Putin kills off a fake language

He may have failed to "de-Nazify" Ukraine, but in Moldova he de-Stalinized

Author taking a break from Moldovan-language discourse, 1992

The gifts of Vladimir Putin have attached mostly to the civics realm: alongside catastrophes for those under his boot, the Russian leader has provided the world with a valuable lesson on the dangers of unchecked power. This week has added to his ledger: Putin has helped kill off of the fictitious language of Moldovan, thus reducing the sum of nonsense in the world.

To understand the Moldovan issue, one must imagine New World colonists whose rage over taxation without representation has overwhelmed their faculties to the point where they decide to pretend their language is not English but American—and commence printing American-English and English-American dictionaries.

To understand what actually happened, we must cast our gaze 84 years back to the moment when Nazi Germany threatened to invade Poland. Under Josef Stalin, the Soviet Union decided to use this dangerous moment to cut a sweetheart deal.

Russia had long eyed the southwestern reaches of its empire, up to and including areas inhabited mostly by Romanian speakers (and also Jews)—descendants of a wayward Roman garrison, according to lore. This had to do with access to the Danube and the seas—but also just with covetousness in the most vulgar biblical sense. As with Putin.

As part of a pact signed in August 1939 by German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, Germany ceded a swath of territories not its own to the USSR. Soon two things happened: Nazi Germany invaded Poland, and Soviet troops marched into northeastern Romania, occupied it and declared the “Moldavian” (or Moldovan) Soviet Socialist Republic.

The Soviets knew something fundamental about the human condition that was misaligned with communism: people wanted to feel distinct, a tribal identity. A linguistic one, even.

They therefore understood that the Moldovans might one day want to reunite with their fellow Romanian speakers. Thus did the Soviet propaganda machine give rise to the fiction of a Moldovan people who were a proud member of the Soviet family of nations and who speak a Moldovan language that is very definitely not Romanian.

Radio broadcasts from Romania were jammed so that no one would know it is the same language; Romanian nationalists were oppressed, silenced, and if need be, deported; Slavs were moved in, to scramble the region’s ethnicity. Moreover, Slavic-populated areas of what should naturally be Ukraine, across the Dniester River, were appended to Moldova. To mix things up yet more, industry was concentrated there to make it inseparable from the rest of Moldova.

My own parents hail from the “Pale of Jewish settlement” that straddled the Soviet Union’s borders with what is now Eastern Europe. They were, in effect, Romanian Jews, and they escaped the post-World War II Communist regime in 1960. I grew up in Philadelphia, speaking Romanian, which enabled me to get a job with The Associated Press as the correspondent in post-Communist Bucharest. 

In 1990, as the Soviet Union was falling apart, I was among the first group of people—almost all of them local Romanians—who crossed the Prut River border into the Moldovan SSR. The USSR, on its last legs, would not let my car across, and I stepped into a makeshift taxi on the other side.

“Do you speak Romanian?” I asked the driver in American-accented Romanian.