From Heroisation to Competing Victimhoods. History Writing on the Second World War in Moldova

Identity, Legitimacy, Memory

World War Two swept the borderland regions of Bessarabia and Transnistria, which lie today in the Republic of Moldova and southern Ukraine, into two different political entities, Romania and the USSR. As a consequence of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, in June 1940 the regions of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina that had been part of Romania were incorporated into the Soviet Union, along with the Baltic states. Bessarabia, stripped of its northern and southern parts (which became part of the Ukrainian SSR), merged with the Moldavian Autonomous SSR, whose shape had been close to that of today’s de facto Transnistria, to form a new Soviet republic, the Moldavian SSR. In June 1941, Romania, allied with Germany in the war against the USSR, regained the two regions and occupied the region between the Dniester and Bug rivers, to which the name of Transnistria was given. Here a military governorate was established that lasted until August 1944. A huge number of Jews and Roma, predominantly from Bessarabia and Bukovina, were deported there upon the orders of the Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu. Between 280,000 and 380,000 of them perished during their march to the region (or further east): either they were purposely killed or died of hunger, illness, or exhaustion in hundreds of ghettos and camps set up in the region^[1] The case of Transnistria, which was Romania’s ‘ethnic dumping ground’^[2] was an exception in Eastern Europe (beyond Poland) with regard to the Holocaust. Romania ‘ranks’ second only to Germany in the number of individuals it killed.

For the inhabitants of Bessarabia and Transnistria, the war was a devastating conflagration that manifested in this region its most brutal features: mass murder and other atrocities, wholesale destruction, and forced migration. As in the Baltic states and Ukraine, change in the political status of the two regions meant that the local population also saw the war front change. Thus, in 1941, Bessarabians and Transnistrians were recruited to fight in the Romanian army along with the Wehrmacht and against the Red Army; but in 1944, men from these areas were recruited to fight in the Red Army and march towards Berlin. On the war’s front lines as well as on the home front, people’s capacity to survive was challenged: through the deprivation of goods, famine, deportation either temporarily or for good, or forced labour. Families disintegrated, entire communities were destroyed, and everyone was suspect of ‘betrayal’.

Despite the tragic times experienced by almost every individual and family, there is, in today’s Moldova, a constant state of ‘conflicting memories’. The culture of the Soviet veterans, widespread during the Soviet period and still present in commemoration practices today, has gradually been disappearing. Dominant today is the fostering of the remembrance of ‘heroes’ and ‘victims’; ‘traitors’ and ‘perpetrators’ are consigned to amnesia. The commemoration of Holocaust victims has been limited to several geographical locations. Moldovans thus have shown themselves reluctant to acknowledge the extraordinary scale of the destruction of Jews and its consequences, preferring instead to claim that they themselves suffered most during and as a consequence of the war, indeed more than any ‘others’, i.e. the ethnic minorities. Denying or diminishing the victimhood of the Moldovan majority population has been considered tantamount to a crime. To be sure, the understanding of the war is not homogenous in Moldovan society. The younger generation, to a greater extent than their elders, have sought out answers to certain uncomfortable questions: why the ‘victim’ cannot sit at the same table with the ‘perpetrator’; why some ‘victims’ suffered more than others during the war; why the pro-Russian (formerly Soviet) symbol of ‘Victory Day’, the St. George ribbon, is publicly ‘challenged’ by the Romanian tricolour. This sort of public ‘confrontation’ of symbols, monuments, and commemoration sites is part and parcel of the contagious phenomenon of mutually exclusive war remembrance and history politics. For example, in November 2016, several Moldovan deputies spent the night by the monument of the Soviet tank in the village of Cornești in order to protect it from the demolition announced by the Minister of Defence^[3] ‘Taking sides’ has persisted in different settings and on different levels. Each year the public controversies peak around the date of 9 May. In 2017, ‘Victory Day’ and ‘Europe Day’ were celebrated simultaneously on that date; still, like every year, the commemoration rituals and official discourses were dominated by the ‘victory’ slogans^[4]

It is commonly acknowledged that memory is elaborated through different levels of transmission, from the private sphere of family and friends to the public sphere.^[5] The way people remember publicly is imposed through state and non-state institutions, group and private initiatives, as well as historians’ professional networks and activities. In Eastern Europe official memory politics were greatly influenced by ongoing nation-building project(s) and were debated together with the countries’ political choice between ‘East’ and ‘West’. In Moldova, as in Ukraine, for example, national identity has simultaneously been the object of national construction and of controversy. According to the ‘pan-Romanian’ national narrative, the Moldovans are part of the Romanian nation. As their story has it, the continuity and legitimacy of Romanian rule, ‘proved’ since antiquity and the middle ages, were ‘disrupted’ by the abusive Russian (starting in 1812), then Soviet (starting in 1940) rules. Its supporters, the so-called Romanianists, claim that the USSR ‘occupied’ Bessarabia in June 1940, and again in August 1944, installing a communist regime which destroyed the political freedom as well as the social and economic harmony achieved in the interwar ‘golden era’. In this narrative, the Holocaust of Jews and Roma is all but silenced. According to the competing ‘pan-Moldovanist’ narrative, the Moldovans form a separate nation that for centuries evolved within its own statehood. This process was disrupted by Romania’s interwar and wartime 1941-1944 ‘occupation’, centrally marked by the Holocaust. Nevertheless, the story goes, the Moldovans managed to recover and to flourish during the Soviet period. Russia’s constant support of the Moldovan nation’s development is presented as crucial for this success. The two narratives have more recently become intertwined with the question of ‘East’ or ‘West’. While the Romanianists emphasise that the union with Romania would be Moldova’s ‘last chance’ to integrate into the EU, the ‘ethnocratic Moldovanists’, who managed to ascend to power after a power deadlock in 2010, have been advocating the strengthening of ties both with the EU and with Russia. Still, they continue to argue that Moldova’s historical ties with Russia remain the cornerstone for the further development of closer political, economic, and cultural relations. Both narratives are thus ethnocentric, having one nation—either Romanian or Moldovan—at its core. Moreover, both approaches have an exclusivist character; the development of debates during the last two and a half decades seem to have narrowed the space for compromise.

An interesting peculiarity for Moldova is that besides the two national narratives that argue for the legitimisation of either the Romanian or the Russian influence in the region, a third—regional rather than national—narrative was developed in the separatist region of Transnistria^[6] As an effect of the pro-Romanian perspective for Moldova, discussed during the late 1980s, separatist tendencies developed in the southern part of Moldova, where the Gagauz minority lives, and in Transnistria. In September 1990, Transnistria declared itself separate from the Moldavian SSR. In 1992, tensions escalated into a military conflict between Transnistrian separatists and Moldovan forces, with the former Russian 14th Guards Army and a Cossack division becoming involved on the side of Transnistria^[7] In the context of the ongoing conflict, identity took a specific shape: the legitimation of secessionism from Moldova and ‘Greater Romania’ was gradually replaced with a civic, ‘internationalist’ identity grounded in Russian values and language. Nevertheless, the celebration of the ‘common victory in the Great Patriotic War’ on 9 May, the building of museums and monument sites, and the preservation of the veterans’ culture show that the war, along with the larger Soviet/Russian past, remains central to Transnistrian identity.

The interplay of politics, history, and memory in Moldova has been researched both inside and outside the country.^[8] Among the main actors, one can find historians who have ‘adjusted’ the past to fit it into the ‘national’ frame. This was not accidental, since the historians themselves were active participants in political processes: some of them took part in the 1980s’ ‘national awakening movement’, with several of them building political careers; others lamented the dissolution of the USSR and their lost careers and privileges; while the third group, based in Tiraspol, adjusted to the new status quo while supporting the ‘separatist movement’ and Transnistria’s ‘closeness’ to Russia. In fact, in every country that participated in the war, historians have taken part in the war’s re-narration and the search for its place in the memory of their society.^[9]

Eastern Europe stood out because the war had to be reinterpreted after the collapse of the communist regimes and the disintegration of the USSR, on the one hand, and, on the other, had to fit the alternation of regimes—either the Soviet and the Nazi (i.e. Poland and Ukraine) or the Soviet and the Romanian regimes (i.e. Moldova)—into new national narrative(s). Besides several illuminating contributions that show the place of the Holocaust in the sociopolitical battles on the sovereignty of historical interpretation,^[10] there is only one collective work of Moldovan historians and colleagues outside the country which reveals how opposing political discourses supporting one or another regime led to the suppression and distortion of personal and local memories.^[11] This idea is particularly stressed in this article: ‘bottom-up’ research can bring alternative ways of thinking and insights to the contradictory and exclusivist debates about the war.

From Memory to Memories

After World War Two ended, the Moldovans joined the victorious Soviet people within the Moldavian SSR and engaged in the ‘liquidation of war consequences’ and the ‘peaceful construction’ of socialism. As part of the Soviet professional cohort, local historians moulded their work within the postwar cultural-ideological context that glorified the victory of the Soviet Union in the ‘Great Patriotic War’. All guilt was transferred to the Romanian and the Nazi regimes, which were declared responsible for the war and its consequences.^[12] No historian doubted that the Red Army had ‘liberated’ Bessarabia: either in June 1940, when the Romanian Army and administration were ‘warded off’ the region, or in August 1944, when the ‘Iași-Chișinău’ military operation ensured the success of the Red Army over the Romanian-German occupiers and its march further west. Within this context, the Moldovan historians fulfilled the task of emphasising the contribution of the Moldovans, along with other Soviet nationalities, to the long-aspired victory over the Romanian ‘fascist’ and the Nazi occupation regimes.^[13]

During the perestroika years Soviet historians, recognising the crisis of historical scholarship but for the most part ignoring the discredit of the historian’s profession, launched a campaign of ‘uncovering the white spots of history’. Accounts of the ‘dark’ communist past from unsealed and newly available archival documents were published in the media, resulting in a clash between traditional Soviet historiography and historical journalism. The changes in approach towards the past slowly reached the Soviet peripheries; the ‘wrongfulness’ of the 1939 Soviet-Finnish Winter War was acknowledged earlier than the questioning of the 1940 ‘liberation’ of Bessarabia by Soviet troops. In 1990, in the State Museum of History of the Moldavian SSR (today the National Museum of Moldova), the diorama ‘Iași-Chișinău Operation’ opened to the public. It presented the ‘liberation’ of Chișinău city by the Soviet (Red) Army on 26 August 1944, after which date the Moldavian SSR was restored and the Axis forces pushed further west, thus opening the way for the Soviet Army to enter Romania and the Balkans. The diorama currently remains part of the museum’s exhibition.^[14]

After Moldova declared independence in 1991, historians engaged in the construction of Moldovan statehood, and debates about identity played a crucial role. During this process, new practices vis-à-vis the political use of history were adopted. This was a typical phenomenon in the postcommunist countries, where the symbols of the communist past were destroyed and public space decommunised.^[15] Nevertheless, in Moldova, as in eastern Ukraine but in contrast to the Baltic states and western Ukraine, no radical de-Sovietisation occurred. Historians were left ‘free’ from political impositions on what and how to write, but nonetheless embarked on the process of reinterpreting the war rather slowly and cautiously. In fact, only after they came to know the positions of their Russian and Romanian colleagues did Moldovan historians reveal their own position towards the Soviet past and the Great Patriotic War as the crucial event that consolidated Soviet identity. Similar to what one finds in Soviet historiography, the publications that appeared in Russia in 1990 or immediately afterwards argued that in June 1940 Bessarabia experienced a ‘long-awaited liberation’ from the Romanian ‘monarchist bourgeois-landlord regime’ that had harshly exploited local inhabitants.^[16] In turn, Romanian historians wrote that the events marked a ‘dramatic page’ in the history of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, both regions being occupied by the Soviet army along with a part of Poland and the Baltic states as a direct consequence of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The Soviet ‘aggressive intention’ fuelled Hungarian and Bulgarian revisionism that led to Romania’s further territorial secessions and its subsequent entrance in the war on the side of Germany.^[17] No mention was made of racial or anticommunist motives to account for Romania’s entrance into the war.^[18]

The act of ‘borrowing’ either the Romanian or the Russian simplified ‘template’ coincided grosso modo with the political sympathies of the individual historians. Unsurprisingly, those who supported the ‘pan-Romanianist’ perspective adopted the template provided by their colleagues across the Pruth River, while the ‘statalists’, as well as those who defended the role of Russia in the building of Transnistria, subscribed to the old-new intellectual products delivered by Russian historians. To give greater weight to what was said or written, the phrase ‘historical truth’—in contrast to the ‘falsity’ implied by one’s opponents—was often used, so as to claim that the ‘truth’ was based on facts. But where, and how, were such facts collected? The Moldovanist historians and those from Transnistria used Moldovan archival sources and quoted extensively from Soviet-era publications, while their Romanianist counterparts rushed to the previously inaccessible Romanian archives. The latter established contacts with Romanian colleagues and took part in academic events and programmes in Romania. Very few quoted Soviet wartime sources in their works, due to a lack of research funding but also to a rather typical, purposeful ignorance of everything related to the Soviet Union and Russia.^[19] Until recently, the lack of corroboration between Romanian and Russian archival sources was the norm, which greatly affected Moldovan history writing.

Despite a relatively short period of political support, the pan-Romanian approach took root in academia and the broader educational sphere. This can be seen as something of a paradox, since starting in the mid-1990s the parties in power supported the ‘Moldovan nationalist’ project. Andrei Cușco has categorised the dynamics between the ‘politics of memory’ and ‘history politics’ into several chronological stages: 1) 1990/91-1993, characterised by the nationalisation of the public sphere and a ‘symbolic break’ with the past; 2) 1994-2000, when Moldovan nationalism gained ground, and a certain ‘amnesia’ towards the past was supported; 3) 2001-2009, when the Moldovanists, supported by the Communist Party, then in power, called for partial rehabilitation of the Soviet past and declared opposition to the Romanianists; 4) 2009-2010, observed as a period moving towards ‘transitional justice’, during which time the Commission for the Study and Evaluation of the Totalitarian Communist Regime was set up.^[20] Throughout the last two decades, there were different attempts to replace the school subject ‘History of the Romanians’, but these efforts were met with fierce resistance from members of academia, schoolteachers, and pupils, even provoking ‘student strikes’ in 1995 and 2002^[21] In textbooks and other educational materials,^[22] the victorious character of the Great Patriotic War was contested; furthermore, the Soviet Union was declared responsible for launching the conflagration in 1941 and dragging the region into the conflict via its occupation in 1940, which had deep consequences for the country. For their part, the Moldovanists argued less coherently. References to Soviet historiography persisted; these historians were less connected with the schooling establishment and did not produce alternative textbooks for classroom use. Even though the Moldovanists, from the middle of the 1990s onwards, became more active in politics and the public sphere, the pro-Romanian intelligentsia dominated the cultural sphere, and their prominence there also played against the imposition of the Moldovanist’s version of history.^[23]

As I will show, the historical debate on World War Two has been perpetuated around several topics, such as the date of 28 June 1940, when Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, along with the Baltic states, were occupied by Soviet troops: this event has been debated within the ‘occupation vs liberation’ cliché in order to claim legitimacy for either Russia or Romania in the long run. In addition, the war’s ‘heroes’, the Red Army soldiers and partisans, have been confronted side by side with the war’s ‘traitors’, such as prisoners of war (POWs). More recently, the Holocaust has been debated as a part of a ‘competing victimhoods’ dilemma, which has strengthened the dimension of ‘the majority versus the minorities’ in the discussions.

Romanian versus Soviet Legitimacy. June 1940 in Bessarabia

Positioning towards the date of 28 June 1940 was, and still is, considered crucial for Moldovan historians. Soviet historiography presented the date as the cornerstone for the subsequent creation of Moldovan statehood, within which the Moldovans lived together with other nationalities.^[24] The Moldovanists interpreted the events as the legitimate restoration of the Soviet regime in a region that for centuries had belonged to the Russian political and cultural sphere, and claimed that the local population had eagerly awaited the ‘liberation’. Pictures of children giving flowers to Red Army soldiers, for instance, were widely used as propaganda material in newspapers, brochures and the like. The Moldovanists claimed that in 1940 the ‘final solution of the Bessarabian question in favour of the USSR’ occurred; Romania’s ‘tacit acceptance’ to cede Bessarabia signified the ‘end of Greater Romania’. Both chronological moments of 1940 and of 1944 were qualified as a de jure and a de facto recognition of Bessarabia as Soviet territory.^[25] The focus was placed on the ‘liberation from the foreign yoke’ as having a ‘positive’ impact on the inhabitants. Little was said about the circumstances of the ‘rapid forced evacuation’ of Romania from Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, already acknowledged, in fact, by Russian historians.

In 1990, historians who participated in or supported the ‘national movement’, and envisaged the perspective of the union of Moldova with Romania, organised an international conference that condemned the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact which had led to the military occupation of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina by the Red Army in 1940.^[26] Several subsequent publications argued that the USSR prepared in advance for the war against Romania, which caused Romania ‘enormous material, financial and moral loss’.^[27] Romania struggled to evacuate the area’s inhabitants and its military forces, as well as to save those goods that belonged to the army and the administrative institutions.^[28] The conclusions, drawn exclusively from Romanian documents, were in line with the claims of the Romanian historians, who considered the Romanian government to be a victim of wartime circumstances and thus tried to absolve it from any responsibility with regard to the fate of the two regions and their people. The need to corroborate Romanian documents with Russian primary sources persists up to today.^[29]

On 5 February 1994 Moldova’s first postsocialist president, Mircea Snegur, addressed the congress ‘Our Home—The Republic of Moldova’ and accused the Romanianist historians and writers of plotting against the Moldovan statehood that supported its multiethnic society. According to him, the name ‘Moldovan’ draws its roots from the medieval Moldovan principality, which is older than modern Romania. As a result of this congress, the Moldovanist discourse was declared the ‘state’s official ideology’,^[30] upon which the Romanianist historians resolved to impress an even stronger nationalist imprint in their works, especially in their efforts to justify Romania’s wartime military alliance with Germany. They argued that the 1940-1941 Soviet occupation legitimised Romania’s subsequent entrance into the ‘war of liberation’ alongside Nazi Germany in June 1941—for the defence of Romania’s historical and ethnic rights, and for the rescue of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina from the ‘Soviet abyss’.^[31] The Romanian regime’s successful ‘protection of the Bessarabian Romanians’, to the detriment of the Jews and the other ethnic minorities, was presented as a positive outcome, as it ensured a fostering of the ‘Romanian character’ of the region. In contrast, these authors maintained, the Romanian majority endured ‘a situation of inferiority’ during the Soviet occupation, whereas minorities, such as Jews, Russians, and Ukrainians, received privileged treatment.^[32]

An opposite position was defended by Transnistrian historians who struggled to make sense of the past within the framework of a newly established Transnistrian ‘statehood’.^[33] They claimed that despite ‘harsh occupation’ of the Romanians during the interwar period, the Moldovans, along with the Ukrainians, Russians, Gagauz, Bulgarians, Germans, and Jews who all belonged to the ‘workers, peasants, intellectuals and representatives of the bourgeoisie’, formed the ‘Bessarabian National Resistance Front’. This front organised a ‘popular uprising’ around 28 June 1940, in which the Romanian authorities were ‘overthrown’ by the locals even before the Soviet army entered the region—a hint at the continuous ‘resistance’ manifested by the Transnistrians towards pro- Romanian tendencies at the beginning of the 1990s, which was supported ‘unconditionally’ by Russia^[34] During 1941-1944, the local population witnessed the ‘degradation of the economy, political terror, cultural regression’ and a ‘crisis’ of the healthcare system, all of which contrasted greatly with the ‘significant progress’ achieved during the Soviet period.^[35]

Several common characteristics of the historians’ publications fit within the above-mentioned rhetoric: a lack of theoretical and methodological explication; the embracing of a state-centric approach and an ignorance of other, non-state individual or group actors; a selective and biased approach to primary sources; an exclusivist ‘liberation’ versus ‘occupation’ perspective; a focus on the political sphere; and an emphasis on the positioning of the ethnic majority versus minorities.

Several recently published studies challenge these predispositions. Such is the case of a collection of documents on the evacuation of Bessarabians and northern Bucovinians to Romania in June 1940, which is the result of a fruitful collaboration between a Moldovan and an Austrian author. Besides bringing into the regional academic circuit a comprehensive historiographic account that encompasses both regional and extra-regional studies, the study attempts to shift the focus from the Romanian state towards the needs and expectations of the local population during the critical days of June 1940. The authors explicitly claim—for the first time in regional historiography—that the ‘questionable loyalty’ of Bessarabian Germans, Russians, and Ukrainians, observed around the date of 28 June 1940, was the outcome of the ‘failure of the (re-)Romanianisation’ of the region—a plausible argument already to be found in western historiography on interwar Romania since the mid-1990s.^[36] The authors argued that on the eve of the Soviet occupation the Romanian state overreached in its attacks against those who had spread rumours about the possible war against the USSR, and that the Jews had not necessarily ‘eagerly waited’ for the Soviets to arrive. To be sure, some important questions, such as the motives behind the solidarity with the new regime, visible in many places, were not taken up. But the cliché that the Jews were the ‘enemies’ who had to pay for the 1940 ‘betrayal’ was called into question.^[37]

Heroes and Traitors. ‘Good’ Partisans Versus ‘Bad’ POWs

During the Soviet period, the partisans’ movement was one of the most popular topics of research; historians argued about how fundamental the partisans’ role in defeating both Romanian and German fascists was.^[38] Despite scarce available documentation, no historian dared to argue that the ‘partisans’ movement’ was not a part of the Moldovan wartime history. Rather than avoiding the topic, they preferred to cite Soviet historians.^[39] After 1990, the Transnistrian historians found ‘diversions’ and ‘strikes’ by Bessarabian ‘workers and peasants’ in nearly every Moldovan village under Romanian occupation. According to one publication, after 1943, the ‘illegalists’ were supported by ‘patriots’ in their actions to stop the Romanian public servants from destroying the Bessarabian and Transnistrian economies. In March 1944, on the left side of the Dniester River and in the neighbouring regions in the rear front, thirty active partisans’ detachments numbered two thousand fighters; thus, already by that time, ‘in the wooded raions of northern “Transnistria” the Romanian occupation administration was liquidated’ with the help of the local inhabitants.^[40]

According to several recent publications on the participation of Moldovan minorities in the war, Russians, Bulgarians, Gagauzs, and Ukrainians did not accept the Romanian occupation regime but took active stances on the side of the Soviet ‘liberators’. These works argue that the support given to the partisans who ‘successfully fought’ in Bessarabia and Ukraine was one of the main forms of resistance against the Romanian and the German occupation regimes.^[41] For instance, in his book about the Gagauz ‘patriotic fight’ in the Great Patriotic War, published with the support of the Russian Embassy in Moldova and distributed to every school in Gagauzia, Stepan S. Bulgar argued that there had been a longstanding ‘denial’ of the participation of the Gagauz minority in the war up to the victorious end against the Nazis.^[42] The Gagauz women were to be placed among the ‘heroes’ who had contributed to the victory of the Soviet people, the author claimed. Although deserving praise for focusing on minorities and gender, such a contribution, and others like it, are nevertheless politicised and biased. The unquestionable placement of the Gagauz, along with other minorities, among the groups ‘loyal’ to the Soviet Union brings with it the actively promoted political line that Gagauz people support Moldova’s development along with, and with the support of, Russia, and oppose the country’s Western ‘allies’, Romania and the EU. Indeed, the leaders of the Gagauz Territorial Autonomy (UTA Gagauzia) have shown their constant attachment to Russian values, have supported Russia’s interests in the region, and have encouraged a boost of national pride and cohesion among the Gagauz people. Such approaches thus postpone rather than call for the acknowledgement of a common war experience among the Moldovans.

The emphasis on the ‘partisans’ glory’ has been a main component of the Great Patriotic War rhetoric, which divides people into ‘heroes’ and ‘traitors’. That the ‘partisans’ movement’ possessed a different intensity and presence in different parts of the Soviet Union, as well as during different moments of the war, has often been ignored. In Bessarabia and Transnistria under Romanian occupation, in fact, partisans were largely absent, in contrast to what transpired in German-occupied territories of Ukraine, where the partisans’ activities have been acknowledged as having had catastrophic consequences for the local inhabitants, on the one hand, and as being an effective military instrument of the Soviet Army, especially from 1943 onwards, on the other.^[43] The scarcity of sources pertaining to Bessarabia and Transnistria in the huge fund of resources on the partisans’ movement in the USSR, kept in the Russian state archives, has also contributed to the relative neglect of the topic by historians.^[44] In today’s de facto state of Transnistria, and to a lesser degree in Moldova, the partisans, together with the soldiers of the Soviet Army, remain the protagonists of local Victory parades and are subjects for school and extracurricular activities.

In contrast to the ‘heroes–partisans’, the fate of the ‘traitors’—among them the Romanian POWs in the Soviet Union—has received little scholarly attention.^[45] The book Spassk 99, the result of a cooperation among Moldovan, Romanian, and Kazakh historians, restores the heretofore unknown tales of wartime prisoners during a liminal period of their lives. The issues of the war’s consequences and the postwar legal and institutional mechanisms that influenced the situation of the Romanian POWs are also raised.^[46] One interesting aspect discussed is the classification of the POWs by the different countries: Romania treated the POWs as Romanian citizens, whereas the Soviet authorities regarded them as Moldovan and Soviet citizens. In turn, the great majority of POWs who initially identified themselves as Romanians had declared themselves, by the end of the war, as Moldovans—probably because they expected better treatment and, subsequently, an earlier liberation. The sensitive topic of the POWs’ identity is closely related to the issue of the Moldovans’ contribution to the ‘victory over the fascists’ raised in the Moldavian SSR immediately after the war. The adaptive character of (Moldovan) identity in this time of crisis would lend itself to comparative analyses with analogous cases.

Competing Victimhoods. The Holocaust and Beyond

In recent years, Moldovan historians competed with one other to argue who suffered most and under which regime—another trend in history writing, which is not regional per se, but now has a rather wide reach in both the ‘West’ and the ‘East’^[47] In Moldova, Romanianist historians claim that starting in 1940-1941, and then continuing after 1944, the Soviet regime intentionally destroyed the dominant Moldovan (Romanian) nation through deportations, forced labour, and famine, referring to the deportations carried out in several waves—1941, 1949, and 1951—as well as through the postwar 1946-1947 famine. They also claim that the Russians, Ukrainians, Jews and other minorities who had greeted the Soviet troops with enthusiasm were promoted in public service and benefitted from various social and economic privileges. Moldovanist historians, on the other hand, who adapted the ‘victors’ justice’ approach to the ‘national’ trend, have argued that during the interwar period the Bessarabian minorities were marginalised by the Romanians, then annihilated and destroyed in the war, such being the case of Jews in the Holocaust. Both approaches pursued a political goal—that of strengthening the legitimacy of either the Romanian or the Soviet regime in the region. This goal also explains the search for a public recognition of the greater suffering of one or another group of people as well as a tendency to establish a hierarchy of crimes—that is, to declare the Soviet deportations the worst crime committed against the Moldovan people, which went hand in hand with denationalisation and russification. Indeed such ‘congenital victimhood’ has become part and parcel of (Moldovan) identity, and is hardly being challenged in public debate today.

The Holocaust and Jewish suffering as a whole have occupied a rather modest place in this debate; only very recently has the topic been brought to the forefront of public attention. On 22 July 2016, the Moldovan parliament adopted a declaration that accepted the 2004 ‘Elie Wiesel’ report on the destruction of Jews during Antonescu’s military regime of 1941-1944, which condemned the systematic persecution and extermination of Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators, as well as any attempt at ignorance and denial of the Holocaust. The declaration encourages Moldovan society to pay tribute to the Holocaust’s victims as well as its survivors. This was a political decision long awaited by both the Jewish community and the part of local and international society that considers reconciliation as fundamental for the encouragement of sensitivity about the topic and for education about how prejudice and hatred can and must be avoided in the future^[48] The adoption of the declaration was, nevertheless, only modestly featured in the media and was little discussed in public. Before as well as after the declaration was adopted, Moldovan governmental representatives assured the foreign officials who visited the country that there would be a series of measures taken to preserve Jewish history and culture and to commemorate the Holocaust^[49] Conspicuously, the need to integrate Jewish history into the wider local, national, and regional historical contexts through education as well as cultural and commemoration activities has hardly been touched upon. Historians have avoided taking a stance in public with relation to the newly adopted document; and if they had done so on earlier occasions, it was in a rather clumsy manner.

As has been shown in several thorough studies, the position of Moldovan historians on the Holocaust in Bessarabia and Transnistria has evolved gradually: first vehement denial, then a distorted presentation of the facts, then purposeful enhancement or diminishment of its scale, and later an (albeit partial) acknowledgement.^[50] The modest number of publications were part and parcel of the two distinctive discourses about the war. Thus, the Romanianists argued that the Romanian anti-Jewish policy was solely motivated by the necessity of securing the country from those who had ‘betrayed’ it in 1940 and violated its security; blame for the killing of Jews (the concept of the Holocaust was rather avoided or carefully sidestepped) was placed on the Nazi regime.^[51] In fact, the heroisation of the Romanian head of state Ion Antonescu was—and still is— part of the justification of the Eastern campaign in June 1941: the ‘liberation’ of Bessarabia from the Soviets and the securing of Romania’s eastern borders through the incorporation of Transnistria. Moreover, both regions benefitted from Romania’s mission civilizatrice, which ‘saved’ them from the communists.^[52] Thus, the Romanianists argued that ‘communism had a nationality’, because the great majority of those who supported the occupation of Bessarabia by the Soviet troops in June 1940 were Jews. Another argument was that the Antonescu regime was not a fascist one, such being the claim of the Moldovanists, but a moderate military dictatorship guided by ‘war necessities’, one such ‘necessity’ being the destruction of the Jews^[53] Although the Holocaust was not denied, as in many publications of Romanian nationalist historiography, the crime was thus justified. To give another example, a collection of documents on the activity of the Antonescu regime in Bessarabia, published by Alexandru Moraru, clearly shows the contradiction between political partisanship and a historian’s professional task. Of the total of two hundred documents Moraru edited, thirty-nine refer to the killing of Jews during the first days of the Romanian occupation in June 1941, the mobilisation of Jews into forced labour, and their treatment in the Chişinău ghetto and others. But still, in the introduction, the author attempts to convince his readers that the regime attacked only ‘communist Jews’, and that assigning Antonescu any responsibility ‘for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, especially Jews, does not correspond to the historical truth’.^[54]

In contrast to the Romanianists, the Moldovanist historians have tried to take Antonescu down from the hero’s pedestal. The Holocaust has been presented as a ‘Romanian phenomenon’ which had its origin in the radicalised interwar Romanian society. In this version, the Jews, as well as other minorities, were hostile to the Romanians and supportive of the Soviets. Sergiu Nazaria, for example, argued that the Romanian ‘genocide’ was directed against ‘Soviet people’ in general, among them Jews but also Moldovans who had earlier been Communist Party activists. According to this author, the number of Jews that fell victim to ‘ethnic cleansing’ were around 550,000 to 600,000—a number twice as large as the one given in the ‘Elie Wiesel’ report.^[55]

Thus, both approaches present the Jews’ positioning towards the changing status of the region as a determinant factor for the policy of the two regimes towards them. Little to no connection is established with the interwar Romanian policy of antisemitism. Moreover, hardly any attempt is made to analyse the destruction of the Jews in the context of internal institutional rivalries and/or German-Romanian relations.^[56] Vladimir Solonari reconstructed the complex historical context in which Antonescu experimented with ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the two ‘model regions’ of Bessarabia and Transnistria.^[57] His book was acclaimed by international academia, but was for the most part ignored by those who either mythologise or demonise the Romanian wartime leader.

The lack of a proper theoretical and historiographic anchor to place the local variant of the Holocaust within the wider regional and European contexts is a typical characteristic of the above-mentioned publications. The number of Jewish victims was either increased or diminished; the available archival sources were often ignored, taken out of context, or misinterpreted. The corroboration of different types of sources remains a challenge, due not only to logistical impossibilities and purposeful ignorance but also to methodological pitfalls and, not least, the lack of constructive dialogue and critique among colleagues.

Moldovan scholars have little acknowledged the work of international scholars who have provided multicultural, ideological, economic, military, racial, and other explanations for the outbreak of extreme violence against Jews and Roma during the Antonescu regime. What is more, the topics that have been studied in depth—such as the relationship between the German and Jewish minorities in the context of the interwar Romanian restrictive policies and, subsequently, the Holocaust—have been overlooked for different reasons, depending on the ‘side’ one leans to.^[58] At the same time, Moldovan scholars have rarely been participants in, nor even observers of, the new theoretical approaches towards the analysis of fascism and communism—in comparison with and/or through the interplay and entanglements of regimes that, undoubtedly, shaped certain perceptions and categorisations that the societies embraced in times of crisis.^[59]

Until recently, both Moldovan discourses held that the Holocaust was an ‘imported’ phenomenon: in fact, their claim was that the attitude of the local population toward Jews was friendly and supportive. Following Jan Gross’s study on Polish gentiles who participated in the massacre of Jews in the German-occupied Polish village of Jedwabne.^[60] Diana Dumitru’s earlier publications,^[61] as well as her recent book on the constructible character of antisemitism and the crucial role of the state during the Romanian Holocaust, have challenged this assumption.^[62] She brought forth evidence of more tolerant and supportive behaviour towards Jews in Transnistria in comparison to Bessarabia, and she argued that this difference was due to the integrative Soviet state policy during the interwar period that contrasted substantially with Romania’s aggressive antisemitic policy, manifested in multiple forms.^[63]

To be sure, the complicity of state institutions, public servants, or civilians in the Holocaust is not a taboo topic anymore, underresearched as it remains.^[64] The publications by the director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, Paul A. Shapiro, on the Chişinău ghetto,^[65] and by Eric C. Steinhart on the German-Romanian conflictual ‘collaboration’ in the mass murder of Jews in Transnistria, in which the German minority (Volksdeutsche) took part^[66] have redirected attention towards local milieus and have raised questions on the participation of local actors. These and other publications point out the crucial importance of oral and written testimonies,^[67] as well as the necessity of corroborating different sources that can widen and deepen the perspective through which the Holocaust in Bessarabia and Transnistria can be understood.

Despite the well-acknowledged differences in Soviet and Romanian state policies towards Jews, a series of topics await their researchers. Among these is the ambiguous character of the Jews’ economic status in the contested regions of Bessarabia and Transnistria. In Bessarabia, as in Bukovina, Jewish properties were leased to Romanian merchants from other regions who opened shops and taverns, or they were sold at local auctions, leading to competition between colonisers and the local inhabitants of Bukovina for the Jewish property.^[68] The findings challenge claims that attempt to justify the destruction of the Jews with the ‘necessity to secure’ the Romanian majority who had ‘lost’ its wealth.^[69]

In addition to the issue of Jewish property, a second important and underresearched matter is the fate of property belonging to the Bessarabian Germans who were resettled in September–October 1940 as a result of a German-Soviet agreement regarding population exchange. Around 120,000 Bessarabian Germans were resettled to Poland (mainly to the łódź area), where they were placed in the empty houses of the departed Poles and Jews. To be sure, their history was researched by German historians,^[70] but only touched on in passing in the works of their Moldovan colleagues,^[71] The memoirs of Bessarabian Germans indicate some connections between acts of violence against the Bessarabian Volksdeutsche by ‘Jews and communists’ and the relatively late entrance of the Soviet army in German villages in June 1940, but there has yet been no comprehensive study on the motives of these ‘riots’ and the behaviour of the local authorities.

These and other examples reveal the necessity to analyse the violence that took place, while also taking into account an intertwining of factors whose complexity exceeds the exclusive understanding of victimhood as a matter to be assigned only to the Soviet or the Romanian regime. Challenging the ‘competing victimhoods’ perspective proves to be no easy task, especially because it lies exclusively on the shoulders of individual researchers. In contrast to other countries, where the study of the war and the Holocaust was prioritized by research institutions, no such initiatives occurred in Moldova. The creation in 2010 of the Commission for the Study and Appreciation of the Totalitarian Communist Regime, in which the majority of the Romanianists historians were co-opted, complicated the task further.^[72] Because the focus of research and its public dissemination has been placed on (Moldovan/Romanian) victims of Soviet deportations and famine,^[73] the gap between the atrocities committed by the Soviet regime and those by the Romanian regime in the two regions was (purposely) even widened.

Towards an Entangled Wartime History of Bessarabia and Transnistria?!

More than two and a half decades after the collapse of the USSR, the Moldovan people prove to be greatly impressed by the Second World War. The wartime period, in which the Soviet and the Romanian regimes alternated, seems to offer an ideal ground for confronting different ‘truths’ and for extrapolating their consequences in today’s environment, as well as for interconnecting them with an (uncertain) Moldovan future perspective. Historians, who along with other intellectuals took an active part in Moldova’s political transformation from the late Soviet period to the country’s independence, have embraced the ‘nationalist’ approach towards the troubled past, which prioritises the defence of the newly established country’s interests. Though rather modest in number, the historians dealing with World War Two were quite active in the public sphere as members of authoritative bodies that take decisions in academia and other educational areas, as well as being authors of school textbooks.

The majority of the (albeit scarce) scholarly works on the regions of Bessarabia and Transnistria during World War Two can easily be integrated into the ‘liberation versus occupation’ approach. The arguments that formed the core of the narrative on the Great Patriotic War, which are today contested in many countries of Central and Eastern Europe, were commonly defended by the Moldovanist historians who saw Moldova’s future as an independent state with the USSR/Russia by its side. In turn, the Romanianist historians, who considered the future of Bessarabia with Romania and within the EU, argued that the Soviet occupation of the former Romanian territories of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, along with the Baltic states and a part of Poland, was the direct consequence of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. In each case, the historians who defended, or condemned, ‘the right of the winner’ in the war were involved in a competition for the monopolisation of the memory discourse, which the country’s political parties saw as an important factor for gaining the political support of the electorate. Adapting their work vis-à-vis the de facto statehood of Transnistria, Transnistrian historians have developed a third approach to the wartime past on the right bank of the Dniester, juxtaposing it with the two narratives that dominate the public scene. This narrative centres on (civic) resistance towards Romania and its values, and on ‘independence’ with Russia on its side; it is constructed upon the concept of ‘resistance’, in which the Great Patriotic War plays a central role. It served as a means for strengthening Transnistria’s ‘statehood’, and as a message for the outside world that the past as well as the future of Transnistria lies with(in) Russia.

Despite their mutual exclusivist claims, these approaches have several things in common. International scholarship, the advancement of theoretical knowledge, methodological approaches and case studies, have not much been taken into account. As state legitimacy is placed at the forefront of the argumentation, the political practices of violence and repression have been presented as legitimate; the issue whether the inhabitants supported or rejected state policies was for the most part avoided. Different dichotomous strategies, such as those of ‘hero versus traitor’, ‘majority versus minorities’, and ‘competing victimhood’, have been used to emphasise, or alternately diminish, certain war crimes committed by either the Soviet or the Romanian regime. Similarly, facts and numbers have been distorted. While these historians claim to acknowledge ‘ethical responsibility’ for the war’s victims and veterans, until recently the perspective of individuals or groups towards the war was disregarded, and individual testimonies were ignored. Asserting the cultivation of ‘historical truth’ through their publications and public activities, historians contributed to the divide in society rather than overcoming it. To work towards this latter aim, they would need to strive to contribute to reconciliation. Instead, historians, along with other representatives of the intellectual and political elite, have engaged in a contradictory public debate that reaches its high point annually around the date of 9 May. Thus, historians have also contributed to the politicisation of this date, which has been widely used to celebrate, or contest, the ‘victory’ rather than to mourn the war victims on both the Soviet and Romanian sides.

The number of historians who dealt with the war was—and still is—small; the number who deal with the Holocaust is even tinier: a mere handful of scholars. As shown above, the atrocities committed by the Romanian regime towards Jews and Roma are no longer denied, and the research results published in the past few years are encouraging. Several recent contributions, recognised internationally, provide an illuminating analysis of the complex circumstances in which the Holocaust in Bessarabia and Transnistria took place. The behaviour and the interaction of actors at different levels of power have been explored; the voices of those who suffered have been brought to the fore. The social dimension of the war, including the histories of individuals and of social groups, has recently been placed on the research agenda. Local stories of the wartime experience, although not free from the bias discussed here, modestly make their way through.^[74]

Nevertheless, the historians’ work was not taken for granted but rather was put under scrutiny, which is of utter importance in a context where even the destruction of the Moldovan capital Chişinău is a matter bitterly fought over. While Soviet historiography maintained that the city was destroyed only during the retreat of the Romanian and German armies in 1944, the Romanianist historians argue that the Soviet Army bombed the city during their retreat in July 1941, destroying a significant number of private houses and commercial and industrial enterprises.^[75] Another layer of the not-coming-to-terms with the war past is the clash of the official version of the war with individual and group experiences—which were bitter, regardless of the regime. Since some family members fought either on the side of the Russians or the Romanians, or some even had fighters on both sides, every family developed their own perceptions of the war. Even though the official commemoration policy in Moldova is kept within the framework of the Great Patriotic War, new studies based on a variety of sources, previously unavailable, challenge the traditional approaches. They do so by adopting different analytical scales—from macro to meso and micro—towards the war and wartime experiences, by avoiding selective and distorted interpretations of facts, and by integrating victims’ testimonies from all sides involved, and also from the perspective of the ‘perpetrators’, which had previously been purposely forgotten. Another very important aspect of research is the analysis of the politics of remembrance, especially since the history of memory refers not only to what is remembered but also to what is forgotten or repressed. The way seems thus paved to overcome the narrow, biased perceptions of World War Two, moving ahead towards the alternation and differentiation of the ‘occupation’ versus ‘liberation’ narratives.

Given how thin and fragile the lines are between ‘victors’ and ‘losers’, ‘heroes’ and ‘traitors’, as well as ‘victims’ and ‘perpetrators’ in the wartime history of Bessarabia and Transnistria, the aim of writing their stories in a complex and entangled manner has gradually been gaining supporters from both academia and the wider public. An attentive observer can notice that local communities have taken one step forward from the official commemoration policy, and are now ready for an acknowledgement of the victims of both the Soviet and the Romanian regimes.