Abstract:
The article highlights the impact of Khrushchev’s Thaw on the question of
national identity in Soviet Moldavia in the framework of the internal Soviet
debates unleashed by the ‘Secret Speech’ and the subsequent Hungarian
Revolution. The question of national identity was expressed by two groups,
one representing the former GULAG returnees and the other the intellectuals
or students socialized in the Soviet milieu. The position of the former was
more radical and anti-Soviet, while the latter was milder and respected
the
status-quo
, i.e. the Soviet regime, and only questioned some previously
established traditions on what it meant to be Moldavian. Incidentally or not,
the former position proved to be more long lasting, in some way prepared
and anticipated the national agenda during Perestroika, in the late 1980s. The
question of national identity emerged once again with a comparable fervour
in 1968 subsequent to the Prague Spring and Ceaușescu’s refusal to support
the Soviet invasion in Czechoslovakia. In 1956 and 1968, the former Western
borderlands – the, sters former Bessarabia, Western Ukraine and the Baltic
States – witnessed what one could call a ‘revenge of history’. More exactly, in
periods of crisis the links between these territories and the interwar political
entities and their traditions were stronger than any time before or afterwards.
The specificity of the Moldavian case is that it succeeded in 1955-1957 to
resume if only partially the Romanianization process witnessed by the interwar
Bessarabia and partially by MASSR . This article is based mainly on archival
documents disclosed in the recent years from Chișinău based depositories.
The first set of documents comprises reports from all districts of MSSR
sent to Chișinău in the months following the ‘Secret Speech’ and Hungarian
Revolution. They are located in the former Archive of the Institute of Party
History within the Central Committee of Moldavia, reorganized in 1991 in
The Archive of the Social-Political Organizations of the Republic of Moldova.
The other set of documents consists of reports of the KGB of MSSR from 1956
and 1957, especially those concerning the attitudes labelled as nationalistic,
and are located in the Archive of the Service for Information and Security of
the Republic of Moldova, the former KGB of MSSR .