REMEMBRANCE IN TIME - Index of

Viorica OLARU-CEMÎRTAN: Cojocaru Commission
We do not have to forget those who, in the battle with the soviet obscurantism and
censorship, brought in the school textbooks Mihai Eminescu, Vasile Alecsandri, Ion
Creangă, asserted the Latinity of the language, culture and our national being in an epoch
wherein any such gesture was liable to excommunication from within society or to
punishment with difficult years of liberty-privation. A Pantheon of our history and culture
should include: Vasile Coroban, George Meniuc, Grigore Vieru, Vlad IoviŃă, Vasile
Vasilache, Ion Vasilenco, Gheorghe Vodă, Mihai Grecu, Emil Loteanu, Lidia Istrati, Ion
Vatamanu and many others. An example of intellectual verticality, of resistance through
culture and of protection of our Romanian language is represented by the works of the
writers: Ion DruŃă, Dumitru Matcovschi, Mihai Cimpoi, Serafim Saca, Petru Cărare,
Nicolae Dabija, Ion Hadârcă, Valentin Mândâcanu, Vladimir Beşleagă and others. The
worker Gheorghe Muruziuc’s fact of temerity, who in the night of 28 June 1966, hoisted
the Tricolor on the Sugar Factory of Alexăndreni, district Sângerei (remained there for 5
hours), the protest of Liliei Neagu and Asei Andruh from 1970 against the Russification
and de-nationalization, the activity of the Patriotic National Front of freedom from the
soviet occupation, whereof Alexandru Usatiuc –Bulgăr and his close collaborators
Gheorghe Ghimpu and Valeriu Graur, other manifestations with civic and national
character, as well as the national-emancipation movement from the `80 point a resistance
line, as it was, which passes as a red thread through all soviet period. These personalities’
worth is immense: they kept our self conscience awake, they taught us that beyond the
human being’s need to adapt to his environment and to the surrounding conditions, as
many of us proceeded, perennial values and ideals exist.
In the hard times of the communist inquisition, we appeased our thirst of truth, tightly
keeping our years against the radio apparatuses, in order to receive the waves of Europa
Libera, BBC, Radio Vatican and Radio Libertatea. Nobody and nothing could force us to
give up the need to break from the spiritual prison universe, neither the regime with all its
oppression army, nor such a „de-nationalization champion”, as Ivan Bodul, first-secretary
of CC of PCM during the years 1961-1980.
In the centre of the investigations of the commission, there also were social and
economic aspects of the evolutions from the Moldavian SSR. The Commission did not
overlook the processes of industrialization and urbanization, or the frame of social
assistance offered by the soviet state to the simple citizen. What the conclusions of the
Commission reveal is that MSSR’s industry becomes wholly dependant on USSR’s
industrial centres, whence, in exchange of agricultural products and alimentary-industry
production, petrol and coal, iron and steel, plastics and metals, tractors, trucks and cars,
excavators and agricultural machinery, machine-tools and industrial equipment, popularconsumption
objects. In the situation in which the production of the republic does not
develop on its own basis, but on the imported raw material, the right of the Moldavian
SSR to an independent existence was a fiction. More than that, most industrial plants and,
at the same time, the most profitable, were placed on the territory of the former MSSR,
which constituted, likewise, the result of a far-reaching policy. Holding the managerial
levers, the pan-union and union-republican ministries promoted the policy of the massive
affluence on MSSR’s territory, of the population outside the republic, brought for
constructing new enterprises in the conditions of local surplus of labour force. This policy
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