Mentalităţi imperiale: istoriografia rusă între discurs politic şi istoric [Articol]

Abstract

In one of his declarations from the autumn of 2009, the Ambassador of the Russian Federation in Chisinau, Mr. Valeri Kuzmin, declared that the history handbooks of the Romanians from the Republic of Moldova contained Russia phobia statements. The Association of Historians from the Republic of Moldova considered these statements as being tendentious and not corresponding to reality and made a declaration in which they expressed the position of the Moldavian historians towards this subject. As an answer the Press Department of the Embassy of the Russian Federation in the Republic of Moldova published a declaration, which, in our opinion, is nothing but an attempt to suggest us the way we should (re)write our history following the spirit of the Soviet communist historiography. On one hand the changes in the tendencies of the Russian historiography in the last years can only make us happy as they keep the Russian school among the most prestigious ones in the world. On the other hand, they place the historic research outside the academic circles, being similar to the way the representatives of the Embassy of the Russian Federation in the Republic of Moldova acted when they offered an example of inadvertency between the political and historical discourse as they had been recommended to do by the specialists from Russia. This position does nothing but to prove the existence of the imperial mentality in a representative institution of the Russian state.