Fragile Loyalität zur Republik Moldau. Sowjetnostalgie und ‘Heimatlosigkeit’ unter den russischen und ukrainischen Minderheiten

Western academic interest in the former Soviet republic of Moldova and its breakaway republic of Transnistria comes in waves. In the early 1990s, political scientists and (political) historians studied Moldova and Transnistria as spectacular and extreme cases of nation and state building, both in the interwar period as well as in the immediate post-Soviet years. This wave was followed by a low tide of more than a decade. Over the last few years, anthropologists, linguists, and (cultural and social) historians have taken over, combining issues of national (historical) identity with socioeconomic disparities. Rather than giving ‘the state’ and so-called ‘ethnic entrepreneurs’ centre stage, this next generation of ‘Moldovanists’ have adopted a bottom-up perspective, without recourse to a normative dichotomy between a repressive state and an authentic civil society.

Together with Stefan Ihrig, Dareg Zabarah, Jan Zofka, Elizabeth Anderson, and Jennifer Cash, Rosanna Dom and her 2015 PhD thesis from Regensburg belong to this second wave. For them, ‘nationality’ is no longer a distinct identity easily manipulated by politicians, historians, and other nation builders. ‘Identity’ is replaced by ambiguous and inconclusive processes of identification, thereby once again ascribing agency to the citizens in a context of multiple transitions (statehood, social fabric, economics). ‘Nationality’ as a fixed category is no longer used and, if at all, national identity is the resultant, not the determinant of a process. The tools of their trade are participatory observation and qualitative citizens’ interviews rather than policy documents, statistics, and interviews with political leaders. Dom uses the concept of ‘loyalty’ (43-46), as it does not imply the exclusiveness of national identity and allows for overlapping loyalties to dissimilar groups: Moldovans, Russian-speakers, villagers, newcomers, and so forth. Loyalty as concept, moreover, she argues, sidesteps the connotation of emotion and irrationality. Correspondingly, these interviewees are no longer naïve victims who have their identities and political mobilization manipulated at will by devilish nationalists in Chişinău, Bucharest, Tiraspol’, Kyiv, or Moscow. In Dom’s cautionary words: ‘In the study of Russians and Russian-speakers in the fourteen non-Russian post-Soviet republics, there is a notable tendency to reify ethnic groups as fixed entities or agents, to the detriment of actual actors and contexts’ (41).

Laudably, the author has avoided the flaw of some other second-wave studies—ignoring the state and politicking altogether and focusing exclusively on citizens and their actions or sentiments. Dom first analyzes laws and policies by the Moldovan state as well as discourse by Russian and Ukrainian intellectuals in Moldova as ‘loyalty propositions’ (Loyalitätsangebote,70), again a much more open concept than an exclusive choice between two national identities that actually is conceptualized as not much of a choice. In that respect, Rogers Brubaker’s seminal study Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity on the Romanian city of Cluj should have informed this thesis with its exemplary combination of state-level nationalism and much more diverse (and partly immune) everyday realities. The thesis pragmatically focuses on the eventful years 1988-1994 and a shorter period two decades later when Dom visited the republic for her interviews. Similarly, she distinguishes between various ‘loyalty proposals’, not only in the confines of the rightbank Moldovan state but also in the anomalous PMR, literally, ‘the Moldovan state on the other bank of the Dniester River’.

Research of this type is particularly challenging and taxing: equipped with theoretical notions such as ‘attribution by others’ (Fremdzuschreibung), ‘community of beliefs’ (Gesinnungsgruppe), and ‘negotiating identities (Identitätsaushandlung), the researcher joins the daily routines of countless Moldovans, observing, questioning, participating, and interviewing. Maybe because this type of study is not limited to the office hours of a library or archive, and maybe because it pursues authentic, arcane loyalties, these students of ‘nationalism from below’ tend to overload their monographs with atmospheric impressions and long verbatim protocols from interviews (including ‘er’ and other filler noises). Unfortunately, this study is no exception. In the four empirical chapters, a quarter to a third of the text consists of such ‘anthropological quotes’, to the detriment of the text’s readability. The interviewees are briefly introduced, their often associative and spontaneous statements thoroughly analyzed and assessed. Within this self-chosen set-up, the author makes every effort to identify topoi and to cluster soundbites and statements. Nevertheless, the result seems overly kaleidoscopic and is at times confusing. Overall, Dom demonstrates excellent competence and knowledge of local cultural habits, economic problems, historical narratives, and daily practices. The problem of the ever-shifting perspectives of the narrative, however, remains unsolved. A much more stringent selection of interview fragments, allowing the author to summarize and paraphrase the largest part of the insights from her research, probably collides with the conventions of anthropological studies. While for the general reader the helicopter view offers much-needed orientation, despite some methodological issues, the more authentic view from amidst has its drawbacks.

Even though the author struggles to tread the fine line between readability and precision, highly relevant observations for the wider field of second-wave nationalism studies abound in the monograph. Many of Dom’s colleagues have struggled with the fact that the intellectual and cultural elites of Russian or Ukrainian speakers are apparently so small and never manage to mobilize large crowds for their associations or meetings. Moldovan nationalists and minority activists may have gone their separate ways since the late 1980s, but they share a socialization and academic training in the same institutions and on the same topics ‘inside the beltway’ of Chişinău. Dom convincingly argues that the discourses and images produced by these intellectuals percolated through to common citizens and provided the intelligentsia with status, privileges, and legitimacy vis-à-vis the political nomenclature of Moldova. Too many scholars have simply assumed that incompatible dogmatic narratives were produced and disseminated by the intellectuals and politicians of the nation state and minority nationalities. Conversely, others have assumed, equally without much evidence, that ‘unsympathetic’ nation builders or separatists attacking the newly created Moldovan nation state found little or no echo among the Russian speakers on the right bank. In her painstaking research project, Dom found ample evidence that since the critical junction around 1990, the Moldovan state has embraced an exclusivist concept of the nation and has failed to make a credible proposition for the loyalty and emotional identification of its minorities. The minority intellectuals in their turn may have failed in mobilizing their compatriots, but they have certainly contributed to cultural distance and mistrust.