Moldovenism - Historical Development - Moldovans in Soviet Moldova

Moldovans in Soviet Moldova

In June 1940 Bessarabia was occupied by the Soviet Union. Most of Bessarabia and about half of the MASSR were merged into a newly-created Moldavian SSR, which became the fifteenth union republic of the USSR. A year later, in 1941, Romania attacked the Soviet Union as part of Operation Barbarossa and retook Bessarabia. Between 1941 and 1944, Romania also occupied the territory between the Dniester and Bug rivers (historic Transnistria). By 1944 the Soviets had taken back all the territories they lost in 1941, which remained in the Soviet Union on until the latter's dissolution in 1991.

During the first years of Soviet occupation, the term "Romanian language" was forbidden. The official language for use in Moldovan schools throughout the entire MSSR (both in Bessarabia and Transnistria) during Stalinist period was based on a patois variety spoken in some areas of the former MASSR. The Commission for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in Moldova is assessing this period.

In 1956, during the Nikita Khrushchev's rehabilitation of the victims of Stalinist repressions, a special report was issued about the state of the Moldavian language. The report stated, in part, that the discussions of 1920-30s between the two tendencies had been mostly non-scientific, since there were very few linguists in the republic; and that the grammar and the basic lexicon of the literary Romanian and Moldovan languages are identical, while differences are secondary and nonessential. Because the political situation in the People's Republic of Romania was now pro-Soviet, the planned convergence of the Romanian and Moldovan languages was once again approved.

During the entire period of Soviet rule, Moldovan speakers were encouraged to learn the Russian language as a prerequisite for access to higher education, social status and political power. Transfers of territory and population movements, including deportations of locals and state-encouraged immigration from the rest of the USSR, shifted the ethnic and linguistic makeup of the republic. By the late 1970s, the number of Russian speakers in the Moldavian SSR had greatly increased. These changes contributed to the proliferation of Russian loanwords in the spoken Moldovan.

While some Soviet linguists continued to deny the existence of a distinct Moldovan language, a new generation of Soviet linguists revived the debate in the 1970s. For example, one linguist, Iliasenco, compared the Romanian and Moldovan translations of a Leonid Brezhnev speech from Russian and used them as a proof for the existence of two different languages. Mikhail Bruchis analysed this claim, and noticed that all the words of both translations are found in both dictionaries. Also, Iliasenco implied that "Moldovan" preferred synthetic syntagms, while "Romanian" preferred analytic ones. However, this claim was also proven wrong, as a book of Nicolae Ceauşescu (the political leader of Romania at the time) uses mostly "Moldovan" synthetic syntagms, while a book by Ivan Bodiul (the secretary of the Moldavian SSR) uses mostly "Romanian" analytic syntagms. Bruchis' conclusion was that both translations were within the limits of the Romanian language.