A Separate Moldovan Language? The Sociolinguistics of Moldova'sLimba de Stat

2006 ◽  
Vol 34 (5) ◽  
pp. 575-597 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew H. Ciscel

The politics of language identity have figured heavily in the history of the people of the Republic of Moldova. Indeed the region's status as a province of Russia, Romania, and then the Soviet Union over the past 200 years has consistently been justified and, at least partially, manipulated on the basis of language issues. At the center of these struggles over language and power has been the linguistic and cultural identity of the region's autochthonous ethnicity and current demographic majority, the Moldovans. In dispute is the degree to which these Moldovans are culturally, historically, and linguistically related to the other Moldovans and Romanians across the Prut River in Romania. Under imperial Russia from 1812 to 1918 and Soviet Russia from 1944 to 1991, a proto-Moldovan identity that eschewed connections to Romania and emphasized contact with Slavic peoples was promoted in the region. Meanwhile, experts from Romania and the West have regularly argued that the eastern Moldovans are indistinguishable, historically, culturally, and linguistically, from their Romanian cousins.

Slavic Review ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aaron J. Cohen

Historians of Russia have not analyzed the roles that the memory of World War I played in Russian life, and Russia remains largely absent from comparative studies of the war and its legacy. Russian people did have “sites of memory” where they expressed myths, displayed symbols, and mobilized public opinion around the memory of World War I. Outside the Soviet Union, a non-Soviet Russian memory of the Great War flourished in the interwar years, and the war became an important memory that military émigrés used to overcome the rupture from the past (imperial Russia) and the present (Russian territory) caused by revolution and life in emigration. The war had a different expression in Soviet Russia, where journalists and publicists evoked its image, but not its historical content, to break the USSR from the Russian past and separate the first socialist society from its enemies in the present.


Author(s):  
B. Issabek ◽  
◽  
E. Shalanov ◽  

In the 30-50 years of the 20th century, the process of eviction in Kazakhstan began in a forced and organized form. Questions of population transfer in the Soviet union were kept confidential. Only in the late 1980s of the 20th century started investigation the problems of "White Spots" in history. Among such problems were the forcibly deported people and their fate. The pages of the shadow history of the past of representatives of other nationalities who were forcibly resettled were revealed, that today they live in a second homeland. Since the middle of 1930s, systematic work has been carried out to forcibly relocate to the territory of Kazakhstan. During the Great Patriotic War, forced evacuation of the population became an integral part of Stalin's repressions. The article considers that the forced relocation of people in general in the run-up to the Great Patriotic War and in wartime, and the deportation of deported people are classified as unreliable changed ethnic groups. The victims of such policy were the people: Korean, German, Polish, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Greek, Kalmyk, Karachai, Ingush, Chechen, Balkar, Crimean Tatars, Turks, etc.


Author(s):  
Vladislav Strutynsky

By analyzing one of the most eventful periods of the modern history of Poland, the early 80s of the XX century, the author examines the dynamics of social and political conflict on the eve of the introduction of martial law, which determines the location of the leading political forces in these events in Poland, that were grouped around the Polish United Labor Party and the Independent trade union «Solidarity», their governing structures and grassroots organizations, highlighting the development of socio-political situation in the country before entering the martial law on the 13th of December and analyzing the relation of the leading countries to the events, especially the Soviet Union. Also, the author distinguishes causes that prevent to reach the compromise in the process of realization different programs, that were offered to public and designed by PUWP and «Solidarity» and were “aimed” to help Polish society to exit an unprecedented conflict. This article provides a comparative analysis of the different analytical meaningful reasons, offered by historians, political scientists, lawyers, and led to the imposition of martial law in the Republic of Poland. The author also analyses the legality of such actions by the state and some conclusions that were reached by scientists, investigating the internal dynamics of the conflict and the process of implementation of tasks, that Polish United Workers’ Party (which ruled at that time) tried to solve with martial law and «Solidarity» was used as self-determination in Polish society. Keywords: Martial law, Independent trade union «Solidarity», inter-factory strike committee, social-political conflict, Polish United Workers’ Party, the Warsaw Pact, the Military Council of National Salvation


2015 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter H. Solomon

The Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia alike have had extremely low rates of acquittal in criminal cases, which conventional wisdom associates with an accusatorial bias. But other countries like Canada, Germany, The Netherlands, and France also have low rates of acquittal without the perception of bias. This article argues that the key difference lies in the presence or absence of pretrial screening—through the withdrawal of charges, diversion, and/or dispositions imposed by prosecutors. After a brief history of the low acquittal rate in Russia, the article documents the use of prosecutorial discretion to screen cases before trial in those four Western countries, especially through the exercise by prosecutors of quasi-judicial functions. The article goes on to demonstrate the absence of significant pretrial filtering of cases in Russia and to explore the implications for understanding the rate of acquittal.


2021 ◽  
pp. 135
Author(s):  
Yinan Li

In 2009, the former Minister of Foreign Affairs of the USSR and President of Georgia E.A. Shevardnadze published his memoirs in Russian, which contain an “explosive” plot: while visiting China in February 1989, during his meeting with Deng Xiaoping, a lengthy dispute over border and territorial issues occurred. At that time, Deng allegedly expressed his point of view that vast lands of the Soviet Union, from three to four million square kilometers, belonged to China. Chinese can wait patiently until someday the lands return to China. This content is cited in scientific works by many historians from different countries as an argument. However, there is no other evidence which can prove this recollection. Many details in it contradict the well known historical facts or are completely illogical. There is a good reason to believe that the plot in the memoirs of Shevardnadze is an incorrect recollection. It could even be considered as a made-up story. Moreover, it is possible that it was fabricated for some reasons. Hence, the plot is not worthy of being quoted as a reliable source. At the Sino-Soviet summit Deng Xiaoping did have expressed the point of view that in the past Russia and then the Soviet Union cut off millions of square kilometers of land from China, but at the same time he promised the leader of the Soviet Union that China would not make territorial claims. Since the mid-1980s Deng Xiaoping actively promoted the settlement of the Sino-Soviet border issues through negotiations, which led to the result that 99% of the border between Russia and China was delimited on a legal basis in the last years of his life. At present, the problems of the Sino-Russian border have been finally resolved long ago. There is no doubt that the scientific research and discussions on issues related to territory and borders in the history of Sino-Soviet relations can be made. However, such research and discussions should be based on reliable sources.


Author(s):  
Antony Polonsky

This chapter highlights how the collapse of communism in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union initiated a new period in the history of the Jews in the area. Poland was now a fully sovereign country, and Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, and Moldova also became independent states. Post-imperial Russia faced the task of creating a new form of national identity. This was to prove more difficult than in other post-imperial states since, unlike Britain and France, the tsarist empire and its successor, the Soviet Union, had not so much been the ruler of a colonial empire as an empire itself. All of these countries now embarked, with differing degrees of enthusiasm, on the difficult task of creating liberal democratic states with market economies. For the Jews of the area, the new political situation allowed both the creation and development of Jewish institutions and the fostering of Jewish cultural life in much freer conditions, but also facilitated emigration to Israel, North America, and western Europe on a much larger scale.


Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 55
Author(s):  
Marianna Shakhnovich

By the end of the 1920s, more than 100 anti-religious museums had been opened in the Soviet Union. In addition, anti-religious departments appeared in the exhibitions of many local historical museums. In Moscow, the Central Anti-Religious Museum was opened in the Cathedral of the Strastnoi Monastery. At that time, the first museum promoting a comparative and historical approach to the study and presentation of religious artifacts was opened in Petrograd in 1922. The formation of Museum of Comparative Religion was based on the conjunction of the activities of the Petrograd Excursion Institute, the Academy of Sciences, and the Ethnographic department of Petrograd University. In this paper, based on archival materials, we analyze the methodological principles of the formation of the exhibitions at the newly founded museum, along with its themes, structure, and selection of exhibits. The Museum of Comparative Religion had a very short life before it was transformed into the Leningrad anti-religious museum, but its principles were inherited by the Museum of the History of Religion, which was opened in 1932.


2015 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 363-386 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivan Boldyrev ◽  
Martin Kragh

Research within the history of economic thought has focused only little on the development of economics under dictatorship. This paper attempts to show how a country with a relatively large and internationally established community of social scientists in the 1920s, the Soviet Union, was subjected to repression. We tell this story through the case of Isaak Il’ich Rubin, a prominent Russian economist and historian of economic thought, who in the late 1920s was denounced by rival scholars and repressed by the political system. By focusing not only on his life and work, but also on that of his opponents and institutional clashes, we show how the decline of a social science tradition in Russia and the USSR as well as the Stalinization of Soviet social sciences emerged as a process over time. We analyze the complex interplay of ideas, scholars, and their institutional context, and conclude that subsequent repression was arbitrary, suggesting that no clear survival or career strategy existed in the Stalinist system, due to a situation of fundamental uncertainty.


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