By the end of the 1980s, many historians and other students of nationalism expected nations and nationalities in Eastern Europe to break free from decades of communist repression. They tended to accept these movements of nation-state building and national emancipation as the last “wave” of a broad historical process. Some of these movements, however, were somewhat arbitrarily censured as “artificial,” as their constituencies lacked a sufficiently distinct history, language, and identity of their own. Whereas the Montenegrin nation was generally acknowledged, Moldovan nation-building was usually condemned as an opportunistic elite project, because the Moldovans “actually were” Romanians. A growing undercurrent in nationalism studies, however, tends to be fascinated by these extreme cases of the construction of a nation against all odds, e.g., the Bosniaks, the Moldovans, and the Transnistrians.^[1] Inevitably, these researchers sympathized with the underdog – the local elites and their national projects – against regional hegemons (the Serbs, the Romanians, and the Moldovans respectively).^[2]
As Stefan Ihrig demonstrates in his study on history-writing and history textbooks, Moldova was an exception even among these bizarre cases of latter-day nation-building. The original idea of a Moldovan nation dates back to a Comintern project in the mid-1920s, invented to consolidate the Moldovan ASSR vis-à-vis the Romanian state across the Soviet border. In the early 1990s, the political elite of the Moldovan Republic faced the daunting task of rehabilitating this Stalinist concept in order to field it against the Moldovan Popular Front, which demanded immediate reunification with the Romanian fatherland. A unique dichotomy that continues to puzzle Stefan Ihrig and other Western analysts ensued: the Moldovanists (championing Moldovan statehood and national identity) took over political power in Chişinău in 1994, but the Romanianist intellectual elite (favoring reunification and denying Moldovan nationhood) managed to uphold its virtual monopoly of cultural and historical production. Lacking the professional historians to provide their newly created nation with a historical synthesis, the Chişinău leadership tended to (ab)use the texts of the few Western authors who accepted the Moldovan nation as a fascinating construction in-the-making, e.g., Charles King, Vladimir Socor and the present writer. Compared to the Romanianists who, as Stefan Ihrig notes, simply copied the Romanians’ well-consolidated grand narrative of their national history, the erratic and incoherent probing of history by the Moldovanists offered a fascinating read. In contrast to the exclusivist view of the nation by the Romanianists, the post-communist leadership in Chişinău seemed to represent a more tolerant and civic concept of the nation.^[3]
The key question of the study is not, who are the Moldovans, but rather whether the Moldovanists’ historical views are in sync with their integrationist nation-building strategy, and whether the Romanianists’ are as staunchly ethnic in their concept of the nation as assumed. Ihrig introduces the distinction between perennialist and modernist views of the nation as the second dimension of his taxonomy for the analysis and classification of academic historiography and history textbooks. In the core chapters of his book, he then scrutinizes a large sample of post-Soviet textbooks and historical studies from Moldova, including Transnistrian and Gagauz literature, and presents an immensely complex debate both competently and coherently, offering several original insights and new assessments.
Inherently, his approach faces three challenges – one didactical, one analytical, and one historiographical. With this book the author himself has entered the minute circle of experts outside the Republic of Moldova who can appreciate the depth and nuances of his arguments on Moldovan nation building and historiography. For a reader with a general interest in East European nation-building or history-writing, however, the learning curve is bound to be too steep. Probably in order not to suggest a historical-normative benchmark for the historiography analyzed in the subsequent chapters, the author has kept the historical background information in the first chapter to a minimum.
The analytical taxonomy, moreover, highlights some contrasts adequately, but disregards some other relevant factors. One such factor is the distinction between nationalities policies (e.g., citizenship legislation) and historical discourses legitimizing these policies. Today’s Romanianists are well aware that they will never have to develop concrete state policies on the basis of their nationalist ideology. The Moldovanists’ priorities are the Transnistrian conflict and societal integration, which require pragmatism rather than ideological consistence. Several years before the integrationist Moldovanists took over political power, the then ruling Romanianists produced one of the most liberal and integrative citizenship laws in the former USSR – not because it was in line with their concept of the nation, but because the domestic situation and international pressure forced them to. In sum, as a result of analyzing some of the more idiosyncratic instances in the debate, the author claims that only a logically consistent (if not historically corroborated) synthesis can fulfill its political functions. A historian writing a history of Moldovan statehood may nevertheless stop short of any territorial claims against Ukraine or Romania, even if that would be the logical consequence of his argument. And the best political speeches are those that appeal to incompatible audiences! Thus, the famous 1994 Moldovanist speech by President Mircea Snegur might be interpreted by minority representatives as reaching out on the basis of a civic concept of the Moldovan nation; whereas Moldovan nationalists could find equal proof in his words that the Moldovan state really belonged only to the ethnic Moldovans. Moldovanists – both in Soviet times and after – always had two options, either to confront the Romanianists on their own turf and deny the Romanianness of the Moldovan nation, or to take recourse to a different discourse by focusing on Moldovan multiculturalism and statehood rather than nationhood.
One of the praiseworthy qualities of this study is Ihrig’s consistent refusal to pass judgment on historiography’s correspondence with “history.” As he notes, the frequent references to “the historical truth” and verdicts of historical falsification in the debate among historians in Moldova testify to political functionality and an antiquated concept of history. The author lets historians speak for themselves (and make a fool of themselves, e.g., when one historian argues that Stephan the Great will return like a messiah to reunite the Romanian nation). Apart from not judging the historical adequacy of historians’ interpretations, the author of any historiographical study faces another dilemma, the choice between defining historiographical paradigms and respecting the individuality and context of the historian. Vasile Stati, the bête noire of Moldovan historiography, may raise implicit claims to Moldovan-inhabited territories beyond the Republic similar to those of the early post-World War II Soviet historians, but apart from aggressive anti-Romanianism, Stati and the 1950s Stalinists have little in common. Conversely, today Vladimir Ţaranov, an old-school communist historian, may underline the modernizing function of the nation-state like Ernest Gellner and Benedict Anderson do, but his interpretations are informed by orthodox Marxism rather than current nationalism theory.
What sets Wer sind die Moldawier apart from similar studies on the Moldovan nation, is the systematic but intelligently and elegantly composed inclusion of all relevant producers of concepts of the Moldovan nation. The study deals not only with the Romanianists and the Moldovanists, but also with the Gagauz and the Transnistrian reactions to the Moldovan nation-state and marginalized unconventional historians in Chişinău. The various aspects of the nation are implicit in historical interpretations, such as stereotypes of the domestic and external “other” as well as the territorial and demographic ideal of the nation/state with their policy implications. This is no small feat in view of the intricacy of the debates, language competencies (Russian, Romanian/Moldovan and Turkish), and the intractable accumulation of political, academic, and ideological motives that make Moldova unique in the post-communist world.
Thus, Ihrig’s analysis offers interesting evidence for the political (ab)use of academic and textbook history for the multiplicity of historical interpretations, as well as (fortunately) for the limited impact of incendiary textbook views on daily interethnic relations in the Republic of Moldova.