Wer sind die Moldawier? Rumänismus versus Moldowanismus in Historiographie und Schulbüchern der Republik Mol-dova, 1991–2006 by Stefan Ihrig (review)

458 Рецензии/Reviews Wim van MEURS Stefan Ihrig, Wer sind die Moldawier? Rumänismus versus Moldowanismus in Historiographie und Schulbüchern der Republik Moldova , 1991-2006 (Hannover: Ibidem -Verlag, 2008). 344 S. (=Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society; Bd. 76). ISBN: 978-3-89821-466-7; ISSN: 1-614-3515. By the end of the 1980s, many historians and other students of nationalism expected nations and nationalities in Eastern Europe to break knowledgeable examination of Dubnow ’s conception of history, but also to interpret it in its various contexts. In this way Hilbrenner exposes important references and links that until now have scarcely been taken into account. The book is most warmly recommended to anyone interested in Jewish and Russian history or in the history of historiography. free from decades of communist repression . They tended to accept these movements of nation-state building and national emancipation as the last “wave” of a broad historical process. Some of these movements, however, were somewhat arbitrarily censured as “artificial,” as their constituencies lacked a sufficiently distinct history, language, and identity of their own. Whereas the Montenegrin nation was generally acknowledged, Moldovan nation-building was usually condemned as an opportunistic elite project, because the Moldovans “actually were” Romanians. A growing undercurrent in nationalism studies, however, tends to be fascinated by these extreme cases of the construction of a nation against all odds, e.g., the Bosniaks, the Moldovans, and the Transnistrians.1 Inevitably, these researchers sympathized with the underdog – the local elites and their national projects – against regional hegemons (the Serbs, the Romanians, and the Moldovans respectively).2 As Stefan Ihrig demonstrates in his study on history-writing and history textbooks, Moldova was an exception even among these bizarre cases of latter-day nation-building. The original idea of a Moldovan 1 See: Stefan Troebst. “We Are Transnistrians!” Post-Soviet Identity Management in the Dniester Valley // Ab Imperio 2003. No. 1. Pp. 437-466. 2 For recent discussions, see: Andrei Cusco, Viktor Taki. “Kto my?” Istoriograficheskii vybor: Rumynskaia natsiia ili moldavskaia gosudarstvennost’ // Ab Imperio. 2003. No. 1. Pp. 485-495. 459 Ab Imperio, 2/2008 their national history, the erratic and incoherent probing of history by the Moldovanists offered a fascinating read. In contrast to the exclusivist view of the nation by the Romanianists , the post-communist leadership in Chişinău seemed to represent a more tolerant and civic concept of the nation.3 The key question of the study is not, who are the Moldovans, but rather whether the Moldovanists’ historical views are in sync with their integrationist nation-building strategy, and whether the Romanianists ’ are as staunchly ethnic in their concept of the nation as assumed. Ihrig introduces the distinction between perennialist and modernist views of the nation as the second dimension of his taxonomy for the analysis and classification of academic historiography and history textbooks. In the core chapters of his book, he then scrutinizes a large sample of post-Soviet textbooks and historical studies from Moldova, including Transnistrian and Gagauz literature, and presents an immensely complex debate both competently and coherently, offering several original insights and new assessments. Inherently, his approach faces three challenges – one didactical, nation dates back to a Comintern project in the mid-1920s, invented to consolidate the Moldovan ASSR vis-à-vis the Romanian state across the Soviet border. In the early 1990s, the political elite of the Moldovan Republic faced the daunting task of rehabilitating this Stalinist concept in order to field it against the Moldovan Popular Front, which demanded immediate reunification with the Romanian fatherland.Aunique dichotomy that continues to puzzle Stefan Ihrig and other Western analysts ensued: the Moldovanists (championing Moldovan statehood and national identity) took over political power in Chişinău in 1994, but the Romanianist intellectual elite (favoring reunification and denying Moldovan nationhood) managed to uphold its virtual monopoly of cultural and historical production. Lacking the professional historians to provide their newly created nation with a historical synthesis, the Chişinău leadership tended to (ab)use the texts of the few Western authors who accepted the Moldovan nation as a fascinating construction in-the-making, e.g., Charles King, Vladimir Socor and the present writer. Compared to the Romanianists...