<i> Glasnost</i> Inspires Moldavia, Romania to Demand Reunification : Eastern Europe: Citizens already regard the territories as one nation. Now they’re pressing for the formal secession of the Soviet republic.

On the day Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was overthrown, Iuri Rosca addressed a nationalist rally in Soviet Moldavia. For the first time in his life, he heard a crowd chanting, “Reunire, reunire” --Romanian for “reunification.”

Several days later, Rosca was in the northeastern Romanian town of Iasi, leading a Moldavian relief operation to Romania. He was asked to address a rally. Once again, the shout went up: “Reunire, reunire.”

“As I looked out at the crowd, I realized that I was looking at the same faces, the same people that I had seen back home in Moldavia. They were chanting the same slogan in the same language on both sides of the border,” said Rosca, vice president of the Moldavian Popular Front, a mass movement pressing for Moldavian autonomy from Moscow.

Made up largely of territory annexed from Romania under a secret 1939 pact between Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler, the Soviet republic of Moldavia is already feeling the impact of the Romanian revolution. The potentially explosive issue of reunification with Romania--a non-starter as long as Ceausescu was in power and Moldavians felt better off in the Soviet Union--is back on the political agenda.

Calls for the incorporation of Moldavia into Romania provide a dramatic illustration of a new political trend that is likely to assume considerable importance over the coming months. The revolution from above initiated by Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev has made the rounds of Eastern Europe and is returning to the Soviet Union as a revolution from below.

“Our glasnost (openness) and democracy had an important effect on Romania,” said Boris Marian, a Moldavian journalist who recently returned from a visit to Bucharest. “Romanians watched Soviet television--and it changed the way they thought. We influenced them, and now they are going to influence us.”

For more than four decades, Soviet ideologists and historians tried to persuade Moldavians that they were a totally different people from the Romanians. To emphasize the difference between Moldavian and Romanian, the Kremlin imposed the Russian Cyrillic alphabet on Moldavia, forcing the population to abandon the traditional Latin script.

The overwhelming majority of Romanians and Moldavians argue that they are one and the same nation. Together with Transylvania and WallachiaC Moldavia was one of three provinces that historically made up Greater Romania. Apart from some differences in pronunciation, Moldavian and Romanian are practically indistinguishable.

“It’s like the difference between American and English,” said Alexandru Bantos, editor of Moldava, a Kishinev magazine. Pressed to provide an example of a Moldavian word that was different from Romanian, he thought hard before finally settling on “watermelon.”

Under pressure from the Popular Front, which organized a series of huge demonstrations in Kishinev and other towns, Moscow finally allowed Moldavians to revert to the Latin script last August. The Moldavian Parliament declared Moldavian rather than Russian to be the republic’s official language, provoking an angry backlash from Russian and Ukrainian workers who make up more than 30% of the 4.3-million population.

A similar national reawakening has taken place along the fringes of the great Russian heartland, particularly in the northern Baltic republics where advocates of secession from the Soviet Union are now in a majority. But Moldavia is the only Soviet republic where secession would mean not independence, but unification with a foreign state.

Up until now, the mainstream political forces in both Romania and Moldavia have taken a cautious attitude toward reunification. Romania’s new provisional government has insisted that it will abide by the 1975 Helsinki declaration, which includes a clause on respect for existing frontiers. Most Moldavian Popular Front leaders also believe that it is too early to push for reunification.

“The Soviet empire will eventually fall apart, just like the Roman Empire did--but I don’t think it would be wise to make this demand right now,” said Rosca, who is responsible for the Popular Front’s foreign relations. “The Romanian economy suffered even more than ours from Communist rule, and reunification could lead to a drop in living standards. Many people would probably not understand this.”

In an attempt to take the passion out of demands for reunification, Moscow and Bucharest have agreed to a significant relaxation in border controls between Romania and Moldavia. It will now become much easier for citizens of both countries to visit friends and relatives on the other side of the border.

“We have hardly had any contacts with the Romanians. It was very tense,” said a customs officer at the Soviet border post of Ungeni, eager for news about the political upheavals in Romania. “Under Ceausescu, they were afraid of having anything to do with us. I hope it will now become more normal.”

As the revolution spread from one East European country to another, the Iron Curtain effectively moved eastward. The sense of crossing a political and psychological divide is emphasized at Ungeni by the switch in railway systems. Carriages are winched up into the air by mechanical cranes and placed on the broader tracks used in the Soviet Union.

The decision to open up one of the most sealed frontiers in Europe is a political gamble designed to show that the Kremlin sympathizes with the Moldavian desire for greater contact with Romania. It could, however, backfire if living conditions improve significantly in Romania.

“Right now, conditions are better here than there. Soon, however, they will be better there,” predicted a Moldavian teacher in Kishinev. “They have already stopped deliveries of food to us, which means there is more in their shops. Under Ceausescu, they used to watch our television programs as theirs were so boring. But now we watch their programs.”

During the first week of the revolution, people living in western Moldavia were glued to Romanian television as it broadcast live coverage of the street fighting in Bucharest. The television coverage in turn provoked an outpouring of popular sympathy for Romanians among ordinary Moldavians. A relief fund was set up immediately, and trainloads of food and medical supplies were dispatched to Romania.

The Moldavian journalists and Popular Front supporters who accompanied the relief trains to Romania were welcomed as heroes as soon as they crossed the border. When Marian, the secretary of the Moldavian union of journalists, asked a question at a Bucharest news conference, he was applauded by Romanian journalists.

The revival of Romanian national feeling and the outlawing of the Romanian Communist Party has alarmed leaders of the Russian minority in Moldavia. Russian intellectuals in Kishinev welcomed the overthrow of the Ceausescu dictatorship. But they also have said they are worried that popular pressure for secession will build up over the coming months.