Moldova finally gets rid of Stalinist invention
Expert opinions on Caliber.Az

INTERVIEWS  19 March 2023 - 23:05

The Moldovan Parliament passed a bill initiated by the ruling party PAS, which provides for the consolidation of the concept of "Romanian language" instead of "Moldovan" and "native” languages in all laws of the country. Fifty-eight deputies voted for the bill in the second reading. After the vote, PAS deputies stood up shouting "Bravo!", and deputies from the Bloc of Communists and Socialists displayed placards with protest inscriptions. The adoption of the bill in its second reading passed without debate and lasted less than two minutes.

Before the meeting, the Bloc of Communists and Socialists demanded that the Romanian language bill be removed from the agenda, but the proposal predictably failed to garner the necessary number of votes.

According to the law, now the phrases "Moldovan language", "state language", "official language" and "native language" in any grammatical form will be replaced by the phrase "Romanian language" in the corresponding grammatical form.

After technical changes, the article of the Constitution of Moldova on the language will become shorter and will have the following content: “The state language of the Republic of Moldova is Romanian”.

It seems that the long-standing dream of all segments of the society of this country focused on the integration into Europe came true. By the way, even without that experts in linguistics have always recognized that the same language is spoken and written in Moldova and Romania, and consequently, there was no need to rename it once in a separate "Moldovan". And half of the historical Moldova with the city of Iasi is part of Romania. But to this day, this "linguistic" relic of the Soviet ideological policy has continued to exist. So, what does the new change in the Constitution bring to the Moldovan people? What further steps in this regard should be expected?

Well-known Moldovan analysts agreed to evaluate the event at the request of Caliber.az.

The former Minister of Justice of Moldova, a former member of the Venice Commission of the Council of Europe, Alexandru Tanase first of all noted that the "Moldovan language" is a Stalinist invention, which was intended to legitimize the annexation of Bessarabia in 1940.

"According to the Stalinist doctrine, since Moldovan and Romanian languages are different, so are the peoples. The renaming of the Romanian language into Moldovan gave the Communist regime the reason to change the alphabet from the Latin alphabet to Cyrillic and begin a massive policy of Russification.

The occupying Soviet authorities did the same to other peoples in the former USSR. The change of Article 13 of the Moldovan Constitution will mark a complete departure from the false Stalinist approaches to the history of our country, to the national and constitutional identity of the Republic of Moldova," said the former Minister of Justice.

For his part, former Moldovan ambassador to the US and former MP Igor Munteanu said that the adopted law replaces the concept of "Moldovan language" with "Romanian", thus implementing the decision of the Constitutional Court of December 5, 2013.

"This is the right decision, in my opinion, although belated and widely politicized. But Moldova is a widely divided country, so there is no need to explain why all important state tasks are discussed at length and spears are broken for years.

The first paradox is that the most ardent opponents of this decision are people who do not even speak the language or speak a clear surzhik (language mixture - Auth.), which automatically means disrespect for the language of the majority of the population.

The second paradox is that at a time when the vast majority of cultural elites keep saying that our mother tongue is Romanian, some politicians in Moldova have adopted Soviet myths that the Soviet system created a new ethnos - Moldovans, who speak their non-Romanian Moldovan language, completely alienated from the language spoken in Romania - which is a lie.

For your readers who may not be familiar with our linguistic battles, we must remind you that there is a complete identity between the Moldovan and Romanian languages, and the theory from which it follows that they are different was born of political necessity. Moscow tried to prove that all Moldovans who lived in the Soviet Union spoke a language different from the other Moldovans across the Prut, and as a consequence they "punished" the language by converting it to the Cyrillic script on this side of the river. The Soviet authorities thus resolved this linguistic dispute in a very simple way - all those who disagreed with the Party instructions were shot or deported to Siberia after the war, while the rest were tried to inculcate an aversion to "bourgeois culture" by the Soviet authorities. But no matter how hard they tried to tear Moldovans away from the classics of Romanian culture, such as Eminescu, Bacovia, Caragiale, Blaga, Mateevich, etc., the popular love for their culture preserved the truth in the hearts of people," said the diplomat.

This can explain why the national revival in the Moldovan SSR began with calls for the return of the language to the Latin alphabet, as well as for the official name of the language. In the Language Law of 1989 and later in the Declaration of Independence of 27 August 1991, the name of the language was Romanian. This was the main argument for the relevant decision of the Constitutional Court in 2013.

“According to this decision, the Romanian language is the state language in the Republic of Moldova, and the parliament must amend the law, including the constitutional norms included in the text of the Constitution. I welcome the decision of the parliament to oblige the translation of the entire legislative base with a single principle - the state language, that is, the official language, should be designated as Romanian.

I very much hope that we will stop the constant political dispute about the name of the language at least in order to demand from politicians a greater degree of responsibility, professional skills and courage to meet the expectations of ordinary people," Munteanu concluded.

Caliber.Az