The Moldovan Intelligentsia’s Internal Response to Threats and Opportunities of the Gorbachev Era

• In Event: Liberation as a State of Mind: Free Minds in a Captive World, Captive Minds in a Free World

Abstract

This research explores the way in which the Ministry of Culture and Writers Union responded in print to the shifting sands of Glasnost and Perestroika in the late 1980s. It examines the degree to which national identity was a catch-all, serving as a vehicle to express deeper discontent between institutions; older and younger generations; urban and rural; center and periphery; patron and client. Most importantly, has the assumed change of the Gorbachev years masked a truer story of continuity among the Moldovan intelligentsia?

Author

• William D. Prigge, South Dakota State U