kondratovič, “Pridnestrovskaja revoljucija, 1989–1992 gg.”, 3 Ežegodnyj istoričeskij al’manach
Pridnestrov’ja (1999), 23–25.
20 William Crowther, “The Politics of Ethno-National Mobilization: Nationalism and Reform in Soviet
Moldavia”, 50 Russian Review (1991), 183–203, at 189. See also Jeff Chinn and Steven D.
Roper, “Ethnic Mobilization and Reactive Nationalism: The Case of Moldova”, 23 Nationalities Papers
(1995), 291–324.