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

CRISTINA PETRESCU2Throughout this paper, I use only the forms Moldova/Moldovan in referenceto this political entity, regardless of historical period or state affiliation, consideringthat these spellings correspond to the vernacular form used as selfidentificationby the locals. Moldavia is the Latin form, used in diplomatic correspondenceand political documents throughout the Middle Ages, as well asin the work of the erudite Prince Dimitrie Cantemir, Descriptio Moldaviae inthe early 18 th century. Moldavia is also the English form, which designatesespecially the historical principality of Moldova. Finally, the forms Moldavian/Moldaviacorrespond to the Russian spelling, so many authors used themfor the political entities established by the Soviets or for the dialect spokenthere. In short, “from a linguistic point of view, the name switch – from Moldaviato Moldova – illustrates a case of vernacular versus transnational designation.”See Andrei Brezianu, Historical Dictionary of the Republic of Moldova(Lanham, Maryland: The Scarecrow Press, 2000), pp. 127-128.3The term mankurt was introduced by Chingiz Aitmatov in his novel The DayLasts More than a Hundred Years, first published in 1980, in the journal Novyimir, an allegoric critique of Moscow’s policy of erasing the pre-Soviet culturallayers, depriving the ethnic minorities of their previous identities. “Themankurt did not know who he had been, whence and from what tribe he hadcome, did not know his name, could not remember his childhood, father andmother. ... Deprived of any understanding of his own ego, the mankurt was,from his masters’ point of view ... absolutely obedient and safe.” See ChingizAitmatov, The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years (Bloomington: IndianaUniversity Press, 1988), p. 126. The novel was a success, especially among theintelligentsia of the Soviet Socialist Republics. The term mankurt was used inthe pro-Romanian literature, produced in the late 1980s in the Moldovan SovietSocialist Republic, as a metaphor symbolizing the Moldovans who had forgottentheir common origins with the Romanians.4This option was surprising, considering that the very process of democratizationin this Soviet Republic had begun in 1988-1989 with the debates over the natureof the spoken language – between those who considered Moldovan languageone and the same with the Romanian, and those who argued that it was justanother Romance language having many commonalties with Romanian – thatwere interpreted as a sign of national awakening at the time. In understandingthe complicated developments in Moldova from the late 1980s to the early1990s, when very different forces instrumentalized the problem of Romaniannessof the majority population as a lift to power and a means to secure politicalpositions in the unstable period of late Gorbachevism, the work of Charles Kingis essential. See his book, The Moldovans: Romania, Russia, and the Politics ofCulture (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2000), especially pp. 120-167.5The survey was made by William Crowther, and the results were included in hispresentation at the Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington, entitled “The Politicsof Ethnic Confrontation in Moldova.” Cited in King, The Moldovans, p. 159.6The form Dnestr (sometimes spelled Dniestr) represents the Slavic name ofthis river, which is an adaptation of the ancient Latin name Danaster. In thesecondary literature one finds this river sometimes under the local vernacularname, Nistru. See Brezianu, Historical Dictionary of the Republic of Moldova, p.144.166