Lost Province. Stephen Henighan

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in Chiinu: among those over thirty, the Romanian speakers had come from the countryside and the Russian speakers had come from elsewhere in the former Soviet Union. (Nelly, unusually, had grown up in Tiraspol.) The pattern rehearsed the history of the deportation of the Romanian middle class and its replacement with a middle class drawn from the Slavic heartland. As we loitered in the dusty, shaded patches where trees grew in gaps in the sidewalk paving, waiting for the arrival of a bus offering enough free space for us to squeeze onboard, Natasha said, “That’s one of our biggest problems. We have no leadership. All our potential leaders died in Siberia and their children grew up as Russian-speaking Siberians.”

       “Did you learn Russian in your village?”

       “I learned Russian when I was twelve.” Learning Russian had been a crucial stage, the essential qualification for attending university and entering the urban world. Without fluent Russian she would have remained a peasant, condemned to back-breaking labour in a remote village. “It was very difficult for me to learn a Slavic language. I had to work very, very hard. But this has made my life more interesting. I’ve been able to read the literature. The Russians have the greatest literature in the world. You’ll never know what you’re missing unless you learn this language…”

       Once we had clambered up the steps of a low-slung, fume-spewing bus, shouldering a niche for ourselves out of the cushion of sweating bodies, Natasha’s mood darkened. Her full-volume bitterness unnerved me. Could we safely assume no one on the bus understood English?

       “I have Russian friends here. Very nice Russians, but if you tell them about the Romanian language, about Romanian literature, they don’t want to hear about it. They don’t want to admit that you speak this language and they will never learn the language themselves. How can people be like that? How can you go to live somewhere and not learn the language? They say Romanian is an irrelevant language. Well, my parents went to live in the south, among the Gagauz people, and they learned to communicate in Gagauz. Gagauz is a very small language, maybe two hundred thousand people speak this language, but if you go to live with those people, you should learn their language!”

       The blast of English staked bodies rigid, raised resentful stares. The theme trembling behind Natasha’s last statement was the political tension surrounding the upcoming revision of Moldova’s language law. This was an explosive issue, and I was relieved when Natasha waited until we had gotten off the bus on a busy side street near §tefan Cel Mare Boulevard before bringing it up.

       In 1989, as the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic began to assert its autonomy within the Soviet Union, a tumultuous public debate ushered in new language laws. Russian ceased to be the province’s official language. While retaining the Soviet-era term Moldovan, the new laws included a recognition that Moldovan and Romanian were the same language. In essence, the laws enshrined Romanian as Moldova’s official language. The country’s clocks were set to Bucharest time; the phantom of reunification flickered for a few weeks until realpolitik crushed it. Having engineered the overthrow of Nicolae Ceauescu and manoeuvred Ion Iliescu, his old crony from Moscow State University student politics in 1950 and 1951, into the presidency of Romania, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev leaned on the Romanian president not to push the reunification issue. A few months later Gorbachev was gone, Moldova’s post-independence momentum had been lost, and the old hierarchies and old faces had settled down to the business of ruling the country in the old ways under different banners.

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