The Ambivalence of Authenticity, or How the Moldovan Language Was Made

Abstract

The Bolshevik revolution represented a remarkable opportunity for many academics and professionals. The demands of governing a region as vast as the new Soviet state necessitated official patronage of the sciences, and the party and government provided sources of support for disciplines that had been underfunded, underdeveloped, or completely nonexistent before 1917. After the revolution, cartographers, linguists, geographers, ethnographers, social hygienists, and others found themselves the beneficiaries of a regime eager to learn about the lands that it had suddenly inherited and to spread the news of revolution to the backward peoples of the former empire. As much recent scholarship has shown, far from being the mere conduits for policies devised at the center, these specialists were professionals of variable talent and training with interests, projects, and agendas of their own. Government policy toward the nationalities, and perhaps toward scientific research in general, emerged not simply as a result of Moscow'sdiktat, but as a complex interplay among the center's patronage and attendant demands, the professional interests and programs of the specialists dispatched by the center, and the local interests of their colleagues and subjects in the outlying reaches of the Soviet state.