Nation-Building and Contested Identities: Romanian & Hungarian ...

Contrasting/Conflicting Identitiestrated above, the homogenizing force of the Romanian state did not succeedin socializing the Bessarabians as Romanian nationals and convertingtheir pre-modern regional identity into a modern national one. Thus,the Soviets’ project to construct a Moldovan national identity found favorableconditions in Bessarabia. The independent path – chosen in 1991,when, in the political chaos that followed the August coup in Moscow, thelocal Moldovan parliament decided on a rupture with the Soviet Union,and, then, reaffirmed in the following elections, when popular support wasgiven to the proponents of the two-state doctrine and not to the pan-Romanianists– demonstratess that the Moldovans prefer to be a nation apart. 70From the Romanian perspective, all agree that the Moldovans are, in fact,Romanians, but the project of reunification has not been considered seriouslyby the post-communist governments in Bucharest. 71 It seems that withthe passing of the generation of Bessarabians that sought refuge in Romaniain 1940 or 1944, the reunification project will be completely forgotten.NOTES1Indeed, since the early 1960s, with the discovery of Marx’s writings on theRomanians, which assured an irrefutable scientific justification for the claimson the Romanianness of the Moldovans, the “maverick” regime in Bucharestalluded more or less explicitly to the Bessarabian problem. See Karl Marx,Însemnãri despre români: Manuscrise inedite (Notes on the Romanians: Uneditedmanuscripts) (Bucharest: Editura Academiei RPR, 1964). On the circumstancesin which Marx’s notes on the Romanians were published in Romania,see Pavel Þugui, Istoria ºi limba românã în vremea lui Gheorghiu-Dej: Memoriileunui fost ºef de secþie a CC al PMR (History and Romanian language duringDej’s time: The memoirs of a former chief of section of the Central Committeeof the Romanian Workers Party) (Bucharest: Editura Ion Cristoiu, 1999).The way Dej and Ceauºescu regimes regarded the problem of Bessarabiacould be a very interesting subject of study. It seems that, beginning with thecondemnation of the Cominternist theses related to the multinational characterof Greater Romania at the forty-fifth anniversary of the Romanian CommunistParty in May 1966, and ending with the condemnation of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact at the Fourteenth Congress of the RCP in November 1989,Nicolae Ceauºescu kept Bessarabia on a hidden agenda. He brought it upwhenever appropriate, and even allowed the publication of a study that assertedthat the union of 1918 was the will of the Romanians from both sides of theriver Prut. See ªtefan Pascu, “Momente din lupta poporului român pentru formareastatului naþional unitar” (Episodes from Romanian people’s strugglefor the formation of the unitary nation-state), Magazin Istoric 2 (February1976), pp. 7-9.165