River of turbulence

Moldova and Romania are separated only by the Prut River. The Republic of Moldova is the slice annexed by the Russian Empire in 1812 from the principality of Moldova, one of the three main building blocks of modern Romania. Culturally, the differences across the two sides of the river are very small and the language spoken is at most seen as a dialect of Romanian.

Moldova was a part of Romania between the two world wars and to justify its annexation in 1940, the Soviet Union promoted for decades the idea that Moldovans were a separate ethnicity with its own language that used Cyrillic script, rather than Romania’s Latin alphabet.

Despite limited direct contact between Moldovans and Romanians during the Communist era and a strong campaign to impose Russian as the ascendant language in the 1980s, the idea was never fully embraced and Moldova switched to the Latin script even before the Soviet Union broke apart and Moldova declared independence in 1991.

The late 1980s and early 1990s was also the time when sentiment for re-unification with Romania was at its strongest, but it never won the following of the majority in either country. It was strong enough, however, to scare politicians in the newly-independent Moldova to have Moldovan written as the official language in the country’s constitution to fend off the perceived threat of Romanian re-unification overtures. Large-scale rallies in 1994 and 1995 to have the constitution changed ended without achieving their goal.

The public perception was that with its reliance on agriculture and no industry, Moldova would be on Romania’s poorer periphery and far away from the centre of power in Bucharest in case of unification, while politicians in Chisinau, most of them at the time coming mainly from a Communist background, would find themselves marginalised.

Relations between the two countries became strained even further after the Communists won emphatically in 2001, capitalising on the mass discontent with the policies of the ruling centrist coalition. Already falling apart over domestic issues, the government failed to deal with the fallout from the 1998 Russian financial crisis, which hit Moldova hard.

The Communist party, banned until 1996, had won the most votes at the 1998 polls but was kept out of government. In 2001, when Moldova switched to a parliamentary republic in which lawmakers elect the president, the party won convincingly on a pro-Russian platform and its leader Vladimir Voronin became president.

Old-school
Voronin (67) is the product of the Soviet school of politics, rising as high as interior minister in the Soviet government of Moldova in 1988/90. The pro-independence drive came mostly from the local parliament, however, and he found himself on the losing side, leaving in 1990 for a one-year stay at the Soviet Interior Ministry’s academy, graduating as a police general.

Returning to Moldova, he was instrumental in rebuilding the Communist party, marshalling support for closer ties with Russia and showing even greater distrust for Romania than his political opponents.

Already tense, relations became even worse after Traian Basescu was elected president of European Union-bound Romania in December 2004, even though Voronin won his second term on a programme of closer ties with the EU just three months later.

Deeply mistrustful of Bucharest, Voronin has made it clear that he saw Basescu’s stated ambition to act as a guide for Moldova’s EU integration drive and his desire to speed up the process of giving citizenship to tens of thousands of Moldovans as interference in domestic affairs. The mutual dislike also appears to be personal, with Voronin’s public persona, strongly reminiscent of a Soviet-era Central Bureau official, clashing sharply with Basescu’s populist appeal.