La soviétisation culturelle de la Bessarabie: le cas de l'Union des écrivains moldaves à l'époque stalinienne

Abstract

This article aims at tracing a model of cultural Sovietization of the territories incorporated by the USSR in 1940, based on the study of this process in Bessarabia, a former Romanian province which became in June 1940 a Soviet republic (the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic - MSSR) and more specifically on the case of the Moldovan Writers' Union. The history of this process dates back to the creation in 1924 on a small territory on the left bank of the Dniester of the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (MASSR) within the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. The author will therefore try to pursue the rather discontinuous and contradictory development of the creation of a cultural policy in the center of the Soviet Empire and implemented in a small Western Soviet republic, but no less important given its strategic position. This cultural policy is elaborated and applied in a tacit or explicit relationship of convergence or divergence with other integration models applied in other regions annexed in the same period (1940-1944), in an effort to consider local and regional specificities.