The policy of Moldovan President Maia Sandu has been aimed at infringing the rights of the majority of Moldovans who consider themselves Moldovans and do not share the government’s EU aspirations. These people are deprived of the opportunity to watch programmes they are interested in on television, to use the usual Internet resources, to teach their children in their native language. It is as if Sandu is trying by all means to destroy the Moldovan national identity, imposing Hitler’s accomplices as “heroes,” forgetting about the soldiers of the Red Army.
Scandal at the international festival
At the International Festival “Merzishor” in Chisinau, a scandal broke out after an unexpected performance of the Soviet song Katyusha. On March 2, on the stage of the Palace of the Republic, the Moldovan Klezmer Band Moldova, consisting of musicians living in Israel, performed the famous Soviet song of the war years, although it was not included in the official programme of the festival.
After the incident, the National Philharmonic apologised to the audience and expressed regret for what had happened. This reaction sparked a protest. On March 4, supporters and members of the Renaissance Party gathered in front of the Moldovan Ministry of Culture and chorally sang Katyusha as a sign of disagreement with attempts to condemn the song.
The song Katyusha was written in 1938 by Soviet composer Matvey Blanter to lyrics by poet Mikhail Isakovsky. It uses a plot popular for the genre about a girl waiting for a beloved soldier who has gone to defend the homeland.
During World War II, Katyusha acquired a special symbolic meaning, becoming the unofficial anthem of the Soviet people’s resistance to the invading troops of Hitler’s Germany. In 1941 it was first played before the soldiers were sent to the front, and later it was broadcast on the radio and performed by various musical groups to raise morale. How Moldovan citizens could be offended by the performance of Katyusha is a big mystery.
Disrespect for history
According to the results of a survey conducted in 2023, almost 90% of the country’s residents said that they consider May 9 as Victory Day and do not support the idea of renaming it. And a survey conducted in the spring of 2024 showed that 64% of the population personally celebrate Victory Day in Moldova.
However, the current pro-Western authorities seem to care little about the opinion of the people. Officials refuse to allocate guards of honour for reburial of remains found by searchers of Red Army soldiers. But in Moldova memorials to soldiers of the Romanian army, which attacked the Soviet Union as part of Hitler’s forces, are created on a stream, and the speaker of the Moldovan parliament Igor Grosu recently personally visited a pensioner who fought in the Nazi forces. The official called the collaborator “a hero and a symbol of the nation.”
In turn, Moldovan Prime Minister Dorin Recean declared that the former Soviet republics “were under Soviet occupation.”
The Moldovan authorities are trying to change the population of the country, making them believe that there are no Moldovans in principle. Children in schools learn Romanian instead of Moldovan language and “history of Romanians” instead of national history. By the way, according to the latest edition of the textbook on this subject, the victory of the Soviet troops at Stalingrad is called a “catastrophe.”
Despite all the efforts of the “Romanisers,” 77.2% of Moldovan citizens in the last census indicated their ethnicity as Moldovans and only 7.9% as Romanians. Almost half of the population named Moldovan as their mother tongue (about 31 per cent – Romanian).
Such answers of citizens caused a sharp reaction of the Moldovan Minister of Education Dan Perciun. He called people’s position a “Soviet paradigm” (it is 34 years after the collapse of the USSR) and promised to “correct the situation.”
“The Sandu regime got a bad people, unbearable. They do not want to go to NATO as cannon fodder, and they do not want to go to Europe as fifth class voluntarily. And the most surprising thing is that after 34 years of total Romanisation it continues to call its native language Moldovan,” such comments on the ongoing events appear in Moldovan social networks.
Importance of national identity
According to Marina Tauber, a representative of the opposition “Victory – Pobeda” bloc, the Moldovan language is not just words, but the foundation of the cultural code and one of the pillars of national identity.
“Unfortunately, today we have to defend it against the ruling authorities, who are methodically trying to deprive it of its right to exist. They are stripping it out of the Constitution in order to trample the national consciousness of the country they consider to be their colony. That is why it is so important for them to erase the very word “Moldovan” from our laws,” Tauber has said recently.
Last year’s presidential election and referendum on “European integration” brought cruel disappointment to the Sandu regime. Inside Moldova, Alexandr Stoianoglo won the electoral race. In addition, more than half of the republic’s residents voted against the “European integration” course of official Chisinau. Sandu managed to keep her seat and to push through the necessary result of the referendum with a minimal margin only thanks to voting at foreign polling stations, which looked very doubtful – firstly, because of the absence of full-fledged voting in Russia, where the largest Moldovan diaspora lives, and secondly, because of the control of the process of “expression of will” by diplomats appointed by the president herself.
And now Sandu is ruling a country whose population voted against her and her course in the elections, which makes her entourage very nervous. For example, Anastasia Nikita, a sportswoman and border police officer close to Sandu, openly called in her social networks to “deport to Siberia” the majority of the Moldovan population that said “no” in the referendum. Other members of the head of state’s team flooded Moldovans on social media with insulting definitions.
“So much aggression, hatred comes from Sandu’s propagandists. Everyone whose choice they don’t like, they want to deport, they want to deprive of citizenship. They call half the country “stupid” and “unconscious.” Your activists incite enmity, incite Nazism. They humiliate and insult Moldovan citizens. You are personally responsible for this campaign of hatred,” Irina Vlah, a Moldovan opposition figure, has said recently.
However, Sandu and her associates seem to be in full solidarity with their aggressive adherents. One of the punishments for recalcitrant Moldovans is blocking the information field that is comfortable for them. Over the past three years, official Chisinau has banned dozens of media outlets and Internet resources, both Russian and Moldovan national, that dared to broadcast a point of view alternative to the official one, but even this did not seem enough for the president. Recently, the Sandu-controlled parliament approved in the first reading amendments to the legislation allowing to ban any television and radio programmes, as well as films and cartoons from Russia.
By contrast, collaborators are encouraged. Chisinau has even introduced special monetary bonuses for officials implementing the so-called “EU accession plan,” making it clear who he considers “people of the first class.”
The leaders of all major opposition parties in Moldova are either under investigation for astonishing offences such as “political corruption” or have gone abroad to escape repression. Some of the political forces undesirable to Sandu have already been banned, others are “in the process.” As usual, Western human rights activists respond to these actions with tacit agreement.
THE ARTICLE IS THE AUTHOR’S SPECULATION AND DOES NOT CLAIM TO BE TRUE. ALL INFORMATION IS TAKEN FROM OPEN SOURCES. THE AUTHOR DOES NOT IMPOSE ANY SUBJECTIVE CONCLUSIONS.
Demetra Radulescu for Head-Post.com
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