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Abstract
The effort to build a patriotic, usable past for Moldova has led important Moldovan post‐Soviet historians of the pan‐Romanian school to de‐emphasize and rationalize the Holocaust for fear of it staining a national myth grounded in Romanian victimization narratives. Much of this strategy has been focused on the Jewish connection to Soviet communism in interwar greater Romania, which supposedly undermined the Romanian state and thereby warranted a public outcry against the Jews. The construction and use of this interwar “mismemory” has been mimicked by post‐Soviet historians in recent years, whereby greater social, political and economic problems are glossed over in preference for a specifically threatening Jewish anti‐Romanianism. One’s position on this historical debate is seemingly important enough to influence one’s national credentials in the public forum.
Notes
1. For treatment of the question of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union see Gitelman, Bitter Legacy.
2. By “pan‐Romanian” I mean primarily that nationalist sentiment in Moldova which is focused on Romania as historic and ethnic homeland. Much of the Moldovan intellectual elite focus their nation‐building efforts not on the country in which they currently live but rather on their imagined broader Romanian home. Thus, their political efforts for much of the post‐socialist past have been to undermine the Republic of Moldova as a Soviet aberration and politically unite with Romania.
3. Solonari, “From Silence to Justification?” 435–57.
4. Altshuler, “Foreword.”
5. See Levy, Ana Pauker. For an example of this thinking, see Goma, Săptămâna Roşie, discussed below.
6. An example of this is the general support of most local historians in Timişoara for an initiative raised in 1999 by several local NGOs to exonerate the Marshal through a moral trial. When this drew protest from members of the US Helsinki Committee, historian Florin Constantiniu described it as censorship aimed at stopping healthy historical debate in Romania: Shafir, “Memory, Memorials, and Membership,” 77–8.
7. I base this statement on personal experience as a researcher in Moldova in 2004–5. Many local historians I met, once they learned that I was researching a topic related to interwar Jewish history in Bessarabia, were very wary of my perspective and increasingly concerned once they realised that my views were different.
8. King, The Moldovans, 224–30.
9. In using these terms I engage with the well‐developed body of literature surrounding the historical question of the deconstruction of national myth, including works by Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780; Gellner, Nations and Nationalism; Anderson, Imagined Communities; and Connor, Ethnonationalism, which are only the best known of many works on this topic. For an example of the ethno‐national appeal in national construction, see Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation. Closer to Moldova, see the review of post‐socialist nationalism by Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed; and for a discussion of the modern formation of national myths by post‐Soviet elites, see the case of Transnistria in Solonari, “Creating a ‘People’,” 411–38.
10. For an assessment of the historians’ role in fostering the national–patriotic narrative in Moldovan state education see Anderson, “They Are The Priests,” 277–90.
11. Scurtu and Encu, Istoriia Bessarabii ot istokov do 1998 goda, 129. Many of the members of the pan‐Romanian camp contributed articles, with Scurtu handling much of the history of interwar Greater Romania.
12. This is currently changing under pressure from the communist authorities’ efforts to construct a pro‐Moldovan educational curriculum – the required history course for secondary schools on the table is called “integrated history,” which combines broader European history together with Romanian history. There is significant resistance from the pan‐Romanian intellectual elite in the country and the issue is not yet decided.
13. History of the Romanians, 276–81.
14. For scholarship on the evolution of the racial definition of national identity in Romania, see Bucur, Eugenics and Modernization in Interwar Romania, and Turda, “Blood and homeland.”
15. Judt, “The Past Is Another Country,” 309–10.
16. On antisemitism among the Romanian elite, see Volovici, Nationalist Ideology & Antisemitism; and Fischer‐Galati, “Fascism, Communism, and the Jewish Question in Romania;” also Iancu, Jews in Romania 1866–1919.
17. Iancu, Evreii Din România, 143.
18. This phrase does not translate easily; it roughly means “the urgency of our time.”
19. Purunca Vremei, March 2, 1935.
20. It is unknown exactly how many were killed during the uprising. The French representative in Romania at the time put the number of dead from the fighting at 300, not including the summary executions performed by Romanian troops: Hausleitner, Deutsche und Juden in Bessarabien, 91.
21. For the history of the Tatar Bunar uprising and its political uses in Greater Romania, see Hausleitner, Deutsche und Juden in Bessarabien, 92–6.
22. For a recent example of this approach, see Ţâcu, Problema Basarabiei şi relaţiile sovieto‐romăne în perioada interbelică, 63–101.
23. Hausleitner, Deutsche und Juden in Bessarabien, 103.
24. For a detailed analysis of Romanian interwar political currents from Bucharest, see Livezeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania, 189–208.
25. For a concise review of politics surrounding Tatar Bunar, see Hausleitner, Deutsche und Juden in Bessarabien, 90–5.
26. Bruchis, “The Jews in the Revolutionary Underground of Bessarabia and Their Fate after Its Annexation by the Soviet Union,” 145. Bruchis subscribes to the idea that Jews were manipulated by the Soviet regime into largely provoking the policies of the Romanian governors as national defence measures – he is unlikely to have overestimated the number of Jewish communists.
27. Arhiva Naţionala a Republicii Moldova (hereafter ANRM), f. 679, o. 1, d. 7, l. 2; a letter from the Siguranţa Directorate in Bucharest Number 22829 from November 13, 1918 reported to police in Bessarabia and Moldova (part of the pre‐1914 Romanian kingdom west of the Prut) that all organisations deemed to “have links with socialist syndicates” were to be closed immediately.
28. Hausleitner, Deutsche und Juden in Bessarabien, 104.
29. Shafir, Romania Politics, Economics and Society, 25, as cited by Korkut, “Nationalism versus Internationalism,” 140; and Levy, Ana Pauker, 5.
30. See Michael Bruchis, “The Jews in the Revolutionary Underground,” for an example of someone who does this. Bruchis treats Jewish communist participation as a consciously pro‐Soviet enterprise, arguing that it was a serious mistake that undermined Jews in Romanian society.
31. Dimineaţa, January 15, 1927.
32. Tismaneanu, Stalinism for All Seasons, 58–60.
33. ANRM, Fond 680, Op. 1, D. 3168, L. 20.
34. ANRM, Fond 680, Op. 1, D. 3354, L. 173.
35. ANRM, Fond 680, Op. 1, D. 3354, L. 179.
36. ANRM, Fond 680, Op. 1, D. 3354, L. 21.
37. ANRM, Fond 679, Op. 1, D. 5410.
38. Solonari, “Holocaust of Bessarabian, Bukovinian, and Transnistrian Jewry in the History Writing in Moldova,” 7. Solonari reviewed files (Moldovan National Archives, Fond 1026, Opis 1) of arrests of Jewish and non‐Jewish communists by the Romanian military after their invasion in 1941and found that Jews were statistically much more likely to be summarily executed than Christian communists.
39. Interview with Jacob Mihailovitch Kopansky, April 22, 2005; see also the novel by Schreibman, Semnadtsat’iletnie.
40. See for example Petrencu, Basarabia in al doilea razboi mondial; Goma, Săptămâna Roşie; Stavilă, De la Basarabia româneasca la Basarabia sovietică.
41. The killing charge was derived from a letter from Ion Antonescu to prominent Bucharest Jewish leader Wilhelm Filderman during this time, in which he accused the Bessarabian Jews of murdering retreating Romanian soldiers, an allegation that has since been disproved but has stuck in national memory. See Levin, The Lesser of Two Evils, 38.
42. See Solonari, “‘Model Province’,” 471–500.
43. Indeed Goma has become something of a hero of the patriotic–nationalist ideology in Moldova, with numerous websites devoted to him. For just one example, see 〈http://paulgoma.free.fr/〉, which is often updated and where the author writes rebuttals to his detractors, including Michael Shafir, Radu Ioanid, and others. Most of his works can be downloaded in full.
44. Goma, Săptămâna Roşie, 19. Some 250,000 people died in Soviet Moldova from deportations to Siberia (1949) and mass starvation resulting from the implementation of collectivisation (1946–7). See Gribincea, Basarabia in primii ani de ocupatie sovietica, and Siscanu, Destaranirea bolsevica in Basarabia, for discussion of the deportation and mass starvation in post‐1945 Moldova.
45. Goma is not alone in this approach: Matrescu published a monograph titled Holocustul roşu (Red Holocaust).
46. Goma, Săptămâna Roşie, 6–7.
47. Ibid., 18.
48. Carp, Cartea neagra.
49. Conversation with fellow researcher, December 2004.
50. Codreanu, Pentru Legionari.
51. From a November 2004 conversation in Chişinău.
52. Romanian antisemitism, from the interwar period and earlier, is well documented; see, for example, Volovici, Nationalist Ideology & Antisemitism; Livezeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania; Webster, The Romanian Legionary Movement; Ioanid and Heinegg, The Sword of the Archangel; and Iancu, Evreii din Romania, as just a few examples of this study.
53. The commission’s full report, “Romania: Facing the Past,” was presented to Romanian President Ion Iliescu in Bucharest on November 11, 2004 and is available at 〈http://www.ushmm.org/research/center/presentations/features/details/2005‐03‐10/〉.
54. Solonari, “Model Province,” 485.
55. Ibid., 486–7.
56. Petrencu, România şi Basarabia în celui de‐al doilea război mondial, 8. This version of the original study, Basarabia in al doilea razboi mondial 1940–1944, was cleansed of some of the most odious anti‐Jewish references, although the subjective thrust of the narrative is nevertheless clearly pan‐Romanian and apologetic for Antonescu’s policies.
57. Ibid., 8, 42, 43. 51, 63.
58. Ibid., 43.
59. Petrencu, Basarabia in al doilea razboi mondial.
60. For a tremendously comprehensive and detailed account of Romanian interwar antisemitism and the Jewish response, see Iancu, Evreii din România.
61. Petrencu, România şi Basarabia, 35.
62. Levit, Holocaust in Bessarabia, 3.
63. Petrencu, România şi Basarabia, 51.
64. The notable exception is the active scholarship of historian Iziaslav Levit, a former leading figure in the Moldovan Academy of Sciences who emigrated to New York in the early 1990s and maintains a polemic against the Moldovan nationalist historical school, such as through his reaction to Petrencu that appeared in May–June 2000 on the pages of the Chişinău daily Glasul Moldovei, titled “The Holocaust in Bessarabia through Mr. Petrencu’s Distorting Mirror.” These articles were translated into English by Natalia Alkhazova and published in Chisinau in 1999 by the Anti‐Fascist Democratic Alliance of the Republic of Moldova and the Youth Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly of Moldova. He has accused some of its members, especially Petrencu, of selective research and antisemitism. In 1997, an interview with Levit by journalist M.G. Lukianchikova, originally printed in the Moldovan‐Jewish newspaper Nash Golos (Our Voice) in March 1994, was republished in Chişinău as The Ashes of the Past Beat into our Hearts. See also his Under the Narcotic Intoxication of Judeo‐phobia. Vladimir Solonari also engages closely with the arguments of Petrencu in his essay “From Silence to Justification,” 441–6.
65. Peterncu was nominated for the State Prize by the Senate of the Moldovan State University (Solonari, “From Silence to Justification,” 442); his book carries the official stamp of the History Department of the Moldovan State University (Levit, Holocaust in Bessarabia, 2).
66. Levit, Holocaust in Bessarabia, 2–3.
67. Ţâcu, Problema Basarabiei, 193.
68. Ibid., 193.
69. Ibid., 191. Ţâcu relies primarily on Michael Bruchis for this theory, offering little in the way of primary evidence.
70. On the connection between the modern state, standardised education and literacy, and the development of national sentiment see Gellner, Nations and Nationalism and Anderson, Imagined Communities.
71. This was the political reality despite Romanian national historiographic arguments that union with Romania was achieved after centuries of struggle against foreign occupation and the will of the Bessarabian people. For examples of this perspective see Popovici, The Political Status of Bessarabia; and Cazacu, The Truth about the Question of Bessarabia; and, to a lesser extent (but still inherently anti‐Russian), Upson Clark, Bessarabia: Russia and Romania on the Black Sea. For the Soviet propagandistic perspective, see Lazarev, Moldavskaia sovetskaia gosudarstvennost’ I bessarabskii vopros; and Kopansky, Internatsional’naia solidarnost’ s borboi trudiashchikhsia Bessarabii za vossoedinenie s sovetskoi rodinoi. For a detailed and more objective perspective, see Haynes, “Historical Introduction.”
72. Prisăcaru, “Un istoric neagă că a scris ‘Holocaustul în Basarabia’.”
73. Conversation with Alexandru Moraru, May 2005.
74. For more on this perspective see Stati, History of Moldova.
75. It should be noted that Nazaria tends to overestimate the number of Jewish victims in Transnistria, a fact that does not help his case: Nazaria et al., Holokost v Moldove, especially the conclusion, 204–11.
76. This is a lower estimate presented by Solonari. Iziaslav Levit estimates that about 350,000 were killed; see Ashes of the Past, 8. According to statistics compiled by an independent commission of the US Holocaust Museum’s Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, the number of Jewish victims in Transnistria was between 280,000 and 380,000. Dennis Deletant, basing his statistics on the Holocaust Museum’s research led by Radu Ioanid, reports that 90,000 of the Jewish dead in Transnistrian camps were from Bessarabia and Bukovina, while 170,000 were local Ukrainian Jews. Deletant, “The Holocaust in Transnistria,” 143–61.
77. In another reference to us and them, a well‐known nationalist historian warned me “not to be like Solonari” (a scholar from Moldova now working in the United States who is critical of the Romanian war legacy and Holocaust historiography), who he said, “had been one of us, and then went to America and started writing bad things about us” (conversations with author, November 2004 and April 2005).
78. Nazaria book‐signing ceremony, April 2005.
79. This is according to Vladimir Solonari, who spoke to Moraru about the topic. Thus his article in Timpul of April 29, in which he went on to essentially denounce Nazaria.
80. Several young historians in Moldova who believe it difficult to present narratives that question the national patriotic perspective in Holocaust historiography voiced this concern to me. Viorica Nicolenco, author of the pro‐patriotic perspective work Extrema dreaptă în Basarabia, explained to me that she did not feel free to follow her own opinion in her research and had decided not to proceed in the historical profession in Moldova after completing her dissertation. The so‐called foreign viewpoint is exemplified by the text oppositional to History of the Romanians, called History of Moldova, published in 2002 by Vasile Stati with the blessing of the communist government. This book is commonly understood and described by national–patriotic historians as representing interests foreign to the ethno‐nation.
81. I refer here to the work of Trouillot, Silencing the Past. Truillot focuses his study on the European silencing of Haitian and other non‐white historical narratives surrounding the Haitian Revolution, thereby effectively erasing, at least from popular consciousness, a successful overthrow of European power.
82. Georgescu, “A Jewish Diary Fifty Years Later;” and see Shafir, “Memory, Memorials, and Membership,” 67–96.
83. This idea was repeated to me on several occasions, not only by academics but by others as well, for example by two commercial publishers, who took offence at the emphasis on Jewish suffering that they saw as implicit in the use of the term “Holocaust.” On several occasions, I was asked to explain why the Holocaust is different from that of any other genocide, such as that in Rwanda or Bosnia, or especially the Armenian genocide. Not surprisingly, Sergiu Nazaria (discussed below) goes into considerable length in his introduction to show why the Holocaust was unlike any other genocide in modern history (Holokost v Moldove, 9–20).
84. See Livezeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania; see also Benjamin, “Introductory Study.”
85. Iziaslav Levit points out that while most communists in Bessarabia were Jewish, many more Jews were in Zionist organizations (Holocaust in Bessarabia, 9). Solonari estimates that across Romania, even if the entire communist movement were entirely Jewish, this would still mean that roughly only one in every 700 Jews was a communist (“From Silence to Justification,” 444). My own research into Bessarabian Jewish cultural life bears these opinions out: the majority of Jewish culture in interwar years was directed toward Zionism, Yiddishism, and religion, not communism.
86. Vladimir Tismaneanu explains the Jewish drive toward communism in interwar Romania in the following manner: “Dissatisfied with the status quo, disgusted with bourgeois values, victimized by discriminatory measures, and appalled by the rise of Nazism, they indulged in fantasies about a worldwide communist revolution that would create a climate conducive to what Marx had called the ‘realization of the human essence’ and thus excise the cancer of antisemitism. Their dream was to overcome their Jewishness, to be part of a universal movement whose aspirations and promises transcended national, religious, and racial boundaries. Their romanticized image of the Soviet Union functioned as compensation for their frustrations and humiliations” (Tismaneanu, Stalinism for All Seasons, 77).
87. Such scholarship has become more sophisticated since the mid‐1990s: Petrencu’s early attempts were deeply problematic in that he tried both to deny that victims of the mass murder were Jews specifically and at the same time to justify the killing of Jews! See Solonari, “From Silence to Justification?”
88. Here I refer to Weber’s Peasants into Frenchmen, in which he famously showed just how modern a phenomenon the creation of national identity was – in the French case, largely during the two generations prior to World War I. Despite arguments that place the movement back to Roman Dacia, the interwar period was the era of “Bessarabians into Romanians,” although it was more sloppy, heavy‐handed, ineffective, and controversial, thus provoking more resistance from all involved, especially minorities.