Romanian language and Moldavian culture: identity and differences

by Silvia Matteucci

This paper is part of the 'Europe and the Balkans' Occasional Papers Series, published by the Istituto per l'Europa Centro-Orientale e Balcanica of the University of Bologna. 


Since the Second World War, Moldavia was the only Soviet Socialist Republic to have a reference State – Romania – outside the borders of the Soviet Union. This peculiarity emerged especially at the end of the 1980s. With the reforms introduced by glasnost’ and perestrojka, promoted by Gorbačëv to revitalize the economy and society through the mobilization of the “Soviet people”, all the Soviet republics gained new freedoms that, at the local level, were used by political groups willing to acquire increasing autonomy rights for their republics. The strength of this pressure frustrated Gorbačëv’s efforts to keep the Soviet Union, albeit deeply reorganized, alive.

In Moldavia, the moment of parting from Moscow was even more complicated because, at least in its initial phase, it came with the cultural rapprochement with the Romanian “motherland”, from which Moldavia was driven away during the Second World War.


This paper is in Italian.