mulling over moldova

Moldova has been in the news a lot lately. Well, not a lot, but the fact that this small Eastern European nation has been in the news at all is notable. The native communist party, stubbornly holding on power in a Europe that is leaving it in the dust, not surprisingly won the recent elections, proclaimed "fair" by the authorities. What changed this time around was that the youth of Chisinau, the capital, took to the streets to protest/riot over the results, calling a spade a spade and alleging fraud. The pictures of riot police being buffeted by unarmed gangs of youth gives me some encouragement that this long suffering corner of the former Soviet Union is coming out the other side. People aren't taking it anymore. Maybe change will be in tow.
What interests me about Moldova more than these recent developments is how the nation has managed to exist at all in the post Cold War years. Because it's not just the fact that Moldova is the poorest country in Europe. It's not just the fact that the Communists have managed to keep the reins on power here when the rest of Eastern Europe is at least drifting towards EU equilibrium. It's not the sad reality that very few people want to visit this place besides passport stamp enthusiasts such as the members of the Century Club. It's the fact that this country and its peculiar historical conundrum get to the very root of what being a nation means.
First off, Moldova is land locked. Never good for a small country. Secondly, it was created, in a fairly arbitrary manner, by the Soviet Union. We are at least peripherally familiar with sub-Saharan African nations given clinical names like Central African Republic, that seem to be very tenuous brushes of the colonial cartographic stroke. Moldova is basically in the same boat. For a long, long time what is now Moldova was considered just part of Romania. But Romania sided with the Axis powers during World War II, and when the time came to carve up Eastern Europe after 1945, Moldova became a province of the USSR. Populated with a large number of Russians and Ukranians, the area that Moldova occupied was in an established nether region between the Romanians and the Russian Slavs, and thus served as a sort of buffer region.
Nothing sums up the crisis over Moldovan idenity more than the debate over the language. By any stretch of the imagination, "Moldovan" is nothing more than a dialect of Romanian, but due to political differences, every attempt by the authorities was made to differentiate the dialects into separate languages. This was of course much to the bafflement of the populace.
There are quite a few nations without borders, at least when one starts to consider the plight of the Kurds, the Ossetians, the Palestinians, and possibly the Armenians. What is remarkable about Moldova is that it seems on paper at least to be a set of borders without a nation. That is, it is a grimly carved stretch of Southeastern Europe with a large number of people that under many other considerations would be called "Romanian", but placed in a context where national identity is, if not directly forced upon the people, very elusive to perception.
I had an Israeli friend tell me once that there was no such thing as "Israeli" culture, that the nation was still too young; placed in a bizarre position of having a large number of former Europeans adapting to Middle Eastern mores, cuisine, music, etc. I think that's a somewhat miserly assertion about a country who, at least to me, has a very distinct culture, but I think he meant more that there was no such thing as purely "Israeli" food, or "Israeli" dress, etc. Which might be fair.
Moldova bears this line of thinking out though. While it would be easy to point out the aspects of Romanian culture and language, or on the other hand, Ukrainian culture or language, something uniquely "Moldovan" remains a bit more hard to grasp. I for one have been very intrigued by the remaining presence of Yiddish language media in Moldova. There are still Yiddish television and radio shows in the country, perhaps a sign of how locked in a former time this nation is. There is also a healthy wine industry, once a quite prosperous source of revenue. As with many things, the best days this country saw were during the golden years of the USSR, when it was favored over neighboring Romania. Things have flipped since then obviously.
To be sure, as one travel writer put it, you can in fact go to Moldova. You can get your passport stamped, you can tuck a few notes of Leu away, but is there much more than that? What else does one take away from this country, other than the fact that it still exists, it has a high level of poverty and very low level of contentment?
Let's hope better days are ahead.