Bitterness in Soviet Moldavia : Ethnic Russians Target for Bias in Nationalist Drives

Yuri P. Tishenko, an ethnic Russian now considered an enemy by many in Moldavia, the Soviet republic he calls home, had a far-away look in his eye as he recalled the day he came to Kishinev. It was Christmas, 1957, and Tishenko was a child of 9.

“I knew not a word of Moldavian, and our neighbors knew precious little Russian,” he told a visitor. “But the kids who lived around us took me caroling with them and introduced me to the neighbors, saying: ‘Look who has come to us from Russia.’ I will never forget how warm it made me feel.”

Suddenly his eyes darkened, and he reached for a cigarette.

“Now there is just friction and confrontation,” he went on. “Old friends reject me. I cannot help but be bitter.”

Tishenko, managing editor of a Russian language local newspaper and long considered an equal among Kishinev’s Moldavian intelligentsia, has almost overnight become an outsider--an occupier--in this rural southern republic where he once planned to spend the rest of his life.

Moldavian nationalists want to force him to stop speaking and writing Russian. Some just want him to leave. He is struggling, with visible bewilderment, to cope.

There are more than 100 ethnic minority groups in the Soviet Union, and under President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, many of them are being permitted for the first time in Soviet history to celebrate their culture, wave their national flags and sing their own songs in their own languages. But this freedom has led to excess in some instances, and more than 200 people have been killed over the last 18 months in nationalist clashes.

In several republics, ethnic Russians are complaining that the Communist Party, in its new concern for minority rights, is overlooking the rights of Russians, who increasingly have become targets of discrimination, or worse.

For example, in the Baltic republic of Lithuania, Russian activist Yuri A. Grishkovsky said in an interview last week that a friend in Vilnius, the republic’s capital, was not able to summon an ambulance for her husband when he had a heart attack because she spoke Russian, not Lithuanian.

This week, the daily Soviet Russia published a letter from 320 Russians who live in Lithuania complaining that friendships with Lithuanians had given way to anger and distrust on both sides.

“We hereby ask the government of the U.S.S.R. to take measures against instigators of the destabilization,” the letter writers said. “We also ask for assistance for those who want to move.”

Here in Kishinev, a city of half a million people of whom only about 43% are ethnic Moldavians, Tishenko’s concern has been heightened by the local legislature’s approval Thursday of a law making Moldavian the official language. An angry crowd of about 500 Moldavians booed when the lawmakers voted to permit the use of Russian in the street.

Tishenko fears that this is just the first step.

“Everyone is becoming so strident,” he complained. “One man, a Moldavian writer who has been my friend for 12 years, knows that my ability to speak Moldavian is not up to the mark. We always spoke in Russian. But suddenly he has begun speaking to me only in Moldavian, and elaborate, literary Moldavian at that.”

Moldavians are virtually indistinguishable culturally and linguistically from their neighbors to the west in Romania. Moldavia was annexed to the Soviet Union in 1939 under an agreement between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.

Agriculture is the mainstay of Moldavia, and only about 40% of Moldavians graduate from secondary school. Thus, after the annexation of the republic, ethnic Russians were sent in as managers and skilled workers and became the elite of Moldavian society.

But times have changed drastically for Russians in Moldavia since Gorbachev took over in March, 1985. Tishenko is trying hard to adjust. The new Russian-Moldavian dictionary atop his paper-strewn desk is just one sign of the effort he is making.

He admitted, though, that his future in Moldavia is probably limited, not least because of his concern about his 21-year-old son and his 15-year-old daughter.

“Moldavia is a different place now,” he said. “We lived so long without democracy. Suddenly, overnight, we have it, and it is like a strong wine. It has gone to peoples’ heads.”

Tishenko said he scours the advertisements for house-swapping offers that appear in his newspaper every weekend.

“I don’t want to move,” he said, “but my children are Russian, and they must live somewhere where they have a future as Russians.”

Across town, in another office, 28-year-old Yuri A. Rozkho said that he, too, worries about the future of his children. But the concerns of Rozkho, an ethnic Moldavian, are of a different sort.

“I want my children to know our language and to be able to speak it freely, openly,” he said.

He is the father of a 5-year-old boy and an 18-month-old girl, and he is an organizer of the republic’s three-month-old independence movement, the Moldavian Popular Front.

“I want my children to be able to read our great Moldavian writers without fear of being arrested by the KGB,” he said, referring to the Soviet Union’s secret police. “I want them to spend as much time studying our great poets as I was forced to spend studying (Russian poet Alexander) Pushkin. And if I have to fight the Russian occupiers to achieve that, I will.”

Back in Tishenko’s office, on the fourth floor of a building in Pushkin Street, the newspaper editor said he understands Rozkho’s complaints and even sympathizes.

“Let’s face it,” he said, “these nationalistic desires always existed. But in the past, the Communist Party either ignored them or tried to stamp them out.”

His mood slipped again into indignation, and he added: “The people from the Popular Front are wrong, though. They call me an occupier. Maybe Stalin was an occupier, I don’t know. But I’m just a man who has lived his life in Moldavia.”