Creating a "People": A Case Study in Post-Soviet History-Writing

Vladimir Solonari

Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, Volume 4, Number 2, Spring 2003 (New Series), pp. 411-438 (Article) Published by Slavica Publishers DOI: 10.1353/kri.2003.0027

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/kri/summary/v004/4.2solonari.html

Access provided by University of Pittsburgh (29 Oct 2013 13:00 GMT)

Creating a People: A Case Study in Post-Soviet History-Writing*

Vladimir Solonari

With innovative interpretations resulting from renewed interest in the study of 1 Soviet nationalities policy, scholarly attention is turning toward the longneglected links between national consciousness and Soviet historiography and 2 education. Soviet historical narratives are increasingly viewed as a powerful means of creating and manipulating the national identities of Soviet subjects, 3 both Russians and non-Russians.
*

Research was made possible by generous stipends from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and by the National Endowment for Democracy, as well as the excellent conditions for work created by the staff of those two institutions. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 7th Annual Convention of the Association for the Study of Nationalities at Columbia University in April 2002 and seminar on post-communist politics and economics at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University in May 2002. Many people contributed to this text, among them David Brandenberger, Irina Blagodatskikh, Charles King, Irina Livezeanu, Terry Marin, Marc F. Plattner, and other participants in the events listed above. Ruth Smith and Eve Fairbanks helped me to improve my English. I thank them all for their most valuable contributions. Responsibility for all errors and omissions, however, is my own. 1 See the groundbreaking essay of Yuri Slezkine, The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism, Slavic Review 53: 2 (1994), 41452, and Ronald Grigor Suny, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993). More recent works include Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 19231939 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001); Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Colonial Technologies and the Making of the Soviet Union, 19171939 (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1998); Peter Blitstein, Stalins Nations: Soviet Nationality Policy between Planning and Primordialism, 19361953 (Ph.D. diss., University of California-Berkeley, 1999). See also the informative debate on the applicability of the Western concept of race to the Soviet nationalities policies in Slavic Review 61: 1 (Spring 2002), 165. 2 Among earlier studies the works of Nicholas S. Timasheff, Klaus Mehnert, and Lowell Tillett stand out. See Nicholas S. Timasheff, The Great Retreat: The Growth and Decline of Communism in Russia (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1946); Klaus Mehnert, Stalin versus Marx: The Stalinist Historical Doctrine, trans. from the German (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1952); and Lowell Tillett, The Great Friendship; Soviet Historians on the Non-Russian Nationalities (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1969). 3 See, among others, David Brandenberger, The Short Course to Modernity: Stalinist History Textbooks, Mass Culture and the Formation of Popular Russian National Identity (Ph.D. diss., Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 4(2): 41138, Spring 2003.

412

V LADIMIR S OLONARI

Despite valuable advances, some aspects of this problematic still require further investigation. In particular, the crucial role played by Stalinist historical narratives in the formation of Soviet and post-Soviet world-views has not been sufficiently clarified. While David Brandenberger, who recently published a wonderful study of the genesis of Stalinist history textbooks in the late 1930s, is certainly correct in ascertaining that those texts created a popular sense of modern Russian national identity, he seems to see this identity mostly in terms 4 of the pantheon of Russian national heroes. It is my contention that Stalinist and post-Stalinist Soviet history textbooks may be analyzed in a fashion long familiar to scholars of Soviet literature considering Socialist Realist literary products as highly rigid, formulaic texts containing a limited number of encoded cultural symbols, conveying an ideological message suitable to the authorities and 5 readily understandable to the Soviet masses. Given that these narratives changed
Harvard University, 1999); Stephen Velychenko, Shaping Identity in Eastern Europe and Russia: Soviet-Russian and Polish Accounts of Ukrainian History, 19141991 (New York: St. Martins Press, 1993); Donald V. Schwartz and Razmik Panossian, eds., Nationalism and History: The Politics of Nation-Building in Post-Soviet Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia (Toronto: Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of Toronto, 1994); Victor A. Shnirelman, Who Gets the Past? Competition for Ancestors among Non-Russian Intellectuals in Russia (Washington, DC and Baltimore: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Georges Michel Nivat and Vilen Serhiiovych Horskyi, eds., Ukraine, renaissance dun mythe national (Geneva: Institut europen de lUniversit de Genve, 2000); Serhy Yekelchik, Stalinist Patriotism as Imperial Discourse: Reconciling the Ukrainian and Russian Heroic Pasts, 193945, Kritika 3: 1 (2002), 5180 . I also addressed this problem in relation to the Republic of Moldova in my Narrative, Identity, State: History Teaching in Moldova, in East European Politics and Societies 16: 2 (2002), 41445. 4 Brandenberger, The Short Course to Modernity, and idem, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 19311956 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002). 5 On Socialist Realism, see Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual, 3rd ed. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000); idem, Socialist Realism with Shores: The Conventions for the Positive Hero, in Socialist Realism without Shores, ed. Thomas Lahusen and Evgeny Dobrenko (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 2750; Rgine Robin, Socialist Realism: An Impossible Aesthetic, trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992); Evgenii Dobrenko, Formovka sovetskogo chitatelia: Sotsialnye i esteticheskie predposylki retseptsii sovetskoi literatury (St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 1997), trans. Jesse M. Savage as The Making of the State Reader: Social and Aesthetic Contexts of the Reception of Soviet Literature, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). In a brilliant recent essay Dobrenko persuasively demonstrated that Stalin himself was the author of what he calls the Soviet historical master-plot, treating Stalins Short Course on the history of the Communist Party as a Socialist Realist text occupying the space between history and literature (Dobrenko, Mezhdu istoriei i proshlym: Pisatel Stalin i istoki sovetskogo istoricheskogo diskursa, in Sotsrealisticheskii kanon, ed. Dobrenko and Khans Giunter [Hans Gnther] [St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 2000], 63972, esp. 668.)

C REATING A PEOPLE : A C ASE S TUDY IN POST -S OVIET H ISTORY -W RITING

413

only slightly since the late 1930s when the first textbooks on the history of the USSR were produced, and that virtually all Soviet citizens were exposed to their teaching, one might legitimately expect that they played a prominent role in the formation of the Soviet worldview, which, according to recent findings, exhibited remarkable resilience during the Soviet period and to a large extent survived 6 the downfall of the Soviet Union. Furthermore, it is worth noting that the Soviet tradition of history-writing itself lingers in the post-Soviet world. Even a cursory glance at curricula and textbooks in post-Soviet countries is enough to produce the impression that many of them follow, perhaps unwittingly, the basic structure established under Stalin in the second half of the 1930s. Often they use similar discursive strategies and de7 vices and focus on similar themes, even if their judgments are inverted. It thus follows that narratives of national histories in the post-Soviet countries and national republics of the Russian Federation can be analyzed not only in terms of their conduciveness to the creation of closed or open worldviews or to what extent they contain old Soviet or new Western market ideological 8 statements, but also, and probably more fruitfully, from the point of view of what they do with the Soviet master narrative. To what extent do they remain faithful to it, and to what extent do they depart from it? What are the implications of their chosen narrative strategies, and how deliberately do their authors employ them? In light of what was noted above about the influence of Stalinist history on the outlooks of Soviet citizens, it hardly needs to be emphasized that
See, e.g., Vladimir Shlapentokh, Public Opinion: Acceptance of the Regime, chap. 10 of A Normal Totalitarian Society: How the Soviet Union Functioned and How It Collapsed (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2001), 12752; James Alexander, Political Culture in Post-Communist Russia: Formlessness and Recreation in a Traumatic Transition (New York: St. Martins Press, 2000). It is remarkable that Alexander Lukin, who recently studied the political culture of the Russian democrats during perestroika, found that behind their hostility to all things Soviet lay a belief system that maintained many of [Soviet] ideologys structural characteristics and even some particular beliefs which were typically Soviet (Lukin, The Political Culture of the Russian Democrats [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000], 166). Lukin attributes this to the pervasiveness of indoctrination in the official ideology, which, he suggests, effectively penetrated not only the schools and kindergartens but also the process of family upbringing (114). 7 For a useful overview of the texts concerned, see Gennadii Arkadevich Bordiugov, ed., Natsional nye istorii v sovetskom i postsovetskikh gosudarstvakh (Moscow: AIRO-XX, 1999). At the same time, at least some of the contributions to that volume themselves appear as manifestations of the Soviet historiographical tradition. 8 Elena Lisovskaya and Vyacheslav Karpov, New Ideologies in Post-Communist Russian Textbooks, Comparative Education Review 43: 4 (1999), 52243; Lisovskaya, The Dogmatism of Ideology: Content Analysis of Communist and Post-Communist Russian Textbooks, in Comparative Perspectives on the Role of Education in Democratization, ed. Noel F. McGinn and Erwin H. Epstein (Frankfurt am Main and New York: P. Lang, 1999), 36795.
6

414

V LADIMIR S OLONARI

such studies may elucidate important aspects of post-communist mentalities and political culture. This study attempts to do exactly this in respect to one particular, and rather extreme, case of post-Soviet history-writing in the self-proclaimed and unrecognized state of the Dnestr Moldovan Republic (DMR), also known by its Rus9 sian name Pridnestrov e and its Romanian (Moldovan) name Transnistria. First, I will introduce readers to the place and explicate the structural constraints under which its official historical narrative was produced, paying attention to the motives of both the executors and consumers. Next I will set forth my understanding of the basic structure of Soviet historical master narrative as it was created under Stalin. Finally, I will proceed to analyze the post-Soviet official history of the DMR in terms of its relationship to the Soviet master narrative.
The Dnestrian Moldovan Republicand its History: An Introduction

Transnistria comprises the eastern part of the Republic of Moldova (RM), which includes the area on the left (east) bank of the Dnestr River plus the right-bank town of Bender. Its territory is about 4,100 square kilometers and it has an ethnically mixed population of approximately 750,000 inhabitants, Moldovans 10 comprising 34 percent, Russians 28 percent, and Ukrainians 26 percent. The main part of the Republic of Moldova lies to the west of the Dnestr River, with its western border going along the Prut River. The territory between the Prut and Dnestr is commonly known as Bessarabia. This region was part of the Moldovan Principality in the 15th through the early 19th centuries, and in 191840 it was incorporated into the Greater Romanian Kingdom. Transnistria was never a part of those state entities.
9 The Russian word Pridnestrov e implies territory along the Dnestr River, while the Romanian Transnistria means territory across the Dnestr River. The official title of the DMR in the Moldovan (Romanian) language is Republica Moldoveneasca Nistreana. The English title Dnestr Moldovan Republic was first proposed by Charles King in The Benefits of Ethnic Wars: Understanding Eurasias Unrecognized States, in World Politics 53: 4 (2001), 52452. I follow this suggestion and also employ Dnestria, Pridnestrove, and Dnestr for pridnestrovskii or pridnestrovets whenever I cite or paraphrase a Russian original. My use of this label as well as all references to this unrecognized state, its bodies, and officials in no way implies their recognition on my part. When speaking for myself and referring to the territory of DMR and its population I use the conventional terms Transnistria and Transnistrians. 10 These official Transnistrian data are available at <http://www.olvia.idknet.com/overviewru. htm>. Moldovan data differ slightly, usually citing 40 percent Moldovans, 26 percent Ukrainians, and 25 percent Russians (see, e.g., President Mircea Snegurs interview in Sfatul Tar i i , 15 November 1991, cited in Gheorghe E. Cojocaru, Separatismul n slujba Imperiului [Chisina u : Civis, 2000], 158).

C REATING A PEOPLE : A C ASE S TUDY IN POST -S OVIET H ISTORY -W RITING

415

In the last ten years, Transnistria has acquired international notoriety as a result of its unilateral declaration of independence in 1991, a step taken at the height of inter-ethnic tension in Moldova and in the aftermath of the failed August Moscow coup. This was a time when the imminent breakdown of the Soviet Union was becoming increasingly clear and Soviet republics were declaring their independence one by one. By seceding from independence-minded Moldova Transnistrians reasserted their preference to Moscow rule as opposed to that of Chisinau , the capital of Moldova. However, Transnistrian independence was never recognized, and the international community has unflinchingly considered the self-styled DMR an illegal separatist entity, de jure part of the Republic of Moldova. For its part, Chisinau has claimed sovereignty over the region, although it has never been able to enforce it. Despite military and political pressure put on Transnistrian separatists both by the legitimate Moldovan authorities and by the international community, Transnistrians never conceded their putative independence and insisted that they 11 be accorded the same status in negotiations as Moldova. Since the proclamation of independence in 1991, Transnistrians have managed to consolidate the institutions of their alleged state and survive economically with substantial assistance from Russia. Despite all the furious assertions of Moldovan authorities to the contrary, it now seems certain that the separatist regime in Transnistria and its intransigent policies towards the legitimate Moldovan authorities do in fact enjoy high levels of support among the local population. The Transnistrian political regime is widely seen in the West as a spoiled replica of the defunct Soviet Union, surviving by widespread drug and arms traf12 ficking and other illegal practices. Even allowing for a certain amount of exaggeration and emotionalism involved in denunciations of the black hole of Europe, there is no doubt that the regime there is highly oppressive and authoritarian. Its leaders see it as upholding the best traditions of the Soviet era and widely employ Soviet symbols and imagery. The continuous eulogizing of 13 president Smirnov borders on a veritable personality cult.
In 1991 and again in 1992 with renewed intensity Moldovan authorities attempted to subdue Transnistrian separatism by force. These attempts failed, mostly due to the military support lent by the Russian (former Soviet) 14th Army stationed in the region. See Charles King, The Moldovans: Romania, Russia, and the Politics of Culture (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2000), 178208. 12 See, for example, Michael Wines, Trans-Dniester Nation Resents Shady Reputation, New York Times, 5 March 2001. 13 For example, the flag of the DMR is the old flag of the Moldavian SSR and statues of Lenin and other monuments of the Soviet epoch are ubiquitous in the Transnistrian capital Tiraspol. However, it should be recalled that Lenin statues are fairly typical in many provincial Russian (as well as Ukrainian and Belorussian) towns. For a sense of the cult of the president one can visit the official Transnistrian press-agency Olvia-Press at <http://www.olvia.idknet.com/>.
11

416

V LADIMIR S OLONARI

A strong awareness of the Transnistrian regimes lack of legitimacy on the part of its leaders has led them to employ history-writing as a means of inculcating a new identity and loyalty among the local population. History was accorded high priority by the separatist authorities immediately following the proclamation of Transnistrian independence. In March 1991, by the decision of the socalled Supreme Soviet of the Dnestr Soviet Socialist Republic (later rebaptized DMR), a working group on the history of Dnestria was established at the University in Tiraspol (the DMR capital). This body was given the task to 14 create a full and comprehensive picture of the history of [the] land. Since 1997, an annual historical almanac has been published in Tiraspol and dozens of 15 articles, essays, and books produced on the history of Dnestria. In 2000 and 2002, The History of the Dnestr Moldovan Republic, a twovolume work with a second volume consisting of two substantial books, was 16 published in Tiraspol. This collective work was a product of the joint efforts of the Tiraspol historians many of whom had moved to Tiraspol from Chisinau in the aftermath of the 199192 military conflict and had previously worked in the academic institutions of the Moldavian SSR, primarily the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences and Chisinau (later Moldovan) State University. Participating as well were a number of Russian historians from MosVladislav Iakimovich Grosul et al., eds., Istoriia Pridnestrovskoi Moldavskoi Respubliki (Tiraspol: RIO PGU, 2000), 1: 8, cited hereafter as the History in the text and as Istoriia in the notes. 15 Each issue of the almanac is released on the eve of the Republic Day holiday on September 2. In a thorough historical bibliography appended to the two volumes of the History I was able to count no less than 173 articles, monographs, collections of documents, and memoirs on the history of the region published in the last 11 years. One can agree with the authors of the History that during the last decades of the 20th century more research on the history of Dnestria was accomplished than in all preceding years (with the proviso, of course that those publications are accepted as research). Istoriia, 1: 9). The most numerous are texts devoted to the events of the last decade or so, i.e., to the history of the separatist movement, the ensuing bloody conflict, and the so-called struggle for independence and international recognition. Significantly, separatist leaders themselves, such as President Igor Nikolaevich Smirnov; Grigorii Stepanovich Maracutsa, head of the Transnistrian Supreme Soviet; Viktor Vasil evich Diukarev, chair of the local soviet in the city of Dubossary (Dubasari) in 199192; and Anna Zakharevna Volkova, Smirnovs deputy when he headed the Transnistrian Supreme Soviet in 199091 and later Smirnovs aide, have all contributed to this avalanche of publications on the history of the DMR. 16 Istoriia, vol. 1, cited in full in n. 14; vol. 2, bks. 1 and 2 (Tiraspol: RIO PGU, 2001). Despite the date indicated, the bulk of the print run was brought out in 2002. Publication of this second volume was timed to correspond with the so-called presidential elections in Transnistria in December 2001, held in an atmosphere of increased tension with Chisina u . After some hesitation I have decided to render the names of figures from right-bank Moldova in their official Romanian form and transliterate the names of Transnistrians and Russians in accordance with Library of Congress transliteration of Russian, since most Transnistrians hold dual citizenship of the DMR and Russia and almost never that of RM.
14

C REATING A PEOPLE : A C ASE S TUDY IN POST -S OVIET H ISTORY -W RITING

17

417

cow academic establishments who shared their views. Irrespective of their current location, however, all of them were trained during the Soviet era, work in the Russian language, and mostly follow the Soviet historiographical tradition, in contrast to their Romanian-speaking counterparts from Moldova, who adopted a 18 Romanian historiographical perspective. Significantly, chapters in the History dealing with the period after the proclamation of independence are written by the separatist leaders and functionaries of the Transnistrian state, such as Anna Zakharevna Volkova (referred to above), Minister of Justice, Viktor Alekseevich Balala, Major General Vladimir Ivanovich Atamaniuk, Deputy of the Supreme Soviet Vladimir Lukich Bodnar, and others. The avowed unanimity of state officials and allegedly objective researchers lays bare the official status of the text produced. Clearly, the text does not meet the accepted standard of an academic publication. It contains no references and avoids mention, let alone analysis of any possible differing interpretations. Nor is it intended as a textbook for school or university students, who are still supposed to study some aspects of the history of Moldavia within the framework of the course on the history of the father19 land. Obviously, the purpose of this enterprise is neither academic nor educational, but rather ideological. What these volumes ultimately produce is an uninterrupted narrative on the history of something called Dnestria. Its sheer magnitude (the first volume contains no less than 590 pages, and the two parts of the second are over 900 pages, for a combined total of almost 1,500 pages) legitimizes, or at least is believed to legitimize DMR as an also-state. The underlying similarities between the conditions under which the Stalinist History of the USSR and Transnistrian History of the Dnestr Moldavian Republic
Among the former the most prominent are Nikolai Vadimovich Babilunga, chair of the working group on the history of Pridnestrov e, and his colleague Boris Grigorevich Bomeshko. Among the latter are Vladislav Grosul, a department head at the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences (and son of the Moldovan Soviet historical patriarch and first chairman of the Academy of Sciences of the Moldavian SSR Iakim Sergeevich Grosul), and his collaborator from the same institution in Moscow, Gennadii Aleksandrovich Sanin. Participants also included some historians currently living and working in Chisina u , although not in the academic establishment, such as Petr S ornikov and Alla Iurevna Skvortova. 18 I discuss this perspective in Solonari, Narrative, Identity, State. 19 This course is mostly centered on Russia and Ukraine, but contains some aspects of Moldovan history deemed appropriate by Transnistrian educators. On the curriculum, see Istoriia: Tipovaia programma dlia obshcheobrazovatelnykh uchrezhdenii (511 klassy). Prilozheniie k zhurnalu Pedagogicheskii vestnik Pridnestroviia (Tiraspol : RITs GIPK, 2000). Teachers have at their disposal lectures on the history on Moldavia published in Tiraspol in 199297 by Nikolai Babilunga and Boris Grigor evich Bomeshko, Kurs lektsii po istorii Moldavii: Lektsii IXI (Tiraspol: n. p., 1992 97) (on one 1997 lecture the publisher RIO PGPU is indicated), and also routinely use old Soviet textbooks on the history of the Moldavian SSR.
17

418

V LADIMIR S OLONARI

were produced are striking. In both cases the regimes lacked legitimacy and were acutely aware of it, as well as of the external threat to their very existence; in both cases close cooperation between historians and authorities was the order of the day, with the former agreeing with the latter about the political significance and 20 ultimate objective of their activity. I would even suggest that, in the Transnistrian case, cooperation between historians and politicians was more organic than the cooperation during the heyday of Stalinism, precisely because both the former and the latter were schooled in Soviet educational establishments and thus had common views on how history should be written, talked about, and used. This makes an analysis of the Transnistrian historical narrative especially relevant for understanding the broader issues of Soviet culture and Leninist 21 legacies.
The Soviet Historical Master Narrative

I will now elucidate my understanding of the basic structure of the Soviet master 22 narrative on the history of the USSR and its constituent republics. In fact, from the late 1930s on Soviets talked about the history of the USSR and its constituent republics in terms of two basic narratives: one revolving around the ethnona23 tion and the other revolving around class struggle. In the first narrative the 24 main hero is the people (narod), understood as a community of origin. The people originates (derives or stems proiskhodit), suffers (from foreign domination), fights (for independence), creates. The activity of the peopleas-nation is invariably outwardly oriented, and even when the people creates culture, it is implied that it is mostly to be used as a proof of its dignity and creative might to the external world. The outward orientation of the activity of the people is predicated by its existence as a collective individual among other collective individuals, which themselves, it is assumed, normally have the
This, of course, does not imply that the Transnistrian case has involved physical control or terror comparable to that of the Soviet 1930s. But that was a pioneering, original enterprise, while the Transnistrian one has been epigonic. History repeats itself first as tragedy and then as farce. 21 Ken Jowitt, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 22 My basic structure is very close to Katerina Clarks master plot, but I use my terminology because, as I will show below, there were two plots and two discourses running alongside one another in Soviet historical narratives. 23 I borrow this term from Walker Connor, Ethnonationalism: The Quest for Understanding (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). 24 According to Vladimir Ivanovich Dal, the first meaning of narod was those that were born ( chto narodilos ). Dal, Tolkovyi slovar zhivogo velikorusskogo iazyka (St. Petersburg and Moscow: M. O. Volf, 1911), 2: 1201.
20

C REATING A PEOPLE : A C ASE S TUDY IN POST -S OVIET H ISTORY -W RITING

25

419

same motivations. Abnormally, however, they may acquire and demonstrate aggressive and predatory intentions, including towards the people, and this is where the danger arises, the fight for national independence becomes necessary, etc. The story, then, is that the people an entity that is always the same over time encounters and successfully overcomes multiple obstacles in its journey through history, thereby proving its invariable essence. This is recognizable as a romance, or, more precisely, what Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin calls the adventure novel of ordeal. In this sub-genre the sameness of the hero in the face of 26 all trials and tribulations is in fact the main idea. However, in its pure and simple form that plot was only employed in the history of the Russian people, which was simultaneously supposed to comprise a large portion of the history of the USSR. When Soviet historians talked about the history of the non-Russian constituent republics, they had to subvert and undermine the integrity of this plot: the formation of the USSR (and, by implication, the expansion of the Russian empire) had to be presented as a consummation of history itself, in the course of which all non-Russian peoples of the USSR came to recognize in Russia their natural protector and benefactor (the friendship of peoples myth). This is why Soviet national histories lacked the robustness characteristic of unashamed nationalistic narratives, and were never able to produce the kind of strong identity based on loyalty to the regime that Soviet authorities craved. An assertion that the second basic narrative in Soviet historical discourse concerned class warfare comes as no surprise, I suppose, since Marxism as a doctrine from the start came to be firmly associated with the thesis that the history
This presentation of the nation is common to the nationalist tradition both in Europe and beyond. For example, Richard Handlers analysis of nationalist discourse in Quebec shows how the nation is depicted as a living individual, a living creature, and a biological species (Handler, Nationalism and the Politics of Culture in Quebec [Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988], 40). See also Katherine Verderys summary of the Romanian nationalist tradition: This collective individual acts as an entity: it does things, fights for its freedom, asserts its dignity, participates in world culture, possesses legitimate pride, rejects cynicism, and so forth. Such a collective individual generally also possesses: it has a culture and a bounded territory and a character or spirit (Verdery, What was Socialism, and What Comes Next? [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996] , 73). I would like to suggest in this context that it is indispensable to use the English the people in the singular as an equivalent of the Russian narod, in order not to lose this vision of a collective individual. 26 Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes Towards a Historical Poetics, in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays , trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981), 86 ff. This distinctive correspondence of an identity with a particular self is the organizing center of the human image in the Greek romance (105, italics in orig.).
25

420

V LADIMIR S OLONARI
27

of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle. Further clarification, however, is needed as to how this discourse was employed in mature Soviet historical narratives. In its pure and relatively sophisticated form we encounter it in those historical treatments devoted to the history of the Russian revolutions and Civil War; because these had to be written as if Lenin was always right, his original language of class war was the only one conceivable for those 28 events. However, because of the complexity and impenetrability of this discourse or due to the nature of class analysis as a double-edged sword, which might be 29 turned against the regime itself after the late 1930s the discourse of class war30 fare was radically recontextualized and simplified. In the mature Soviet historical narrative it appears as a struggle of the majority of the people (or simply 31 the people) against a handful of exploiters. In the second basic Soviet historical narrative, the main hero was also the people, narod, but in another hypostasis: it appeared not as an ethnonation but
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New York: International Publishers, 1948), 9. 28 As George M. Enteen persuasively demonstrated, it was Mikhail Nikolaevich Pokrovskii who first invented this discursive strategy in the 1920s, and despite all the vitriol later directed against the Pokrovskii school it was never reconsidered. See Enteen, The Soviet Scholar-Bureaucrat: M. N. Pokrovskii and the Society of Marxist Historians (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1978), 5263. Ironically, these are exactly the parts of the curriculum that Soviet students persistently found impenetrable. See Brandenberger, Short Course to Modernity, 293318. 29 That class analysis language could be strategically used against the Soviet regime has been known at least since Milovan Djilass The New Class (New York: Praeger, 1957), but Lev Davidovich Trotskiis analysis of the Stalinist regime in The Revolution Betrayed (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran and Co., 1937) also comes very close to doing so. Stephen Kotkin has suggested that Soviet elites in the 1930s were concerned about the possible use of class warfare language against them, and Stalin deliberately used it to legitimate terror. See his Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 34154. 30 As Basil B. Bernstein stresses, pedagogical discourse (and Soviet historical narratives were fundamentally pedagogical in the sense that they were intended to serve the indoctrination of the masses) is constructed [in accordance with] a recontextualising principle which selectively appropriates, relocates, refocuses and relates other discourses to constitute its own order (Bernstein, Pedagogy, Symbolic Control, and Identity: Theory, Research, Critique, rev. ed. [Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2000], 33). The shifting official discourse on the nature of the Soviet regime, which after the adoption of the 1936 Stalin Constitution increasingly talked of itself more as a state of the people of the whole than a dictatorship of the proletariat, was bound to entail this recontextualization. 31 See Serhy Yekelchyks informative discussion of the declining role of the category of class in the 1930s, especially after the adoption of the 1936 Stalin Constitution, in Yekelchyk, Stalinist Patriotism as Imperial Discourse, 53. The positions of Sheila Fitzpatrick and Ronald Gregor Suny are persuasively analyzed.
27

C REATING A PEOPLE : A C ASE S TUDY IN POST -S OVIET H ISTORY -W RITING

32

421

as the toiling-and-exploited-masses. In this incarnation, the people invariably suffers from oppressors (feudals, landlords, the bourgeoisie, state officials, exploiting classes, autocracy, plutocracy, etc.) and fights them for its emancipation, which, however, always eludes it until the final victory, i.e., the Socialist Revolution and the installation of Soviet power. The people as toiling-andexploited-masses performs its role under the guise of peasants, working people, laborers, underdogs ( nizy), the masses, etc. It is supposed that in this journey through history, the people manages to accumulate experience by drawing lessons from its failings, and this is what makes its final victory possi33 ble. The narrative is of the same genre, romance, but of a different species, this time a Bildungsroman, whose central theme is that of becoming, re-education, 34 and rebirth in the midst of various ordeals. If the narrative on the people-as-ethnonation was meant symbolically to describe international relations, i.e., relations between nations-as-states, as well as to justify the structures of institutionalized ethnicity in the Soviet Union, then the discourse of class warfare was to account for the Communist Partys ascent to power. By re-educating itself, the masses brought its fullest expression, its living essence, i.e., the Party, to power; or, it would be better to say, the people itself came to power by empowering the Party, and thus achieved the promise of history, the fulfillment and fullness of time. After that moment history effectively 35 stops: the plot has reached its denouement, and the hero is reborn. All this explains the incredible boredom that grips anybody trying to read the Soviet narrative on Soviet history per se there is no plot in it except the infinite repetition of achievements under the Partys leadership. The discursive strategy employed by the Soviets in this respect may best be described as transferThat the same dramatis persona may play more than one role in the same text is a commonplace in structural analysis, of course. See Vladimir Iakovlevich Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, trans. Laurence Scott (Bloomington, IN: Research Center, Indiana University, 1958), 73. On the polysemy of narod, see Sergei Ivanovich Ozhegov, Slovar russkogo iazyka (Moscow: Russkii iazyk, 1977), 355. 33 Cf. Lenin: [I]n all verity Russia earned Marxism the only correct revolutionary theory through suffering at the cost of unheard-of anguish and sacrifices, revolutionary heroism unseen before. (Vladimir Ilich Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5th ed. [Moscow: Politizdat, 1970], 41: 8), italics in orig., translation mine. 34 Bakhtin, Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel, in The Dialogic Imagination, 23435, and idem, Discourse in the Novel, in ibid., 39293. Katerina Clark calls the master plot of Soviet novels a highly politicized version of Bildungsroman, but adds that this comparison cannot be taken too far because of the highly ritualized character of the Soviet texts (Clark, The Soviet Novel, 17). This is probably true of the official historical narratives as well. 35 One can easily see here a clear analogy with what Katerina Clark terms a Soviet dialectic of spontaneity and consciousness. See Clark, The Soviet Novel, 1524.
32

422

V LADIMIR S OLONARI

ence of their own recent past to the epic great times that conferred an exalted status on all who played a major part in them. In the 1930s these epic times were represented by the Revolution and Civil War, and later the period of socialist construction and the Great Patriotic War were added to the list. The main characteristic of an epic time is that it was as exactly as it ought to be it 36 is both the idealized past and the idealized future. Soviet historical narratives had a pronounced flavor of inevitability and naturalness about what the Soviet writers usually referred to as historical process. As Dobrenko showed in his masterful essay on Stalins historical imagination, the Soviet dictator created the stylistic means by which Soviet historians systematically transformed history into logic, logic into history, past into program. The effect is achieved by purely stylistic means. He continues: [L]anguage transforms history from chaos into cosmos. But language transforms this cosmos into a golden cage: from this wholeness, from this harmony one cannot escape. Syntactic constructions themselves are links in the chain that 37 holds the reader by a deadly grip in the realm of socialism. I would like to stress that the Soviet historical master narrative was devoid of any other meanings than those contained in the two narratives just discussed. It could not have accepted the idea of the advancement of liberties (emancipation) as the meaning of history, which has been so characteristic of the liberal historical discourse since the formation of the Whig historiographical tradition in the early 38 19th century. Nor could it have been focused on the notion of the growth and gradual perfection of public institutions, which was the linchpin of the dominant state school of pre-revolutionary Russian historiography. In fact, those two modes of presentation were closely connected. The liberal understanding of progress implied the increasing perfection of public institutions; by the same token, the idea of perfecting those institutions meant that they were supposed to become more and more liberal. For the party hierarchy, whose pedigree included the radical smashing of the exploiters state, there could be no value in the development of public institutions before the Revolution. Any talk about progress before that entailed either denunciation of it as a fake progress, as a maneuver of the malignant exploiters, or its back-door legitimization as developments conducive to the intensification of class warfare. Finally, progress could also be presented as an accumulation of the power of the state, i.e., of the people-as-

36 Clark, The Soviet Novel, 40, following the well-known Bakhtinian concept of epic times (Bakhtin, Epic and Novel, in The Dialogic Imagination, 1322). 37 Dobrenko, Mezhdu istoriei i proshlym, 663, 665. 38 On the centrality of progress in 19th-century British thinking, see Peter J. Bowler, The Invention of Progress: The Victorians and the Past (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1989).

C REATING A PEOPLE : A C ASE S TUDY IN POST -S OVIET H ISTORY -W RITING

39

423

ethnonation, of the community as opposed to individual human beings. This is why the Russian pre-revolutionary historiographical tradition, when retained, 40 was reinterpreted in a more populist and nationalist spirit. It is very probable that this conception of history remained in a position, to borrow from Pierre Bourdieu, of structural homology to the real world as ex41 perienced by Soviet citizens. The mass of ordinary Soviet people was confronted by an all-powerful and oppressive state, and it was only natural for them 42 to perceive reality in terms of a radical us versus them dichotomy. On the other hand, ethnicity was the all-pervasive and indelible mark every Soviet sub43 ject was supposed to bear from the cradle to the grave. A radically simple and populist view of history with constant reference to ethnicity was obviously a readily accessible discourse for the Soviet populace. Stalinist history textbooks were thus both the response to the perceived craving of that populace for the identity-forming discourse and a means of manipulating it in the direction desired by the authorities. Undoubtedly, the two discourses of people-as-ethnonation and class warfare are not readily compatible, and it took a lot of effort for Soviet historians and their overseers to construct a more or less digestible composite narrative. Be that as it may, with the publication of Andrei Vasil evich Shestakovs Short Course of the History of the USSR in 1937, a basic discursive device was created to resolve 44 the two. Starting with the treatment of the early 19th century the narrator accomplishes a deft and subtle polarity shift: from presenting the history of the
According to Robert A. Nisbet, progress as movement towards liberty and progress as accumulation of power were for centuries two main and competing understandings of historical consciousness. See Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress, rev. ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1994), 179298. 40 Natalia Mykolaivna Iakovenko convincingly demonstrates this thesis in respect to Ukrainian historiography in her Modifications du mythe national ukrainien dans lhistoriographie, in Ukraine, renaissance dun mythe national, 11730. 41 Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), esp. 163228. 42 On the prevalence of this us versus them worldview, see Sarah Davies, Popular Opinion in Stalins Russia: Terror, Propaganda, and Dissent, 19341941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 12444, and Elena Iur evna Zubkova, Poslevoennoe sovetskoe obshchestvo politika i povsednevnost, 19451953 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2000), 11719. 43 On the role of ascribed ethnicity in the Soviet Union, see, inter alia, Terry Martin, Modernization or Neo-Traditionalism: Ascribed Nationality and Soviet Primordialism, in Stalinism: New Approaches, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick (New York: Routledge, 2000), 34867, and David D. Laitin, Identity in Formation: The Russian-Speaking Populations in the Near Abroad (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 4882. 44 Andrei Vasilevich Shestakov, Kratkii kurs istorii SSSR: Uchebnik dlia 3-go i 4-go klassov (Moscow: n. p., 1937).
39

424

V LADIMIR S OLONARI

Russian state and its territorial expansion (people-as-ethnonation), a process only sporadically interrupted by social explosions, he begins to focus on those social and revolutionary movements in the Russian empire leading inexorably to the October Revolution (class warfare), thus allowing the party hierarchy to claim a 45 pedigree at once revolutionary and imperial. What was difficult with respect to the Russocentric history of the USSR was impossible when it came to the histories of various national republics, because in those cases the discourse on ethnonation had to be thwarted even earlier in order to allow for the presentation of the supposedly voluntary joining of this or that people and its national territory to the Russian empire. As I have shown elsewhere, the polysemy of the key word narod, which means both nation and people, allowed Soviet historians to relate the history of the various union republics of the Soviet Union in a way suitable to the Party and the Soviet state, in 46 part because they often substituted the two different senses of narod. Creating the Dnestr People We are now in a position to consider how the discursive devices first invented by Stalinist historians in the late 1930s have been used by contemporary Transnistrians to recount the history of the DMR. From the start there was an immediate problem for Transnistrians to address. As we have already seen, since the late 1930s it was narod understood in its first sense, as ethnonation, that came to be foregrounded by the Soviets as the main historical agent. This option, however, was not available for Transnistrians; because of the multi-ethnic character of the regions population, it could in no way have been presented as an ethnona47 tion. The problem has been further confounded by the fact that the discourse of class struggle has also lost its appeal and explanatory value for them (I will address this issue below), and as a result the usefulness and centrality of the people-as-nation as an emplotting device has been bound to increase. The determination with which the narrators cling to the tried and true formulas of the first
Brandenberger, Short Course to Modernity, 7677. See Solonari, Narrative, Identity, State. 47 Significantly, it is the ardent critics of the Transnistrian regime in the guise of Moldovan (or Romanian) nationalists who decry the putative Transnistrian state as illegitimate because it has no obvious people (meaning, of course, people-as-ethnonation) as its bearer. See, for example, the interview with Mircea Snegur, then Moldovan president, in the parliamentary daily Sfatul Tarii on 15 November 1991: As for the putative Dniestr Republic, consider that a republic in which 40 percent of the population are Moldovans, 26 percent Ukrainians and 25 percent Russians is nothing other than nonsense. What kind of a republic is it? Would it be another Moldovan one? Such a republic already exists. Russian? But there is the RSFSR. Ukrainian? What for, if next door there is Ukraine? Cited in Cojocaru, Separatismul n slujba Imperiului, 158.
46 45

C REATING A PEOPLE : A C ASE S TUDY IN POST -S OVIET H ISTORY -W RITING

425

basic narrative in the Soviet historiographical tradition is remarkable. Effectively, they create a surrogate ethnonation, a substitute that serves an analogous function in their history. We now proceed to see how they do it.
Territorial Community?

Throughout the work, the authors of the History of the Dnestr Moldovan Republic define the primary historical agent, the people or narod, not in terms of ethnicity but in terms of territory. To the dismay of the authors, however, what Dnestria is territorially is less than clear. Until at least 1924 there was no administrative, let alone political, entity even remotely related to todays DMR. Furthermore, up to the end of the 18th century the territory of what is now known as DMR was divided between different states, and in the middle ages it was a site of almost constant wars between Lithuania and later the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth on the one hand and the Crimean Khanate and the Sublime Porte on the other. Only in 1791, when the southern part of the territory between the Bug and the Dnestr was taken over by the Russian empire from the Sublime Porte and the northern part of it (Podolia) was annexed from Poland during the second partition, did Dnestria come under the sovereignty of the same state. But even then the territory of todays DMR belonged to different oblasts and gubernias , and those administrative borders were frequently subject to radical revisions. It was only in 1924 that something remotely resembling the present-day DMR appeared on the map in the guise of the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (MASSR, part of the Ukrainian SSR). The reasons for the creation of MASSR were almost totally political. Since 1918 Bessarabia, the territory bounded by the Dnestr and Prut rivers (the latter a tributary of Danube) belonged to Romania. (Bessarabia, annexed by Russia from the Ottomans in 1812, had since the early 15th century been controlled by Istanbul politically and militarily, but administratively it stayed inside the Moldovan principality, itself a vassal of Istanbul.) The Soviets never recognized the Romanian incorporation of Bessarabia in 1918, calling it robbery and instigating an anti-Romanian communist underground in the province. The formation of the Moldavian ASSR on the territory adjacent to Bessarabia, where there was a Moldovan ethnic minority of about 30 per cent of the population (not even a plurality), was a clearly political act aimed at putting additional pressure on Romanian authori48 ties. However, the territory of MASSR after 1924 was still not commensurate

48

Istoriia, vol. 2, bk. 1, 95. The best analysis available on the formation of the MASSR and cultural policies pursued by the Soviets is in King, The Moldovans, 6388; MASSR was just one example of

426

V LADIMIR S OLONARI

to that of the present-day DMR it was much larger, at 8,100 square kilometers, but at the same time never included the town of Bender, which is now under the de facto control of the DMR separatist leaders. In 1940 when Bessarabia was taken over from Romania by the Soviets, MASSR was dismembered; six out of its 14 districts (raiony) were included into the newly-formed Moldavian (Union) Soviet Socialist Republic, while the remaining eight were transferred back to the Ukraine. The first six made up 45.9 per cent of the overall territory 49 of the MASSR and 51.9 per cent of its population. However, even this was not the end of the story, because from 199092 a secessionist movement enveloped not only the mostly Russian-speaking left bank of the Moldavian SSR, but also the right-bank city of Bender (where Russian speakers were also in a clear majority), while some Moldovan-speaking villages on the left bank resisted separatist pressures and stayed with the legitimate authorities of Moldova. Thus the territory of what is now called the Dnestr Moldovan Republic was carved up. There is no doubt that the de facto border between Moldova as such and the DMR was drawn in 199192 mostly according to ethno-demographic realities: those localities predominantly populated by Russian-speaking Slavs switched to the DMR and those where ethnic Moldovans predominated remained under Chisinau .50 However, both sides emphatically deny this obvious ethnic dimen51 sion of the Transnistrian conundrum. Furthermore, the Transnistrian republic is officially called Moldovan, obviously in a symbolic gesture of goodwill to the left-bank Moldovans. Still, the Transnistrian leaders are defensive about their decision to insert the term Moldovan in the name of their state it certainly calls into question their legitimacy as the defenders of the Russian52 speaking population. This uneasiness is reflected in contradictory passages in the History concerning MASSR and its relationship to the DMR. In the introduction to the second
the Kremlins Piedmont principle policies of putting additional pressure on Soviet neighbors: see Martin, Affirmative Action Empire, 36, 27475, 313. 49 Istoriia, vol. 2, bk. 1, 191. Bessarabia itself was dismembered; its southern part and a slice of the north was transferred to the Ukraine, while the rest served as the bulk of the new Union Moldavian SSR. For excellent maps, see King, The Moldovans, xxxxxxiii. 50 There are Moldovan left-bank villages that with varying degrees of willingness recognized the DMR, but, more than any other factor, this reflects the greater impact of Russification and communist ideology among left-bank Moldovans than among those from Bessarabia. 51 See, for example, Cojocaru, Separatismul n slujba Imperiului, 169, and Istoriia , vol. 2, bk. 2, 36. For convincing rejoinders to these stances, see Pl Kolst and Andrei Malgin, The Transnistrian Republic: A Case of Politicized Regionalism, Nationalities Papers 26: 1 (1998), 10328, and William Crowther, Ethnic Politics in the Post-Communist Transition in Moldova, in ibid., 14764. 52 See, for example, Anna Zakharovna Volkova, Lider (Tiraspol: n. p., 2001), 5152.

C REATING A PEOPLE : A C ASE S TUDY IN POST -S OVIET H ISTORY -W RITING

427

volume the authors salute the formation of the MASSR as an expression of the 53 will of the Moldavian and non-Moldavian population of Soviet Dnestria. But when it comes to recounting its history, the tone becomes denunciatory. It is stressed that the local population was never consulted and that the reasons for the establishment of the MASSR were purely political, having nothing to do with the interests of the locals. Figures on the demographic composition of the population were rigged by those in Kiev and Moscow (mostly political migrs from Bessarabia and Romania proper) who pushed the project forward against the resistance of the Ukrainian leaders and some influential Bolsheviks from Moscow, thus increasing the proportion of ethnic Moldovans at the expense of 54 Ukrainians and Russians. Further on, paradoxically, the dismemberment of the MASSR in 1940 is bewailed as a liquidation of the first republic in Dnestria and censured as legally invalid, because contrary to the legislation of the USSR, Ukrainian SSR, and MASSR, the action was taken without holding a referendum in the entities concerned. The Moldavian SSR is described as having been artificially created by the Stalinist regime, and this is said to have led to the origin of Transnistrian conflict in 50 years time. Finally, those sections of the work treating the events of the early 1990s suggest that the declaration of Transnistrian independence was nothing other than the restoration of the first Dnestr repub55 lic. The notion of Dnestria as a territory thus turns out to be elusive. Its boundaries appear blurred, and when they are delimited (in 1924 or 1940 or even in 1991), this delimitation is effected in accordance with ethnic criteria, and in a very confusing manner at that. However, for the sake of fairness it should be noted that this is not an unusual situation. Ever since Ernest Renans famous 1882 lecture we have known that nationness is inextricably connected to the act of forgetting (whether deliberate or not), and thus is inseparable from the inconsistencies of grand narratives 56 of national histories. If even a certaine ide de France implies inconsistencies as to where its historical boundaries lie, this is even more the case for new states formed, say, in the aftermath of decolonization, with their obviously arbitrary
Istoriia, vol. 2, bk. 1, 6. Ibid., 8398. 55 Ibid., vol. 2, bk. 2, 3738. This strand in the Transnistrian self-image and self-presentation was visible right from the first days of the new entity. See Cojocaru, Separatismul n slujba Imperiului, 4950. 56 As Renan put it, the essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things (Ernest Renan , What Is a Nation? in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha [New York: Routledge, 1990], 11. I subscribe to Benedict Andersons reading of this remarkable text (Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism [London: Verso, 1983], 199201).
54 53

428
57

V LADIMIR S OLONARI

borders. In this respect, Transnistrians appear to be in the respectable company of old and new states and nations (as well as those aspiring to join them).
Civilization

That having been said, it appears that the attempt to construct the notion of the Dnestr people as a territorial community is not particularly successful in the History. It functions as a kind of an empty shell that is filled with content only as the narrative proceeds. Substantively, then, the reader gets the idea of what the Dnestr people is during the course of the narrative. According to Bourdieu, regionalist discourse is a performative discourse which aims to impose as legitimate a new definition of the frontiers and to get people to know and recognize the region which is thus delimited in opposition to 58 the dominant definition. This describes exactly how, as a last resort, the problem of agency is finally resolved in the History. First, the agent is named the Dnestr people; secondly, it is presented as performing, i.e., doing something in history. This narrative creates what Edward Said has called a structure of attitude and reference, which, if disentangled from the narrative, gives us the idea 59 of how the Dnestr people is imagined. Dnestria is envisioned as belonging to the Orthodox Slavic civilization, and more specifically, as lying on its borders as its outpost, having suppos60 edly played this role always. Slavs are reported to have been the earliest settlers in the region among all those etnosy or narody that currently populate the region. In particular, Moldovans are said to have settled there at least a thousand years later than the Slavs. Slavs are depicted as appearing or settling, by implication as peaceful agricultural populations, while others are mostly invading, conquering, and plundering, with the exception of the Moldovans, who are also considered peaceful tillers. Especially negative treatment is allotted to nomads like the Huns, Cumans, and Tatars, who are said to represent a threat to the Slavic civilization. The Dnestr is called a distinctive frontier dividing the 61 Christian West from the innumerable hordes of Asian nomads. That the
57

On nationalist histories in post-colonial states see, e.g., Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), and Ayesha Jalal, Conjuring Pakistan: History as Official Imagining, International Journal of Middle East Studies 27: 1 (1995), 7389. 58 Pierre Bourdieu, Identity and Representation: Elements for a Critical Reflection of the Idea of Region, in Language and Symbolic Power, 223 (emphasis in orig.). 59 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 62. 60 See esp. Istoriia , 1: 5, 6, 52730. 61 Ibid., 528.

C REATING A PEOPLE : A C ASE S TUDY IN POST -S OVIET H ISTORY -W RITING

429

local Slavs are peaceful is taken for granted; when Cossack atrocities are recounted, the authors feel the need to excuse them with reference to the mores of 62 the epoch: every people was atrocious in war. No such excuse is deemed necessary for the others they were brutish by definition. From at least the mid-12th century Dnestria is considered part of Galician Rus a feudal state that Ukrainians and Russians now claim as part of their 63 historical heritage. From this point on the idea of East Slavic statehood and the struggle for its preservation or restoration becomes a persistent theme in the account of the turbulent period following the 13th-century Mongol invasion of Russian principalities up to the late-18th-century Russian takeover of Dnestria. In this secular struggle the Poles are viewed more as a nuisance than as an ally. In 1471, when King Casimir IV established Polish rule in Podolia and in what is now known as Ukraine in general, it is reported to have led to the dying 64 out of the whole era of ancient Russian and Ukrainian [sic] statehood. Polish rulers are described as incapable of guaranteeing security to the Ukrainian people (in this context obviously including also Transnistrians), instead exploiting 65 the local population and imposing Catholicism. No wonder Ukraine finally came to see the establishment of its own state as the sole possible way to solve the problem that it was facing (mainly the need to defend itself against the 66 Turks). However, Ukrainians were not able to wrest their independence from the Poles by themselves (in their struggle Dnestria was reported to have played the role of shielding Ukraine from the Poles). They asked the Russian tsar to 67 accept them under his sublime hand in 1653. It is regretted that Ukrainian lands to the west of Dnepr-River stayed under the suzerainty of the Polish Commonwealth after eastern Ukraine joined Russia: because of the Polish-Ottoman and civil wars in Podolia the spark of life in 68 Dnestria all but died out. But the people of right-bank Ukraine refused to recognize the authority of the Polish Commonwealth, so that popular movements (the haidamaki) in the 18th century led to what is described as the formation of a multinational block of the Orthodox against Polish Catholics and

62 63

Ibid., 170, 190. Ibid., 95101. 64 Ibid., 129. 65 Ibid., 150, 207, 22729. 66 Ibid.,150. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid.,172.

430

V LADIMIR S OLONARI
69

members of the Uniate Church(!) Clearly, the liquidation of Polish statehood 70 was brewing. No qualms are expressed over the second partition of Poland in 1793, or over the annexation of Crimea ten years earlier. On the contrary, they are presented as the triumph of historical justice and as turning points in the history of Dnestria. No words are spared to praise the beneficial effects of the adhesion of Dnestr lands to the Russian empire, which had the same faith (as the Transnistrians). This act is reported to have led to the termination of destructive, centuries-long armed conflicts in the Dnestr territory, guaranteeing peace and stability for 125 years (i.e., until 1917). In the 19th century, the adhesion secured access for Transnistrian products to an all-Russian market and made the advanced Russian culture available to the local population. Finally, it is concluded that as a result of those 125 years of peaceful development inside the Russian empire the process of the formation of the Orthodox-Slavic civilization [in 71 Dnestria] was completed. What does this story say about Transnistrian identity? As we have seen, this identity is Slavic, and more specifically East Slavic, comprising both Russians and Ukrainians (and also implicitly Belorussians), but excluding Poles (and implicitly all other Catholic Slavs). Moldovans are tolerated but mostly invisible. In this dyad or triad of East Slavic peoples Russians are clearly seen as the most powerful and resourceful of them and, therefore, as the natural protectors (and, by implication, rulers). What unites them is not only ethnic proximity but also their shared Orthodox faith. The Orthodox theme is very prominent in the History. The story of its advent to the region is not recounted, and this only helps to imagine Orthodoxy as natural to the local population (while all other confessions are always imposed from the outside by aliens). When it is grudgingly admitted that at some point in the second half of the 18th century the Uniate Church came to predominate in the northern part of Dnestria, this fact is attributed to the pressure of Polish authorities. It is also asserted that, despite all this, the Uniate Church did not root itself in the region: just after joining Russia all the Uniate parishes switched to Orthodoxy (clearly, this claim is as convincing as its opposite, i.e. that it was Russian pressure that persuaded Transnistrians to revert to Orthodoxy). (East) Slavism and Orthodoxy are thus imagined as two basic and equally indispensable characteristics of the civilization to which Dnestria supposedly belongs. The secularization of the Orthodox Churchs assets under Romanian
69 70

Ibid.,164, 211. Ibid.,175. 71 Ibid., 369, 435, 442, 452, 502, 509, 514, 516, 52930.

C REATING A PEOPLE : A C ASE S TUDY IN POST -S OVIET H ISTORY -W RITING

431

Prince Alexandru Ion Cuza (185966) and its nationalization (i.e., the banning of services in Church Slavonic and the Churchs subordination to the secular authorities) are presented as blasphemy and as evidence of Romanias betrayal of the Slavic-Orthodox civilization to which it originally belonged. (The First or Old Romanian Kingdom was formed in 1859 by unifying the principalities of Moldova and Wallachia. Bessarabia, the eastern part of Moldova, was, as mentioned above, a part of the Russian empire after 1812.) Because monks trying to escape persecution by the Romanian state fled to Dnestria, it once again reaf72 firmed its role as a bulwark of Orthodoxy. The notion of a bulwark of Slavic Orthodox civilization thus functions as a substitute for ethnonation an intriguing case of nationalist logic applied to an avowedly multi-ethnic community. However, it is not a perfect substitute. While the status of a separate ethnonation almost automatically justifies claims to an independent nation-state, this cannot be said about a bulwark, which as such does not imply an independent standing. Transnistrian identity is thus discursively related to a bigger project, implying either a restoration of the Russian imperial state or the consolidation of East Slavic civilization, whether politically, militarily, or whatever else that could mean in practice. These distinctions notwithstanding, there is no doubt that the concept of civilization in the Transnistrian text has naturalizing qualities, which is almost certainly what makes it so appealing to its authors: its logic is inescapable; it demands absolute loyalty from those who belong to the community thus presented. It may be illuminating to inquire about the sources from which this notion of civilization was imported to Transnistria. As Yizhak M. Brudny has demonstrated, as early as the late 1960s Russian nationalists began publicly to fly this flag in their polemics with Soviet liberals. During the perestroika and postperestroika years the notion became especially fashionable in their milieu due, among other reasons, to the dissemination of the works of Lev Nikolaevich Gu73 milev. This suggests that the origins of this discursive practice are indigenous to Russia. But Transnistrian authors sometimes also refer to the recent works of Samuel Huntington on the clash of civilizations, despite the fact that for him Romania (or at least the bulk of it) belongs to the Orthodox and not the West-

Ibid., 5046. Yizhak M. Brudny, Reinventing Russia: Russian Nationalism and the Soviet State, 19531991 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 86, 18689, 25253, 312 nn. 83, 84, 313 n. 89. On Gumilevs ideas, see Ryszard Podarowski, The Eurasian Idea and Leo Gumilevs Scientific Ideology, Canadian Slavonic Papers 41: 1 (1999), 1932. In contemporary Ukraine, the notion of civilization has also come into vogue recently; see Marko Bojcun, Where is Ukraine? Civilization and Ukraines Identity, Problems of Post-Communism 48: 5 (2002), 4251.
73

72

432

V LADIMIR S OLONARI

ern civilization. Obviously, there are no clear criteria for making that or this par74 ticular country belong to any particular civilization.
Etnosy

This unifying and naturalizing theme of civilization is both supplemented and, at times, contradicted by a persistent emphasis on the tolerance and mutual assistance allegedly characteristic of the Dnestr etnosy. The multinational composition (mnogonatsionalnost ) of the population of these lands Moldovans, Ukrainians, Poles, Russians, Armenians, Jews, Tatars this is the main factor 75 that left an imprint on the local cultural processes, it is asserted. Those etnosy are depicted as peacefully coexisting, interacting, and assimilating (each 76 other?), thus forming the Dnestr community. However, a careful reading of the text suggests that some etnosy are considered more equal than others and that not all of them are equally welcome in the community. Thus, while Dnestria is called a Moldovan-Ukrainian borderland, it is simultaneously suggested that Ukrainians are the main etnos by their numerical strength, the length of their sojourn in the region, their contribution to the [local] economy and the role they played in the secular struggle with the invaders. This bold statement is immediately refuted by the figures on the ethnic composition of the population in the Dnestr villages in the early 19th century, which suggest that Moldovans predominated numerically, but this inconsistency 77 goes unnoticed. In commenting on the policies of the Russian imperial government to invite settlers from foreign countries (such as Germany, France, and Switzerland, as well as the Balkan possessions of the Ottomans) to populate and develop newly acquired territories, Transnistria included, it is regretted that they were accorded various privileges such as bigger lots of arable land, fiscal exemptions, and so on, to the detriment of the locals. It is also asserted that foreign colonists, although they were good farmers, never became models for the local 78 peasants because of their corporate closeness. If peasants are said to have been
See Efim Bershin, Pridnestrovskii razlom, Nezavisimaia gazeta [Moscow], 28 June 2000. I was informed by a reliable source that this article was dictated to Bershin, a journalist, by DMR Minister of Foreign Affairs Valerii Anatolevich Litskai. Arnold Toynbee and Samuel Huntington are explicitly referred to and their terminology widely used to substantiate the claim that Pridnestrove is nothing other than a contact zone of the Western and East Slavic civilizations. If Moldova wants to join NATO, it should renounce Dnestria, because otherwise NATO would not take it with a slice of an alien civilization. 75 Istoriia, 1: 224. 76 Ibid., 530. 77 Ibid., 238. 78 Ibid., 26263, 265.
74

C REATING A PEOPLE : A C ASE S TUDY IN POST -S OVIET H ISTORY -W RITING

433

exploited by their landlords, and those happened to be of a different etnos (e.g., Polish), this fact is singled out, and it is implied that the landlords brutality is 79 linked to it. When describing various etnosy that populated the region in the 19th century, the Jews are mentioned only briefly, despite their numerical 80 strength and economic importance. In the 42-page chapter on the region during World War II, there is only one reference to the annihilation of Jews by German and Romanian occupiers in a paragraph dealing with the damage done to the health protection system, which suffered from the mass execution of 81 Jewish doctors. It should be mentioned in this context that Transnistria, that is the territory between the Dnestr and South Bug Rivers, witnessed the annihilation of up to 300,000 Jews, making this area one of the most tragic sites of the 82 entire Holocaust. One cannot escape the conclusion that the Dnestr community evaluates various etnosy in accordance with their perceived proximity or distance from (East) Slavic Orthodox civilization. I call this approach a limited and hierarchical pluralism. It is here that one can easily perceive a close resemblance to the defunct concept of the Soviet people, which also used to emphasize the unity of 83 the multiethnic community led by Russia. In the post-Soviet historical schema, official Marxism-Leninism as a unifying ideology is replaced by Orthodoxy. To put this observation into proper perspective one should recall that it is not uncommon in Western societies to integrate the separate narratives on various communities, including ethnic ones, into the metanarrative of national his84 tories. What makes the Transnistrian case so distinct is the natural and essentialist quality of its etnosy, which are ultimately unrelated to any notion of universal human value, visions of ennobled social and public order, or the place
Ibid., 326. Ibid., 24647. The space allotted to Jews is less than half that allotted to Bulgarians, Poles, Armenians, and other minorities. 81 Istoriia, vol. 2, bk. 1, 214. However, the Chisina u (in Russian, Kishinev) pogrom of 1903 is referred to and condemned in the strongest possible terms (ibid., 1: 46268). I attribute this difference to the fact that the respective chapters were written by different authors with divergent attitudes toward Jews. The passage on the Chisina u pogrom was written by Nikolai Babilunga, while the chapter on World War II was written by Petr Sornikov. 82 See Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, vol. 2 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1985), esp. 759; Radu Ioanid, The Holocaust in Romania: The Destruction of Jews and Gypsies under the Antonescu Regime, 19401944 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000), esp. 170, 28990. 83 On the Soviet people, see Hlne Carrre dEncausse, Decline of an Empire: The Soviet Socialist Republics in Revolt, trans. Martin Sokolinsky and Henry A. La Farge (New York: Newsweek Books, 1979), 12164. 84 It is enough to visit the National History Museum in Washington, DC, to get an idea how it is done.
80 79

434

V LADIMIR S OLONARI

and roles of individual human beings in history. As such those etnosy are nothing but closed monads; the idea they somehow get along with each other and, taken together, form the bigger community of the Dnestr people appears odd. This is where the idea of civilization comes forward to allow for the possibility of their cohabitation and unity . Characteristically, however, civilization thus presented becomes but a larger monad confronting others like itself waging never-ending warfare in an ultimately meaningless world.
Class Warfare Reappears

The theme of class warfare in Soviet historiography was inextricably connected to the teleology of the Soviet worldview: the confrontation of classes was supposed to have led to the Socialist revolution and the emancipation of the people. For this reason, it was also meant to legitimize the Communist Party hierarchys rule. One might therefore expect it to lose its relevance for the production of historical narratives in the post-Soviet world. However, as we shall see, this has not been the case in Transnistria. Relating events following the annexation of Transnistrian lands to the Russian empire in the late 18th century, the narrators suddenly begin to emphasize the oppressive nature of the tsarist regime. Paradoxically, the Russian imperial state, which until then has been invariably lauded as a great power of the same faith, the natural defender of Orthodox peoples, and so on, from that moment on becomes the main villain in the piece, as well as the protector of a host of other bad guys including landlords, bureaucrats, and capitalist entrepreneurs. All of them exploit the people, which acts under its various guises as peasants, farmers, workers, seasonal workers, and others, causing it, the people, many undeserved troubles. What is perhaps even worse, those villains appear to hinder progress; even the Great Reforms of the 1860s and 1870s, while objectively necessary in order to overcome Russias lagging behind the advanced countries of the West (especially in the sphere of industry), were ultimately unsuccessful because they were implemented by bureaucratic means, with care not 85 to hurt the interests of the nobility. The language of class struggle is in full vigor in the presentation of the events of the Russian Revolution and Civil War. This whole period is talked about in terms of inescapable class antagonisms and the radicalization of the masses, to the point that revolution appears inevitable and the Bolshevik Party is depicted as correctly grasping the course of history. At the same time, however, there appears a distinct tendency to cast those events as a national tragedy, engendered by the intransigence of the parties involved and their unwillingness to compromise for
85

Istoriia, 1: 361, 369.

C REATING A PEOPLE : A C ASE S TUDY IN POST -S OVIET H ISTORY -W RITING

86

435

the sake of social calm, the preservation of peace and Motherland. It is this discrepancy between the desire discursively to reconcile the foes of the revolutionary epoch and the authors apparent inability to talk about the epoch in terms other than those of class warfare that produces the sense of the narratives utter nonsensicality. It is difficult to imagine any other reason for the authors resort to the class motif other than sheer inertia and intellectual laziness. Yet it is noteworthy that in the final part of the story this language is put to a new and fascinating use, i.e., to account for what is grandiloquently called a Dnestr Revolution. This finale comes after a rather prolonged intermezzo (the bulk of the first part of the second volume ca. 270 pages) during which the achievements of the Dnestr people during the Soviet epoch are monotonously recounted. Here political leaders and the Party in general are mostly ignored, while policy decisions are presented as if stemming naturally from the course of events. The verbs are usually in the impersonal form, which is normally rendered in English translation as the passive voice. The dominant form of the narrative may be presented as follows: X and Y were constructed. But still there were problems Because of this it was necessary The following measures were taken Positive results were achieved, but still problems remained Since it is not clear what the alternatives were and who made the decisions, the whole story acquires the flavor of inevitability and naturalness. The only agency that is presumed, although in this section never explicitly mentioned, is the Dnestr people. The Soviet period represents unmistakably epic times, when everything was supposedly as it should be. They thus demand loyalty from the descendants of those who lived in them. The fact that elites are mostly absent from the description of the achievements of the Soviet epoch allows the narrators to change their mode of presentation as the period draws to a close. The authors begin to emphasize growing problems, underline the need for reform, and even stress the doubtless fact that in the early 1980s the Soviet Union was on the threshold of a deep crisis. However, the party elite turned out to be unable to meet the new challenges, 87 mostly because of subjective treasons, that is, factional struggles for power. From this moment on, the party elite is assigned a new role that of the main villain. In addition, the language of class war powerfully reasserts itself. As the narrative switches to events in the Moldavian SSR, the degenerate party elite forms an alliance with the Romanizers, i.e., the Moldovan nationalist intelligentsia that led the national movement of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The activity of the Romanizers is seen as antithetical to Moldovan cultural sovereignty because of their orientation toward Romanian models, rejec86 87

Ibid., vol.2, bk. 1, 29. Istoriia, vol. 2, bk. 2, 6, 7.

436

V LADIMIR S OLONARI

tion of the traditional Moldovan Cyrillic script in favor of a Latin one, the intention to install an ethnocratic regime discriminating against non-Moldovans, and the effort to implement a forced unification with Romania. The party nomenklatura and national bureaucracy (these notions appear here probably as synonyms) are said to have surreptitiously supported the activity of the Romanizers for selfish reasons, because they wanted to use nationalist ideology to strengthen their hold on power and to discriminate against rivals from the non88 native population. The degenerate party elite is thus presented as alien in both senses, as an elite that got detached from its roots and as betraying its own people to foreign interests. Of course, the people could not remain indifferent to all of this. It rose up. In Dnestria this led to a genuine revolution of the masses, a bloodless, 89 phenomenal revolution sui generis. But, readers are reminded, it is well known that the masses always need leaders [vozhaki]. Thus are the new leaders given the mandate of the people. We are told that in place of the inert and initiative-lacking protgs of the stagnation periods party apparatus came energetic, active and dynamic leaders who headed the struggle for the restoration of the 90 Dnestr statehood. This struggle is presented as one simultaneously against the degenerate party elite (and even the Communist Party as a whole) and something called nation91 alism, which is the same as semi-fascism, fascism, and neo-Nazism. Gradually, however, the second of these notions comes to dominate the scene. Nationalism, from some point onward, is equated with Moldova, which is seen as irremediably nationalistic; it is ruled by the old incompetent nomenklatura, 92 which unleashes the war against the Dnestr people. Moldova also comes to be 93 identified with the West, NATO, and Western civilization. By fighting it, the Dnestr people is only fulfilling its perennial role as the bulwark of East Slavic Orthodox civilization against the assault of the other, this time identified with the West. In the end, the discourses of class warfare and ethnonation reinforce one other and merge in a powerful finale.

88 89

Ibid., 4049. Ibid., 71, 447. 90 Ibid., bk. 1, 8; bk. 2, 49. 91 Cf. Igor Nikolaevich Smirnov, Zhit na svoei zemle (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel, 2001), 30. 92 Istoriia, part 1, 446. Moldova is said to be constantly reaffirming its aggressive essence, 448. 93 This view was also expounded in vivid terms in Bershin, Pridnestrovskii razlom, cited and discussed in n. 74.

C REATING A PEOPLE : A C ASE S TUDY IN POST -S OVIET H ISTORY -W RITING

437

Conclusion

This discussion has illuminated striking structural similarities between Soviet and Transnistrian official historical narratives. But it would be also useful to underline what one might call creative usages of Soviet discursive devices by the Transnistrian authors. To be sure, Tiraspol historians sometimes follow the Soviet narrative tradition unwittingly, but in other instances they demonstrate remarkable ingenuity, as when they introduce the notions of civilization and etnos or apply radically simplified class-war terminology to invent the Dnestr Revolution. To describe how they do it, it might be helpful to invoke Claude Lvi-Strausss notion of the bricoleur, which he uses to describe the structure of mythical thought: [T]he characteristic feature of mythical thought, as of bricolage on the practical plane, is that it builds up structured sets, not directly with other structured sets but by using the remains and debris of events: in French des bribes et des morceaux, or odds and ends in English, fossilized evidence of the history of an individual or a society. He adds a reservation: mythical thought, that bricoleur, builds structured sets by means of a structured set, namely, language. But it is not at the structural level that it makes use of it: it builds ideological castles out of debris of what was once a social discourse. Further on, while discussing the logic of totemic classification, he writes: The terms never have any intrinsic significance. Their meaning is one of position a function of the history and cultural context on the one hand and of the structural 94 system in which they are called upon to appear on the other. This last remark is an especially pertinent one. Although Transnistrian authors sometimes introduce new notions, they use them in a way that allows them to keep relations between those categories intact, as when they substitute Orthodoxy for ideology, civilization for Soviet people, bulwark of the civilization for brotherly people, and cast the Dnestr people as the Soviet people writ small. The meanings produced by this narrative are close to the familiar Soviet ones. They prize the unity of ours and hostility towards others, foster loyalty to authorities who express the will of the people, and teach a vision of life as a permanent fight. The Transnistrian historical narrative thus to a large extent re-creates the Soviet world-view in a new and radically different institutional context. These observations raise a number of questions. First, if Soviet historical narratives could be treated basically as mythological constructs, does this not require from us a reconsideration of the ideological volte-face produced by Soviet historians under the guidance of the party hierarchy in the late 1930s? Simply put, was Stalin not acting as a kind of bricoleur when he substituted ethnonation for class
94

Claude Lvi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 2122.

438

V LADIMIR S OLONARI

as a main explanatory category in the construction of historical narratives? To what extent did this change lead to the revision of Soviet ideology, and to what extent did its meanings remain intact? Similar questions could be asked about post-Soviet history-writing. When post-Soviet historians rewrite the histories of their new nations (former Soviet republics turned independent states), do they sometimes reproduce the meanings contained in the Soviet narratives even as they introduce new notions or reconfigure the old? Can further research show how and when this happens? Finally, if these hypotheses are at least partially correct, what does it suggest for our understanding of the reproduction of the Soviet worldview both during and after the Soviet period? Should we not pay more attention to the role of history, education, and academia than has hitherto been the case? There is no doubt, of course, that Transnistria is a special case. Yet it is precisely because the historians who participated in creating its History worked within a completely new institutional setup and were given a novel task to legitimate a new people and an unrecognized state that never existed during the Soviet period that the potential inherent in the Soviet narrative tradition appears in greater relief here than anywhere else.

Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum 100 Raoul Wallenberg Place, SW Washington, DC 20024-2126 USA
solva2001@moldovacc.md