Memories from Bessarabia

IOAN PELIVAN

“Mr. Pelivan is a sturdy man, in the prime of his age, of a peasant descent, born on the blessed territory of Bessarabia, with a serene face, kind voice and a sweet smile in his eyes. He speaks in a smooth voice, using the literary Romanian language”.
Above is an eyewitness account depicting the representative of the National Moldavian Party (he was among the founding members) who held a speech during the momentous session of 21 November 1917 when the Parliamentary Assembly in Chişinău was established, the entity which was to proclaim the union between Bessarabia and Romania only a few months later, on 27 March 1918.
Ioan Pelivan (1876-1954; Magazin istoric, issues 3/1971, 12/1993) was an advocate of national and cultural rights of Bessarabian Romanians, who had been so oppressed by the tsarist rule dating back to 1812. He claimed that they had the right to fight for emancipation and union with Romania.
Born in the Orhei region, he attended the Theological Seminar in Chişinău. This was a 10-year school (4 years of middle school and 6 years of seminar proper), whose primary goal was to train future priests. However, he preferred Law School to a theological career. After the Union, he was in turn a deputy, a senator, Minister of Justice (1919) and a forefront figure in the National Peasants’ Party.
A wealth of documents referring to Ioan Pelivan is still preserved at Romania’s National Archives. Among these documents, several pages of memoirs reminiscing the years spent at the Theological Seminar in Chişinău and recalling the policy of intense Russification pursued by the tsarist authorities in Bessarabia at the end of the 19th century. Young people were systematically deterred from becoming familiar with Romanian language, culture and history. National values were desecrated and discouraged, while the authorities instilled fear of declaring one’s origins and belonging to the great family of our brothers from across the Prut River.
In spite of such harsh measures, vividly evoked by Ioan Pelivan in his writings, the youngsters attending the seminar felt in their souls and minds the ancestral call of their people, as it fed through songs, dances, tales or traditions from time immemorial.
Ioan Pelivan’s text – which has never been published before, as far as we know – is merely a blueprint for a much more comprehensive study, with lots of annotations, add-ons, corrections or erasures. We have transcribed his memoirs by preserving some of the particulars of his style. As it was customary at the time, the author employs the terms “Moldovan” and “Moldavian” throughout the text when referring to inhabitants on the other side of the Prut River. In between brackets you will find any words or phrases that were unclear in the original, certain repetitions etc. that we have removed from the text, as well as our explanatory interventions. The titles and subtitles also belong to us. In May 1950, Ion Pelivan was arrested by the Securitate at his house in Bucharest, 7, I.L. Caragiale St., and locked up in the Sighet prison, where he passed away on 24 January 1954. Years later, in April 1976, his remains were unearthed and reburied in the cemetery of the Cernica Monastery, next to other prominent figures of the Parliamentary Assembly: Pantelimon Halippa, Elefterie Sinicliu, Dumitru Bogos, Vlad Bogos, Daniel Ciugureanu and others.

Ioan Lăcustă

Reactionary forces in Russia were wreaking havoc at the time I attended the Theological Seminar (1892-1898).
During his reign, tsar Alexander III (1881-1894) went to great lengths to confine to a minimum the liberties granted by his predecessor, tsar Alexander II the Liberator.
It is a known fact that the rule of Alexander II [1855-1881] was an epoch of groundbreaking reforms in Russia. It was under this emperor that peasants were freed from slavery (19 February 1861) and given the right to possess land. He was also the initiator of legal and administrative reforms, while also proclaiming the autonomy of local governments and municipalities, etc.
“I was born an autocrat and I wish to die as such...”

Guided – similarly to his august father – by the famous reactionary Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev, who held the position of Ober-Procurator of the Holy Synod and was known as “Russia’s evil genius”, tsar Nicholas II (1894-1917) opposed from the very beginning (1894) any and all liberties and autonomies that the peoples of the Russian Empire were hoping for, the veliko-Russian people being the most vocal of all. During a solemn audience, the tsar even ventured to condemn as “crazy dreams” the burgeoning desire to instate a constitutional regime in Russia, i.e. replacing the autocratic regime by a constitutional regime. This desire was nurtured by delegates of local governments and municipalities, namely the most representative spokesmen of the people and of all social classes.
“I was born an autocrat and I wish to die as such...”, tsar Nicholas II was wont to retort to his closest relatives, who begged him to instate a more democratic regime in order to fend off the impending doom of the revolution.
Since reactionary forces had gained the upper hand at the very heart of Russia – Veliko-Russia (Greater Russia) – one could only imagine the state of affairs in provinces lying on the outskirts of the empire as well as in the regions inhabited by non-Russian peoples, such as Poland, Finland, Ukraine, Georgia, Bessarabia.
After the epoch of self-ruling and privileges granted to Bessarabia by emperor Alexander I “for ever” (1818), the advent to the throne of tsar Nicholas II marked the beginning of an era that was supposed to end with the annihilation of all Moldavian traits of our province.
The entire structure of the social and economic life in Bessarabia was in stark contrast to the structure of life in the rest of Russia, where everything was built upon peasant slavery, with an archaic legislation based on antediluvian conduct, brilliantly depicted by Russian writers such as Gogol, Turgenev, Griboedov, etc.
It was only natural that the authorities and clerks – accustomed with the Russian lifestyle – sent from the most distant parts of Russia to govern Bessarabia could not come to grips with the laws and ancestral habits of this province, which had never seen any form of slavery (except for gypsies), where the people enjoyed a certain degree of freedom and there was nothing Russian about it, except for the army and some of the officials.

In a state of numbness

These circumstances contributed to the forced assimilation of Bessarabia. All rights and privileges were gradually done away with. The Moldavian language was banned in all public institutions, in justice and administration, in schools and even in churches, being replaced by the Russian language.
The printing of Moldavian books was brought to a halt. The eparchial printing works founded by metropolitan bishop Gavriil B[ănulescu]-Bodoni [1746-1821; in 1813 the tsar himself appointed him at the helm of the Church in Bessarabia; he set up the Theological Seminar, along with an eparchial printing house] were shut down. The Moldavian language sections within the Theological Seminar, High-School No. 1 and other academic institutions were also closed down. The parallel printing of the Moldavian version of the religious magazine Ştirile eparhiale was prohibited, and so on and so forth.
[Faced with this wave of Russification and the rooting out of the national identity, I. Pelivan claims that certain boyars were the first to succumb. That was the first social “class to accept «assimilation»”. I. Pelivan substantiates the assertion based on two striking events: “first of all, none of the deputies within the imperial Duma dared hold a speech in support of the Moldavian language at primary school level; secondly, the boyars preferred to stay away from our national and unionist movement of 1917-1918”. Most members of the church were also starting to accept Russification.]
Back in the days when I attended the Seminar in Chişinău, all the priests, with only a handful of exceptions [...], were in a state of numbness peculiar to the Russian people. Across all spiritual schools, it was strictly prohibited for pupils and students to speak the Moldavian language. And this held true not only during the classes themselves, but also during recess [the breaks], in all dormitories, at home, on the street, in trains, etc. Anyone found guilty of trespassing this ban was severely punished.
I remember a particular incident dating back to the days when I was 12. I was in the 2nd grade at the spiritual school. During recess, I was talking to a classmate in Moldavian. It so happened that nadziratel (supervisor) Popov overheard us and grabbed us both by the ears, snorting [text in Russian], which means: “Why are you bawling in your beastly language?”
The doctrine advocated by Russian panslavists [...] with regard to the three “elephants”, i.e. principles, underlying the entire construction of the tsars’ empire – namely autocratism, orthodoxy and veliko-Russian nationalism – was surreptitiously instilled into pupils and students of both genders. Older students, particularly those attending their senior year in the Seminar, were told that Russia had a holy mission from God to rule over the entire world, a world that had to be saved from the perilous political, moral and cultural influence of Voltairian, atheist and republican France, of the rotten and degenerate France, which was the homeland of revolutions and all immoral and antisocial ideas and currents [...].
The propaganda also claimed that Russia was both the largest and the greatest country of the world, that no other country boasted anything similar to the famous “tsar cannon” and “tsar church bell” in Moscow [of huge sizes, i.e. 40 tons and 200 tons respectively, which could be found within the Kremlin Complex] (this was to impress younger students). Moreover, it was advocated that other countries and peoples (such as Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbians, Romanians, Montenegrins, Czechs and others) having recently ridden themselves of the Ottoman yoke now lived solely at the mercy of Russia, thanks to the kindness, support and patience of the Russian tsars and of the righteous Russian people. Virtually no word about Romania. Just that it was neighboring our enormous Russian Empire.
The Geography manual for secondary schools described Romania in no more than 20-30 lines, similarly to the General History manual.
As far as the history of the Romanians was concerned, I remember that Elefterie Eliseevitch Mihalevitch, professor at the Theological Seminar in Chişinău, was telling us in class about two historical theories on the actual origin of the Romanians. According to one of these theories, Romanians are supposedly of gypsy origin. As evidence of the verisimilitude of this theory, he mentioned the gypsy musicians having come from Romania into Bessarabia, who referred to themselves as Romanians and speaking Romanian. According to another theory, more scientifically-based, the Romanians are supposedly the descendants of the brigands exiled 18 centuries before for their criminal deeds from Rome and Italy to the province of Dacia conquered by Emperor Trajan, the same as Russia expels its thieves and felons to the distant Siberia. As for the Moldavian language, we were told that it was an utterly primitive language, a language of the moujiks (Russian peasants), spoken solely by peasants and stupid and illiterate people. It was supposedly a language in which no abstract or elevated idea could be expressed, a spoilt ancient Slavic language, some sort of a jargon mixed with Russian, Turkish and other words. Not to mention that the Moldavian language had nothing in common with Romanian.
Most of our young students were so convinced of the truth of this “axiom” that they could hardly imagine the existence of geometry, mathematics, physics, algebra..., i.e. science and literature, in the Romanian language.
The fundamental library of the Theological Seminar included ancient Moldavian books dating back to the days when the Moldavian language was being taught in this academic institution. There were also some Russian books on Moldavian-Romanian history and literature. But the only beneficiaries of this library were professors themselves. Students were assigned to a different library, which encompassed only those books that had passed the censorship test of the special commission attached to the Holy Synod. In the fall of 1898, on a Sunday, a poor teacher walked all the way from a village nearby Chişinău to see her daughter who was in 4th or 5th grade at the Eparchial School. Her bags were filled with apples and plums for her offspring. The poor teacher was barefooted and dressed in rags. After going through the main entrance to the school, she asked the janitress, a kindhearted Moldovan old woman known as “Auntie Marina”, to let her daughter know that her mother was there, by specifying the girl’s name and the grade she was in. A few minutes later, when her daughter appeared in the guestroom and saw her mother downstairs in the lobby all in rags and barefooted, she was so ashamed to talk to her that she blushed and turned to her classmates, saying “that is not my mother, because my mother is not a Moldovan peasant”.
The poor teacher, all miserable and humiliated, had no other choice but to return home without seeing her daughter.

The shame of a high-school student

Another case-study. Ms. Marusia P., from Chişinău, daughter of a landowner in Chişinău, a 6th grade high-school student (today’s “Regina Maria” High-School), had to pay her tuition at the beginning of the academic year in September 1900. Since the tuition amounted to several hundred rubles and was paid each year by Ms. Marusia P.’s mother in person, the latter insisted on accompanying her daughter to school to pay the dues. Mrs. P. was a hardworking and earnest Moldovan woman, a one-of-a-kind housekeeper, the only problems being that she had only attended primary school, she knew very little Russian and she wore a beautiful black scarf instead of the fashionable chapeaus that ladies of the time used to wear. Therefore, the young lady opposed the idea of her mother accompanying her to school, claiming that she would pay for her own tuition and coming up with all sorts of pretexts. Eventually, she had to confess overtly, tears in her eyes, that she was ashamed to have her mother accompany her in public, the actual reasons being that “she had no knowledge of Russian, she wasn’t dressed properly, wore no chapeau, meaning that her classmates, supervisors and professors would mock at her for belonging to a contemptible family of Moldovans, of moujiks”. This particular incident stands proof of the fact that the same Russification policy was pursued across civilian schools as well. A third case. In 1906, seminar student C-nu, son of a priest, overwhelmed by the Moldavian current advocated by the Basarabia magazine [I. Pelivan himself was among the founders of this magazine], disseminated the publication among the “brilliant minds” of his native county of Bălţi. The magazine was a fervent supporter, inter alia, of the Moldavian language in schools, administration, justice, etc.
Upon listening to her son read out loud from the Basarabia magazine, the mother of the aforementioned seminar student – herself a graduate of the Eparchial School – was engulfed in a state of utmost rage. Here is how she pondered on the articles in the magazine: “Poor emperor!, she said. He will fall ill when he hears about this pain called Basarabia magazine. The bastards who write for this magazine should be hanged” [...] Ninety percent of her Eparchial School classmates judged the same way as she did.
The vast majority of us, seminar students, came from the countryside. Both during our childhood years and during the holidays spent at home while attending the Spiritual School and then the Seminar, we could often hear the common folk talk about the Russians and I must say that the epithets and the recollections were not too much to their credit. [...] Although the reminiscences referred to the days of Russian army occupation, commandeering and encampments in Bessarabia, their vivid nature actually proved that the feelings of hostility towards the rulers had not entirely faded.
On the other hand, we could often hear the Russians settled in Bessarabia referring to our Moldovans as “silly Moldavians” [...] This was further proof – and we felt it instinctively rather than fathom it – that Russians and Moldavians were animated by a latent enmity and mutual contempt which sometimes became overtly manifest. [...]

The Metropolitan Church Choir in Iaşi

Mention should be made that our Moldavian spirit was largely fostered by the Moldavian chants as well, which – as far as I can remember – had always been in the Seminar repertoire. The truth of the matter is these chants were never interpreted on religious holidays or formal parties. But they were sung with even greater pleasure and more enthusiasm than the Russian ones during parties or on informal occasions, be it at home on Christmas and Easter, at the birthday parties of friends and relatives, or during recess, etc. Both the tunes and the lyrics themselves were more impressive and more appealing to our hearts than foreign songs.
Whenever the famous choir of the Metropolitan Church in Iaşi, conducted by Gavriil Musicescu, came to Chişinău for a concert, all the seats of the “Blagorodnoe Soborul” Theater were occupied almost exclusively by seminar students, because Musicescu charmed the world with his concerts.
The next day after the concert, we, seminar students, would reproduce in the curilca (smoking room) all the songs played during the concert, trying to replicate even the tiniest tinges displayed by master Musicescu.
Furthermore, much to the delight of us, seminar students, the Romanian theater company run by Bobescu and Pechea Alexandrescu also served the Romanian cause in Bessarabia. No seminar student, particularly those in their senior year, ever missed a play staged by the Romanian Theater, even running the risk of being punished. It was there that we had the opportunity of listening to marvelous Romanian tunes, watching the wonderful national dances and the ancestral national costumes, while also hearing the harmonious Romanian literary language. Not to mention the actual contents of theater plays that introduced us to the life and history of our fatherland, which seemed all so distant. To this added the significant contribution made by Romanian traditional musicians (particularly gypsies and Jews) dressed up in national costumes, who enthralled the visitors of restaurants such as “Naţional”, “Shweitsarskaia”, “Londra”, etc.
All this could not remain echoless in our souls. Theater plays, songs, dances, costumes – they all nurtured us properly and consolidated our Moldavian spirit. But this spirit remained at instinct level, since there was a wide gap between it and what’s usually referred to as national conscience.
From a national point of view, we were still wandering through the dark. We lacked a major and potent element to make us see the light, and that was culture, nation itself. That was the very reason why neither the curriculum nor the books recommended for reading made any reference whatsoever to anything likely to waken our national spirit, to kindle our interest in the Romanian people, the Romanian language, in the past or future of Romania.
All our thoughts, attention and love were geared towards Russia, the Russian people and everything Russian.
We were blindfolded and, in order to set us free and have our eyes wide open, we needed Romanian books, which could have taught us our language, the history and literature of our people...

A booklet by Creangă

That was the problem, we lacked Romanian books entirely. The church books, written in Cyrillic characters, which we found in village churches or priest houses, told us very little of what was of interest to us.
I am firmly convinced that most of the Bessarabian priests having graduated the Seminar until 1917 did not have a chance to stumble across a Romanian book but after the Union itself.
It was a fortunate event and only by chance that I came across Dovcev’s Romanian grammar and chrestomathy (Chişinău, 1862) while in 2nd or 3rd grade at the Seminar. The book belonged to another seminar student, Vasile Spana, who was two years older than me and lived with the same host family that I did.
Dovcev’s book was the first Romanian book in which I actually found several remarks on the grammar, literature and history of the Romanians. I can still remember that none of the Russian poems I had ever learnt or read touched me the way the ballad or the [blank] in Dovcev’s book did. It was something torn off my soul and off the Moldavians’ soul. I had also found in the house of priest Alexandru Popovski in Chişinău a booklet of stories written by Ion Creangă. I borrowed it for a couple of days and indulged in reading the stories with a pleasure I had never felt while reading Russian stories. The beauty of the language was particularly charming to me.
I was becoming more and more convinced that the Moldavian language – so besmirched by the advocates of Russification – was not uglier than Russian and that abstract and elevated ideas could be expressed in the Moldavian language as well. I was starting to realize it was a beautiful language, I just needed to know it better.
I was also starting to feel sorry for the poor Moldavians, who were so mistreated by the temporary invaders and their collaborators.
Unfortunately, the national culture of the Moldovans was an impossible endeavor back in those days and under those particular circumstances.
Nonetheless, although stifled, the Moldavian spirit of the priests emerged whenever possible, even long before the Union. Thus, in 1905, once the tsarist oppression alleviated somewhat, priests such as Constantin Parfenie, Alexandru Istrati, Constantin Popovici, archimandrite Gurie Grosu [Magazin istoric, issue 3/1999], Ioan Bălteanu, Ioan Bivul and others stood up for their rights. They asked for and actually were granted the right to reopen the Moldavian printing works and the Moldavian language section at the Theological Seminar, while also establishing a similar section within the Eparchial School, etc.
In 1917, immediately after the collapse of the tsarist regime, my fellow priests were among the first local organizations and brotherhoods to engage in the most commendable and honorable undertaking: asking that Bessarabia be granted national autonomy, church autonomy, while also appointing a Moldavian metropolitan bishop at the helm of the Bessarabian Church, etc.
On 20 March 1918, priest A. Baltaga – who was the representative of all priests in the Parliamentary Assembly – overtly and unwaveringly declared himself in favor of the Union. It was no coincidence that former graduates of the Theological Seminar were among the prominent figures of the national and unionist movement of 1917-1918.