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

CRISTINA PETRESCUto use Bessarabia in reference to the whole region between the Prut andDnestr rivers. This was also a shrewd diplomatic solution, since in the previousTreaty of Tilsit it was stipulated that the Russian troops must evacuate theprincipalities of Moldova and Wallachia, but nothing was said about Bessarabia.See Nicholas Dima, From Moldavia to Moldova: The Soviet Romanian TerritorialDispute (Boulder: East European Monographs, 1991), pp. 13-14.13 The regional differences between north and south were underlined by DimitrieCantemir, Prince of Moldova (1710-1711), in his Descrierea Moldovei (TheDescription of Moldavia) (Bucharest: Minerva, 1971). For him, Bessarabia wasthe southern part of Moldova, near the Danube Delta and the Black Sea, thefirst Moldovan territory conquered by the Ottomans.14 For a history of Bessarabia under the Russian administration, see Ion Nistor,Istoria Basarabiei (The History of Bessarabia) (Bucharest: Humanitas, 1991).15 In the case of Romania, it must be emphasized that the nation-state was createdbefore the nation, or, using Miroslav Hroch’s phases, before entering inphase C of mass support for national ideas. Following Miroslav Hroch, anynational movement has three phases: A) the period of scholarly interest withoutpolitical implications; B) the period of patriotic agitation in which onlya small elite advocates national ideas; and C) the period of mass support fornational ideas. See Miroslav Hroch, Social Preconditions of National Revival inEurope (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). It is also important tomention that the elite which advocated national ideas was the governing eliteof the United Principalities of Moldova and Wallachia, then of the Kingdom ofRomania, and, in the interwar period, of Greater Romania. Or, using the categoriesdefined by Peter Sugar regarding East European nationalism, Romaniannationalism was bureaucratic because the leader of the national movementwas the government itself. See Peter Sugar, Nationalism in EasternEurope (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1969).16 The transformations the Romanian language underwent during the second halfof the 19 th century involved a change of the alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin andthe import of a large part of the vocabulary from other Romance languages,mainly French and Italian. It is this radical change that offered arguments for theproponents of the distinctiveness of the Moldovan language. In their view, theMoldovan language was not identical, but only similar to the other east-Romancelanguage, i.e., the Romanian. See King, The Moldovans, pp. 64-72.17 Quoted in Catherine Durandin, Histoire des Roumains (Paris: Fayard, 1995), p.214. How little did the Bessarabians understand from the mass, or, in otherwords, to what extent the use of Russian in church service contributed to thede-nationalization of the Bessarabians, one can also see from the funny storyof the priest who recited Ukrainian poems instead of the gospel readings withoutperturbing his Romanian-speaking audience. See Charles Upson Clark,United Romania (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1932; reprint, NewYork: Arno Press: 1971), p. 83 (page citations are to the reprint edition).18 Constantin Stere, the main proponent of poporanism, wrote critical articles, publishedin Viaþa Româneascã, on the indifference of a major part of intellectuals inthe Old Kingdom to the young Bessarabians who came to study in their “mothercountry.”Some of those articles have been reprinted in Constantin Stere, Singurîmpotriva tuturor (Alone against everybody) (Chiºinãu: Cartier, 1997).168