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134 Chapter 5

Chapter 5 Ethnic Minorities and Soviet Newcomers

Ekaterina Chekal was 20 in 1953 when she took on the journey to Bessarabia leaving her native city in southern Ukraine to become a school teacher in the Gagauz village of Kotlovina. Some of the 46 students in her first cohort of pu- pils were only two years her junior and none of them spoke any Russian. The villages in southern Bessarabia had just gone through three decades of vio- lence and deprivation caused by two world wars and the competition over Bessarabia between Romania and the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, the new- comer teacher and the village population eventually got to understand each other. In the years to come, Ekaterina instructed six-year-olds in Russian and from their chatter she quickly learned Gagauz. Until very recently, Gagauz eth- nicity could have brought a man to the “labor front” into a coal shaft in the Ural, in Kazakhstan, or the Kuzbas industrial region. Ekaterina remembered people pointing out the uninhabited houses of those sent away. Now, educa- tion had become a highway to social mobility. Collaboration with Soviet new- comers, like school teachers, kolkhoz bosses, and army recruiters, was rewarded with stability and relative welfare. Under such circumstances, cultural differ- ences were overcome quickly. Yet, ethnic boundaries were not forgotten. Quite to the contrary, they were a crucial instrument to turn the peasantry on the periphery into loyal Soviet citizens. The paradox that in the Soviet period cul- tural differences between ethnic groups were leveled, yet ethnic boundaries became more pronounced, is the subject of this chapter. The Soviet period in southern Bessarabia lasted from August 1944 until the disintegration of the Soviet Union in December 1991, after which the region became part of independent Ukraine. The Soviet Union at the time of World War II had an already time-honored ethnicity policy that, compared with the Romanian ad-hoc policies, appeared downright fine-tuned. The USSR was the first state that ascribed one ethnicity to each and every of its citizens and made certain rights in certain places dependent on this category (Slezkine 1994: 415). However, the 47-year period of Soviet rule should not be portrayed as a mono- lith, even though it seems to be perceived as such by many in retrospect. There was a huge difference in standards of living between the beginning and the end of this period. The years of Stalinism until 1953 brought famine and depor- tations. Under the reign of Nikita Khrushchev (1953–64) Bessarabians began to enjoy the fruits of agricultural mechanization and education, benefits they had paid for dearly. Soviet citizens also began to perceive themselves as

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Ethnic Minorities & Soviet Newcomers 135

contemporaries of- and participants in the construction of an ideal society, a society that found itself in conflict with foreign powers, trying to hamper the success of socialism. The long reign of Leonid Brezhnev (1964–82) and the short reign of his two geriatric successors, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko (between 1982 and 1985) brought less innovation but in retrospect a kind of stability unknown to Bessarabians before and after. What is remem- bered now in Bessarabia as lost stability was by many perceived rather as stag- nation (zastoy) at the time. Radical reforms by the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, should have revived the already moribund Soviet economy, but only accelerated the country’s disintegration. The volatile times that followed from the late 1980s onwards are often remembered in sharp contrast to the years of stability in which those now in pension-age entered adulthood. The category of ethnicity accordingly changed its meanings throughout the Soviet period. Its persistent use in educatory and administrative institutions over the Soviet years formed the concept of ethnicity that remains meaningful for most people today.

1 Ethnicity and the Hierarchy of Trust in Post-War Southern Bessarabia

In southern Bessarabia, Soviet passports were introduced only in 1956 (Boneva 2006: 53). But ethnic belonging was registered well before. The Soviet use of ethnicity as an administrative category demanded that ethnic groups were clearly and exclusively bounded vis-à-vis other such groups. Belonging to an ethnic group in the Soviet Union could mean to profit from collective ethnic rights or to suffer from collective ethnic punishment. Therefore, in certain situ- ations, very serious aspects of an individual biography could depend on one’s belonging to a specific ethnic category. In Bessarabia, the most prominent his- torical example of the allocation of trust and mistrust along ethnic boundaries was the so-called labor front. When, with Romanian and German troops re- treating, Bessarabia was again under firm Soviet control by late August 1944, lists of all men in the newly Soviet lands were produced swiftly. They served as the basis for conscription. Although the war against Germany was at that time far from over, not all able-bodied men were recruited to fight at the front. Some were sent to toil in mines and smokestack industries in the Ural, in the Donbas, in Siberia, and Kazakhstan. It seems, the decisive criteria by which a man was sent either west to fight, or east to work on the labor front, was ethnicity. Most men whose ethnicity was registered as Gagauz or as Bulgarian were sent to the labor front. Most men whose ethnicity was Russian, Ukrainian, or Moldovan were recruited into the Red Army.