“No, but I speak Romanian.”
Andrei and the driver looked at each other, concurring with apparent surprise that I was speaking Moldavski. Andrei switched from Russian to a thick, overinflected Romanian. I strained to understand. The taxi climbed a long slope into the district of Buiucani. A row of nine-story high rises stretched along the crest of the hill like a flat-featured palisade. The taxi threaded between two of the high-rise blocks, then trundled over a street running behind the buildings. Across the street lay the bare brown earth of a yard where residents sat on benches beneath sparse shade; barefoot boys in shorts, their torsos burned brown, pelted through the dust. We got out. I removed my luggage, thanking the driver affably in Romanian; in return I received a stony stare. A heavyset woman with a broad, pleasant face got up from one of the benches and walked over to us. She held out her hand.
“Good afternoon,” I said in Romanian as we shook hands. “How are you?”
“He speaks moldoveanu, Mama,” Andrei said in Romanian.
It took me weeks to untangle the linguistic skein into which I had stumbld. At the time of Moldovan independence in 1991, sixty-five percent of the republic’s 4.3 million people identified themselves as ethnically Romanian. The remaining thirty-five percent of the population broke down into fourteen percent Ukrainian, thirteen percent Russian, and about eight percent other ethnicities, most notably the Turkic Gagauz people, Bulgarians, and Jews (who were Russian-speaking). These figures, though, were complicated by the dynamics of power. After fifty years of Soviet rule, the language all these groups had in common was Russian; most Romanians spoke Russian, but very few ethnic Russians spoke Romanian. And, as I discovered in the company of my family, many Romanians did not believe they spoke Romanian, either. For fifty years they had been taught to call their language “Moldovan.” Soviet doctrine dictated that the language of the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic was a backward regional dialect only distantly related to Romanian. Soviet linguists churned out tracts “proving” that the two jurisdictions spoke mutually incomprehensible languages. It is true that the Moldavian version of Romanian has a distinct accent and a more Slavic-influenced lexicon than the Romanian of Bucharest, but to a certain extent these traits are shared by all of historical Moldavia—the part that remained within Romania as well as the present-day Republic of Moldova and Romanian speakers in the portions of the country annexed to Ukraine (where, oddly, Soviet documents continued to refer to the language as Romanian).
Fifty years of Soviet occupation and Russian schooling had made an impact on the vocabulary and accent of the Romanian speakers of Moldova, but their language was instantly recognizable as Romanian—the same Romanian spoken in Romania. It was not even a “dialect” of Romanian (as a recent edition of the Lonely Planet guide Romania & Moldova erroneously claims). Professional linguists recognize three dialects of Romanian, which are spoken by Romanian minorities in former Yugoslavia and Albania. But, within the terms of formal linguistics, the language of Romania and the language of Moldova are the same.
The “Moldovan” language was an invention. The notion had been created by Stalin’s advisers to erect a mental barricade between the new Soviet republic and Romania. Soviet education policy deepened the gulf by rewriting Romanian in Cyrillic characters. This denied Romanian-speaking graduates of Moldovan schools access to their own literary and historical tradition by keeping most of them in ignorance of the Latin alphabet in which Romanian is written.Cultural destitution, in turn, strengthened the argument that speakers of “Moldovan” had been ignorant savages until Russian culture was bestowed upon them. Soviet leaders from Joseph Stalin to Mikhail Gorbachev pursued this policy out of a fear of uprisings in favour of reunification with Romania.
The imperative to drum into Moldovans that they spoke a degenerate local patois grew more pressing during the final years of Soviet rule. From the early 1970s onward the maverick Romanian tyrant Nicolae Ceau
As early as the mid-1960s, Ceau
The largely passive recipients of these geopolitical pressures were people like Andrei and his family. They had suffered through the Leonid Brezhnev era when you could be arrested for speaking Romanian on a trolley bus or in a market. They had been told since birth that the language they spoke was called “Moldovan,” was written in the Cyrillic alphabet, and was a backward dialect. They had been taught that Russian was the key to a cosmopolitan humanity, to fulfilling culture, sophistication, personal success, and power. They had been told Romanian was a foreign language they could not understand spoken by a culture that was inherently fascist. Little wonder they were confused.
At first I was puzzled by the penchant of Romanian-language publications in Moldova to print interviews with visiting personalities from Romania that invariably began with an exchange that went as follows.
“When you visit Moldova, can you understand what people say to you?”
“Yes, of course, I understand everything. We speak the same language.”
This observation, self-evident to any foreigner who had worked his way through a Romanian grammar book and practised with a few language cassettes, was revolutionary in the climate of post-Soviet Moldova. When, gasping for a word, I seized a book with the title Romanian-English Dictionary printed on the cover, Andrei’s mother dealt me a dismissive wave. I wouldn’t find Moldovan words there! But I did. When the procedure worked the next time, and the next, Dora’s heavy face settled into a perplexed expression. The year before she had gone to visit a friend who had moved to Romania, and had made herself understood without effort. But she still couldn’t bring herself to acknowledge that the language she spoke was Romanian. She was forty-one years old, and such a recognition would overturn the foundations of her life, her intimate, if troubled, sense of herself as a Moldovan.
The section of the Buiucani district where Andrei’s family lived occupied the crown of a hill on the outskirts of Chi