I just picked up this Soviet era propaganda poster on eBay. It...

I just picked up this Soviet era propaganda poster on eBay. It makes a stellar addition to my bedroom decor, despite my feelings about romanticizing the Soviets. This poster was designed in 1946 and printed in 1947, which are the years of the last major famine in the USSR.

It’s wild to imagine this poster being distributed in Chi?in?u, all the while the Soviet authorities were requisitioning grain from the country to be fed to party members in the cities. While not overtly politically motivated like the Holodomor, obviously the ethnic Moldovans, who predominately lived in the country, were sacrificed for the benefit of the city dwellers, who were by-and-large ethnicly Russian.

My host mother Nanuca would have been nineteen years old, while her siblings Ana, Valeriu, and Maria would have been eleven, eight, and four, respectively. Ana and Nanuca both have related to me that Maria, who was too young to understand the gravity of the famine, would incessantly cry for food. To appease her, their grandmother Aculina would often give Maria her portion of food, an act of selflessness surely oft-repeated by mothers and matriarchs the Soviet Union over.

For those who are interested in what the poster says, I’ve typed up the Russian. You’ll need to translate it yourselves, though. My Russian is poor and I’m barely able to sound out the words:

??? ?? ?????? ? ????????? ????? ?????????? ???!

?????????? ???? ????? ????????????!

Interestingly, one of the phrases is actually Romanian, although it’s written in the Cyrillic alphabet, instead of the Latin alphabet:

????????? ??? ????? ??????, ?????-??!

Submit that to Google Translate and confusion will abound! The correct transliteration is:

Proletari din toate ??rile, uni?i-v?!

Although Romanian was originally written in Cyrillic, the Latin alphabet had been officially adopted by 1862. That said, what is currently the Republic of Moldova (known to Romanians as Basarabia) and formerly the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic, had been part of the Russian Empire since 1812.

Presumably during that time any Romanian in Moldova was written in Cyrillic, although I very much doubt that many Moldovans were literate. This changed after the first World War, when Romania won big and finally united the disparate majority speaking provinces.

From 1918 until 1940 Moldovans learned to write their native tongue in the Latin alphabet, which is appropriate given that Romanian is a Latin based language. Only after the Russians reinvaded Basarabia did the Cyrillic alphabet again take prominence.

Even though the Soviets instituted an aggressive Russification campaign, I very much doubt that Moldovans in 1947 were able to read the Cyrillic on the poster, regardless of whether it be written in Russian or Romanian.

Nanuca has told me that she found learning Russian to be easy, although she’s half Ukrainian and grew up in a bilingual home. She’s the exception and has related that her classmates found learning Russian to be quite difficult.

If you look into the background of the photo you’ll see the Bruce Springsteen wall.