My role as a columnist at Duty allows me to take unexpected bookish journeys. So here I am this week in Moldova, a small Eastern European country of 2.6 million inhabitants, located between Romania and Ukraine, torn, in terms of identity, between Russia and the West and which has about 8,000 expatriates in Quebec. A former Soviet republic, Moldova proclaimed its independence on August 27, 1991, following the disintegration of the USSR.
What am I doing in these lands? It is Michel Labrecque, retired journalist from Radio-Canada radio, who takes me there with his book There Moldova. In the eye of the Russian storm (September publisher, Quebec, 2024, 210 pages), a major report on a small country whose reality is not unrelated to that of Quebec.
“The Moldovans,” Labrecque does not hesitate to write, “are in some way the Quebecers of Eastern Europe. Latins whose language and culture were oppressed by a non-Latin empire.” For the rest, however, it must be recognized that the situation of the Moldovans is more difficult than ours.
An agricultural and wine-growing paradise, the country is “culturally rich” but “economically poor,” notes Labrecque. When it became independent in 1991 after 50 years of Soviet occupation, it found itself grappling with the mafia instability that had taken the place of repressive communist stability.
Corruption explodes, organ trafficking becomes a lucrative market and poverty reigns, leading to an exodus. More than a third of the population will leave the country in 15 years. Parents even leave their children behind.
Despite everything, and this is the miracle of history, Moldovan democracy will hold the road. Thirty-three years later, the country is led by Maia Sandu, a former World Bank economist in Washington, who fights against corruption and advocates for Moldova’s accession to the European Union (EU).
This latter bias is not self-evident in the country. “Moldova is a complicated country,” explains Labrecque. Its citizens are predominantly of Romanian origin, but also Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian and Turkish Gagauz Christian.
Romanians want reunification with Romania, Russians want the country to reintegrate into Russia, and others, perhaps the most numerous, but barely, want an independent and European Moldova.
To complicate matters further, Transnistria, the easternmost region of the country, bordering Ukraine, claims de facto autonomy and identifies with Putin’s Russia, which is taking advantage of the situation to destabilize Moldova.
Since the Russian aggression in Ukraine, Moldova fears the worst. “Russia considers our territory its own,” explains Iulian Ciocan, a novelist from the country. “Which means that one day, it will try to get it back. Moscow’s eye is always on us.”
To keep Moldova in its fold, Putin is activating his propaganda machine. Russia is trying to discredit President Sandu by spreading the rumor that she is a lesbian — “which can have an impact in a society that has remained rather conservative,” Labrecque says — and is engaging in blackmail using its energy resources.
In 2023, to punish Moldova for “its tacit support for Ukraine,” Russia cut off gas to the country, forcing the president to find other, much more expensive, sources of energy. With Russia, some Moldovans say, things would be better.
The country’s future may be decided on October 20, when Sandu will run against former pro-Russian President Igor Dodon in a presidential election and a referendum on Moldova’s membership in the EU.
An electoral victory for the pro-Russians and a referendum defeat for the pro-Europeans would undermine Moldovan independence, especially if the outcome of the war in Ukraine is favorable to Putin. “Ukraine has to win, otherwise Moldova is lost,” says Lilian Negura, a Moldovan expatriate and professor at the University of Ottawa’s School of Social Work, whom Labrecque met.
The latter went to the country three times: in 1991, just after the declaration of independence, in 2006, to see where Moldova was 15 years later, and in 2023, after a year of war in Ukraine. Each time, he met Mihai Fusu, a Moldovan journalist and playwright who was his guide before becoming his friend.
The first time, Labrecque knew nothing about the country. However, his “weakness for small countries or territories that try to stay afloat in the hurricane of globalization” predisposed him to fall in love with Moldova. Since I have the same weakness, I greatly appreciated the journey that his book took me on.