Mihail Gorbaciov, „perestroika” și problema Basarabiei, 1986-1989

The present paper reveals the way in which USSR propaganda campaigns, initiated in 1965, oriented against the "special course" of Romania and the historiography, the "nationalist" intellectuals and the Moldavian SSR population, became, during M. Gorbachev’s restructuration, a "life and death struggle” with the MSSR movement for democratisation and national emancipation. Realizing that the regime that gave it life was endangered, the CC of the CP of Moldavia tightened its rows to defend the soviet status quo, accepting only cosmetic, inessential modifications in the linguistic and cultural policy, in the relation with Romania. The representatives of the CC of the CPUS, delegated in 1988 and 1989 to Chişinău by the imperial centre, even if they were more tolerant with the general political requests, had the same position as the leaders of CC of the PCM regarding the recognition of the identity of the language spoken in the MSSR and the Romania and the return to Romanian cultural values. In this sense, the loss of the ideological control over the masses and their rejection of the anti-Romanian moldavianism and the Russian and Soviet imperial myths meant the irrevocable loss Bessarabia – what Moscow never wanted to accept.