The National Language and History Revival Movement in SSR Moldova at the Time of the Perestroika

As some of those involved in the movement for the revival of the national dignity during the late 1980s are still active on the political arena, a complete and unbiased analysis of the phenomenon is impossible. Only those who had been successful in the 1990s were to be recognized as public figures later on and were to be also included in historical accounts, whereas everybody else was ignored and forgotten. This article explores the profiles of those humanities and sciences professionals who, as part of a diverse group of advocates, initiated and contributed in earnest to the revival of national identity in ssr Moldova. It all started in the early days of Perestroika1, on the 10th of May 1987, when the Sovetskaya Moldavia newspaper published an article by Leonid Bulmaga and Ion Țurcanu. They were asking for a revision of some rarely or never mentioned periods of the ssr Moldova history as well as the rewriting and publication of a national handbook of history. Except for some reactions in July 1987, there was no follow-up to this initiative. Only in September 1988 a group of sixty-six intellectuals signed a letter of appeal for the revival of the Moldovan language, which is identical to the Romanian language. Very few of them were to draw any material profit from the disintegration of the ussr, which was to occur after a few years. Most of them faded into anonymity after 1991. One of them is Vlad Pohilă, a linguist with high professional and moral standards. In 1989 he had edited and published the first issues of the “Glasul” The Voice newspaper, which used Latin characters instead of the Russian alphabet imposed by ussr during World War Two. This article focuses on the extended group of advocates to which Vlad Pohilă belonged, a movement whose mission was to reinstate the Moldovan language and to recuperate those periods in national history which had been ignored in the post-war period.