Moldovans

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Moldovans, or Moldavians (original name: Moldoveni; Молдовень is used by the Moldovan Cyrillic script, which nowadays has official status only in Transnistria) are the native population in, depending on one's interpretation, all or part of the lands that correspond to the former Principality of Moldavia. In the Republic of Moldova, the term Moldovans is used to officially denote an ethnicity separate from Romanians.

The recognition of Moldovans as a separate ethnicity, distinct from Romanians, is nevertheless a relatively new and controversial subject. Outside of the Moldovan Republic, this group is currently recognized as a minority ethnic group only by several former Soviet republics.

Population

Moldovans constitute 76.1% of the population of Moldova.. In the separatist region Transnistria in the eastern part of the country, they compose a relative ethnic majority with 31.9% of the population.

The 2001 census in Ukraine counted 258,600 Moldovans. They live mostly in the Budjak region or south-west Odessa Oblast and the Novoselytskyi Raion, but also in other areas of Odessa Oblast, bordering the Republic of Moldova.

In Romania, some six or seven million people consider themselves to be “Moldovans” as an integral part of, not distinct from, the Romanian nation . In 2007 a number of Romanian citizens have attempted to seek official recognition of the minority status for the Moldovans in Romania. Around the same time, during a visit of three delegates of this movement in Moldova, Moldovan President Vladimir Voronin spoke of 10 million Moldovans living in the neighbouring country, though this number may be exaggerated. People who declared themselves Moldovans in the last Romanian census were reported as Romanians in the census results.

History

In the second half of the 19th cenury, the population from Ottoman-dominated Moldavia began using the appellative "Romanian", movement which was not mirrored in Bessarabia, where the Romance-speaking population continued to consider itself Moldovan.

Until the 1920s, specialists generally considered the Moldovans a subgroup or regional group of the Romanian ethnos. After 1924, Soviet authorities began to emphasize a distinct Moldovan language, history, culture etc. and to support the claim that Moldovans constitute a separate ethnic group. Soviet policy on the Moldovan language and identity was not constant: there were two intervals (1932-1937 and in the mid-1950s) during which the Soviet scholars declared the unity between the two languages.

Numerous Romanians, as well as a part of the Moldovan population, claim that external interference rather than any actual differences led to Moldova's increasingly separate identity. Despite this, Moldovans have pressed for recognition of an ethnic Moldovan identity, separate from that of Romanians. In the 2004 census, out of the 3,383,332 people living in Moldova, 16.5% (558,508) chose Romanian as their mother tongue, whereas 60% chose Moldovan. While 37% of all urban Romanian/Moldovan speakers chose Romanian as their mother tongue, in the countryside this percentage was just under 15.

Religion

Some differences between Moldovans and Romanians include denominational affiliation. Most Moldovans belong to the autonomous Moldovan Orthodox Church, which depends on the Russian Patriarchate. During the interwar period the church organization was submitted to the Romanian Orthodox Church. Immediately after Moldova declared independence from the Soviet Union, the Romanian Orthodox Church reactivated the interwar structure, forming the autonomous Metropolis of Bessarabia (Romanian/Moldovan: "Mitropolia Basarabiei"). As of 2007, the Moldovan Orthodox Church has 1255 parishes, while the Bessarabian Metropolitan Church has 219.

Moldovan ethnos theory and the Romanian identity

In the past, the term Moldavian/Moldovan has been used to refer to the population of the historical Principality of Moldavia. Nevertheless, after 1924, Soviet sociologists began using the term to demonstrate the distinctiveness of the natives of Bessarabia, in a movement called Moldovenism. On December 19, 2003, the Moldovan Parliament adopted "The Concept on National Policy of the Republic of Moldova" which critics have accused is a revival of the Soviet-style Moldovenist theories. The document states that Moldovans and Romanians are two distinct peoples and speak two different languages, Romanians form an ethnic minority in Moldova, and that the Republic of Moldova is the legitimate successor to the Principality.

Today, Moldovans are recognized as an ethnic group by several ex-Soviet countries. Presently, the largest number of people who declared their ethnicity as Moldovan live in the Republic of Moldova, where according to the 2004 Census, they comprise 76.1% of the population. In Ukraine, according to that country's census in 2001, Moldovans constitute a recognized ethnic minority of 0.53% (7.28% in Chernivtsi Oblast and 5.01% in Odessa Oblast).

Controversy

In Romania, no Moldovan ethnicity was reported in the 2002 census, and people whose self-identification is considered regional by the Romanian government having been counted as Romanians. In the CIA World Factbook a single entry "Moldovan/Romanian" is used. A group of international census experts observing the census had stated that "the census had been generally conducted in a professional manner", however, they also identified certain problems in the collection of data for this census, among others in the domain of nationality and language. Experts have noted that large part of the population has responded spontaneously, however they have reported some cases when the census enumerators have encouraged respondents to declare that they were "Moldovans" rather than "Romanians". Some observers declared that the chapters concerning about the spoken language and the ethnic affiliation can't be veridic.

Notes

References

King, C. The Moldovans: Romania, Russia and the Politics of Culture, Hoover Institution Press, 2000, ISBN 0-8179-9792-X.

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