Lost Province. Stephen Henighan

It was the union of Wallachia and Moldavia in 1859 that had created modern Romania. In 1940 the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact forced Romania to cede Northern Bukovina, a mountainous region of great cultural richness, to the Soviet Union. Most of Bukovina, including the important city of Cernauti, is now inside the borders of Ukraine. Cernauti is famous in Romania as the city where Mihai Eminescu, Romania’s national poet, was educated in the 1860s; in the 1930s Paul Celan, the great German-Jewish poet, received his education in the same city, where he began his writing career in Romanian before switching to German. Yet the most serious consequence of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was that the eastern half of Moldavia was combined with a thin strip of Ukraine and incorporated into the Soviet Union as the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic.

       In a sense, it was not Romania that was dismembered by the victors of World War II, but Moldavia. Chiinu, the region’s second city, vanished from the Romanian-speaking world. The blow to Romanian identity, which had entered a phase of unprecedented self-confidence during the interwar years, was crippling. With the exception of the witty playwright I. L. Caragiale, a precursor of absurdism and a native of Wallachia, the pillars of late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century literature—the country’s classics—were all Moldavian: Vasile Alecsandri, the early Romantic poet who was instrumental in developing an indigenous Romanian theatrical tradition; the poet Eminescu; Mihail Sadoveanu, the Balzac-like novelist of gargantuan energy who drenched his dozens of books in the history, language, and teeming natural world of Moldavia; Ion Creanga, the peasant storyteller who mythologized traditional Romanian life. The dismemberment of Moldavia, which had occurred periodically throughout history, seemed this time to have stopped an emerging national tradition in its tracks.

       Reading Mircea Eliade’s history of Romania as the bus carried me eastward, I learned that Moldavia had reached the zenith of its power under Stephen the Great (1457–1504), one of the most admired monarchs of his day. After Stephen’s death, Moldavia fell under Ottoman rule. At the close of the Russo-Turkish War in 1812, Tsar Alexander I sliced Moldavia in half. The area east of the Prut River, renamed Bessarabia, remained under Russian rule. In 1817 the Russians conducted the first census of Bessarabia and discovered that eighty-six percent of the population spoke Romanian, 6.5 percent Ukrainian, and 1.5 percent Russian. By the end of the nineteenth century, after eighty years of forced migrations and assimilationist education policy, only half of Bessarabians spoke Romanian. When Bessarabia was reintegrated into Romania after World War I, Bucharest dispatched Romanian-speaking schoolteachers and administrators to Chiinu to reinforce its claim.

       The ebullient if troubled interwar years reconfirmed Bessarabia’s Romanian character but also some of its peculiarities. Older people during the 1920s and 1930s retained an attachment to the Cyrillic alphabet, while the upper classes continued to take their cultural cues from Moscow and St. Petersburg. Bucharest’s administrators, though often insensitive to local customs, opened new markets to Bessarabian goods and paved roads at a pace that put the Russians to shame. The Romanian schoolteachers raised the literacy rate to thirty percent. In the minds of many intellectuals the two halves of Moldavia, severed for more than a century, had been reunited.

       Mihail Sadoveanu expressed this consciousness in historical novels such as Nunta Dominitie Ruxanda (Princess Ruxanda’s Wedding, 1932) set in the seventeenth century when Moldavia, though under Ottoman rule, remained whole. The novel’s characters gallop indiscriminately across the length and breadth of Moldavia. The Prut River is stripped of political significance and becomes important primarily as a place to water the horses. At the same time the struggle for cultural wholeness is never far from the centre of the novel’s action. Subsequent Soviet propaganda would decry the “primitive” state of the Bessarabians at the time of the 1940 annexation, but during the interwar years a Romanian middle class took root. Bessarabia in 1940 was inextricably entwined in the Romanian national equation. After the 1940 annexation, the Romanian fascist leader General Ion Antonescu fought to recover Bessarabia. In 1941 the Romanian army drove out the Soviet occupying forces. Penetrating deep into the Soviet Union, Antonescu’s troops captured the Black Sea port of Odessa. From 1941 to 1944 Bessarabia returned to Romania, plaguing today’s Moldovans with the uncomfortable paradox of being one of the few communities in the world that considers itself to have been liberated by a fascist.

       In 1944 the Soviet Union reconquered Bessarabia. Vyacheslav Molotov and Joseph Stalin worked far harder than the tsars to alter the territory’s character. The respected Romanian dissident Paul Goma, who fled Bessarabia at this time, reports that the Soviet troops burned on large bonfires all books printed in the Latin alphabet. The Red Army staged mass executions of captured Romanian soldiers. Tests performed on a swamp near the northern Moldovan city of Balti have suggested that it may contain the bodies of up to fifty thousand Romanian soldiers. This represents a massacre several times the size of the notorious slaughter of Polish officers by Soviet troops at Katyn in 1943; yet, unlike Katyn, Balti has never entered the world’s historical consciousness.

       During the first year of Soviet occupation, three hundred thousand Romanians were removed from Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina and scattered through Siberia and other remote tracts of the Soviet Union. By 1953 authorities in Moscow had dispatched more than two hundred and fifty thousand Russians, Ukrainians, and Tatars to Bessarabia to serve as civil servants, teachers, soldiers, and police officers. The tally of Romanian-speaking deportees to far-flung districts of the Soviet Union surpassed 1.1 million. The 1946–47 famine killed more than one hundred thousand peasants. The society of “Moldavia beyond the Prut,” as Romanians called the region, had been decapitated. Few Romanians endowed with education, initiative, or professional skills were allowed to remain. The Soviet claim of having uplifted a society of peasants maintained in ignorance by the fumbling monarchy in Bucharest was not true in 1940, but within a decade the Romanians of Bessarabia had been reduced to a state nearly as pathetic as that portrayed by Soviet propaganda.

2 THE FAMILY THAT DID NOT KNOW IT SPOKE ROMANIAN

      The block letters projecting above the roof of the train station read CHIINU. At first glance the city had a hard-baked Mediterranean quality The teachers were marshalled on the platform, our names were read out, and families stepped forward to claim us. I was claimed by Andrei, a dark, stocky twenty-year-old with a military haircut who hustled me toward the taxi stand with a gruff haste I soon realized was born of discomfort. The taxi climbed the hill away from the train station and proceeded down the stately boulevard—lined with imposing early-twentieth-century buildings—that I would come to know as tefan Cel Mare (Stephen the Great) Boulevard. Kiosks and crowds thronged the broad sidewalks. We passed parks, a smaller replica of the Arc de Triomphe, people idling in leafy shade. I was dazzled. After ramshackle Lvov, set on its smoggy plain, the Frenchified elegance of some of Chiinu’s public buildings, the generosity of the city’s layout, and the Latinate street life delighted me. I stared hungrily out the window, eager to get rid of my luggage and dive into this pulse of colour and movement.

       I was brought back to reality by the sound of Andrei talking to the taxi driver in Russian. The choice of language surprised me. Andrei,seeming flustered, turned around in the front seat and addressed me with an ungraspable phrase that ended with “pa russki?”

       I realized he was asking me if I spoke Russian. “Nu,”