Zwischen Arktis Adria und Armenien

238 Sovieto-Rossica
In other words: In terms of the constitutional future of the Republic of Moldova and
the TMR, quite a number of options are at hand and possess various degrees of likelihood
– with the option of a reintegration of the TMR into Moldova being among
the less likely of them.
However, with regard to all options listed above the explosive question of the
future status of the city of Bendery, controlled by Transnistrian authorities yet lying
on the west bank, remains unanswered. Bendery, which TMR ‘foreign minister’
Valerij A. Lickaj calls “our West Berlin”, 92 is by now ethnically cleansed and as a
result has developed into an almost entirely russophone city. Moreover, even for people
like Andrej Safonov, one of few remaining democratic Transnistrian separatists,
Bendery represents “something like a sacral symbol”. 93 When in May 2002 the leadership
of the TMR proposed to administratively unite the two geographically close
cities of Bendery and Tiraspol’ into a “new capital of Transnistria”, the situation
was aggravated further. 94 Accordingly, it is no coincidence that Bendery is in the
very focus of TMR propaganda. In the Museum of History and Regional Geography
of Bendery an inscription in golden letters on red velvet puts Transnistrian identity
management in a nutshell: “We are Transnistrians! One cannot deprive us of our history,
our name, our native tongue and national culture. The TMR is the guarantor for
this.” 95
As demonstrated, there is considerable evidence for the fact that the message of
this inscription is shared by a relative majority of the inhabitants of the TMR, i. e.
that a “Transnistrian people” in the sense of a demos exists. Whether this ‘people’
has the potential to develop into an ethnos is an open question for the time being.
In 1970, the historian of Southeastern Europe Mathias Bernath stated with regard to
the similar case of post-1944 Macedonian nation-building inside Tito’s Yugoslavia
“that today the existence of an almost full-fledged nationality in Vardar Macedonia
is a hypothesis to be taken seriously, and tomorrow it will be an irreversible fact provided
within the next two generations no shifts in the territorial shape of Yugoslavia
and Bulgaria occur.” 96 The same could also be said for the TMR and it seems as if
after the success of conflict-driven state-building of the early 1990s, the regional
elite succeeded in laying the foundations for a nation-building process – thereby
proving correct Miroslav Hroch’s view that while nations are invented by political
entrepreneurs, without a hard core of previously existing allegiances, be they lan-
92 In an interview on 13 September 1997 in Flensburg.
93 Safonov, “Vzaimootnošeniia Moldovy i Pridnestrov’ja”, 153.
94 “Novaja stolica Pridnestrov’ja (k voprosu ob-edinenija Tiraspolja i Bender)”, Ol’vija-press, 29 May
2002.
95 “My – pridnestrovcy! Nas ne lišit’ istorii, imeni, rodnogo jazyka, nacional’noj kul’tury. PMR tomu
garantija”. Benderskij istoriko-kraevedčeskij muzej.
96 Mathias Bernath, “Das mazedonische Problem in der Sicht der komparativen Nationalismusforschung”,
29 Südost-Forschungen (1970), 244. For the decisive decade of Macedonian nationbuilding,
see Stefan Troebst, “Yugoslav Macedonia, 1943–1953: Building the Party, the State and
the Nation”, in Melissa K. Bokovoy et al. (eds.), State-Society Relations in Yugoslavia, 1945–1992
(New York, NY, 1997), 243–266.