Dmitrii Milev

Dmitrii or Dumitru Petrovici Milev (Moldovan Cyrillic and Russian: Дмитрий Петрович Милев, Dmitry Petrovich Milev; January 2, 1887 – October 13, 1937) was a Bessarabian-born short-story writer and communist militant, active in the Soviet Union's Moldavian Autonomous Republic (MASSR). During World War I, he served as an officer in the Imperial Russian Army, but embraced Bolshevik ideology around the time of the October Revolution; he was strongly opposed to Greater Romania, and, after the Romanian–Bessarabian unification, made his way into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, which was a cradle for Moldovenism and the MASSR. Though originating from a community of Bessarabian Bulgarians, Milev identified with the Moldavian (Moldovan) ethnicity, which he viewed as distinct from the Romanians. More controversially, he advocated for a "Moldavian language", which he used in his contributions to proletarian literature—and which later scholarship regarded as "gibberish".

Working alongside Samuil Lehtțir, Milev helped establish the MASSR's cultural institutions, and served as president of the Moldavian Union of Writers. Advancing through the ranks of the Ukrainian Communist (Bolshevik) Party, he had contributions to both land collectivization and the literacy campaign. His short prose was a contribution to Soviet propaganda, focusing mainly on depicting the Romanian Kingdom as a bourgeois or fascist polity, which terrorized its "Moldavian" peasants and the Bessarabian Jews. Milev was explicit in his critique of Soviet Latinization, but later renounced Cyrillic and adapted himself to the Soviet version of the Romanian alphabet. He was still identified as a Latinizer, and therefore a Romanian-financed saboteur, with the onset of the Great Purge, being sentenced to death and shot at Tiraspol. Within twenty years of this event, de-Stalinization had him rehabilitated, and included among the founders of Moldovan literature. His posthumous vindication was used by young authors in the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic to push for more creative liberties.

Early life and activities

Milev was born on January 2, 1887, at Baurci-Moldoveni, in what was then Izmailsky Uyezd, in Imperial Russia's Bessarabia Governorate. Romanian scholar Nichita Smochină reports his ethnicity as Bulgarian, noting that he was "from a wealthy family." In a 1956 interrogation by the KGB, Milev's activist friend Ion Ocinschi reported that, during World War I, Milev had been an officer in the Imperial Russian Army, and that "he never made a secret of this." Other reconstructions of his biography suggest that he identified with the Bolsheviks during the October Revolution and under the Moldavian Democratic Republic, fleeing Bessarabia during, or shortly after, the Romanian expedition; he therefore opposed the union of Bessarabia with Romania. According to Smochină, his settling in the MASSR gave him privileged status, since, as an outcast from Bessarabia-proper, he could contribute propaganda against Greater Romania.

Milev original debut was as a poet—his verse was taken up in Plugarul Roșu, alongside works by Mihai Andriescu, Teodor Malai, and Pavel Chioru. He and Chioru were early adherents of the grammarian Leonid Madan, who had theorized that the "Moldavian language" was entirely unlike Romanian, and who invited writers to fabricate a "Moldavian socialist" lexis. With I. Cușmăunsă, they co-wrote a text which argued that: "We have no need for Romanian literary grammar, since that sort of grammar would completely stifle our Moldavian language" (Ноауы ну ни требуи граматикы литерары ромыниаскы кэч ку ашэ граматикы ной ом ынабушы ди тэт лимба ноастры молдовинясы). In 1926, Milev, already "one of the MASSR's most prominent writers", published Norod moldovenesc ("Moldavian People"), which criticized both Imperial Russia and Greater Romania for having denied Moldavians "the right to be human", keeping them "subjugated and nameless". Historian Charles King suggests that Milev followed propagandist Vladimir Dembo in describing the "emancipatory power of the Bolshevik Revolution" for the Moldavians as a separate people, with full liberation only attainable once Bessarabia had been Sovietized.

A "Milev D.", seen by literary historian Eugen Lungu as "in all likelihood Dumitru Milev" (an identification also backed by writer Iurie Colesnic), penned a translation of Une nuit dans les marais, the short story by Romanian communist Panait Istrati. Done from the Russian version, it was published in 1926 by the Moldavian State Publishing House of Balta, as O noapti'n baltî (Lungu's transliteration). Lungu notes that it may be "the first Romanian language version of that well-known work of prose", though the Moldavian avatar of the language, in both Milev's version and the preface (authored by Vitali Holostenco), was bordering on "gibberish" (păsărească). He adds: "I do not know if Panait Istrati has ever come across this 'Romanian' translation", but also that Istrati's "extreme indignation" with poor-quality renditions of his work into standard Romanian allows one to "imagine what this great unfortunate Istrati would have said, if he had ever managed to read the Balta edition."

Milev, alongside authors such as Lehtțir and Chioru, pioneered Marxist literary criticism in the MASSR—with results deemed "quite modest" by literary historian Mihai Cimpoi. In April 1928, Milev founded the literary club Răsăritul ("East"), also serving as editor of the magazines Moldova Literară and Octombrie. In August of that year, Milev and Gavril Buciușcan were members of a welcoming committee which greeted Istrait, who was passing through Balta on his tour of the Soviet Union; in his account of the meeting, Istrati called the MASSR a "Romanian butterfly on the Soviet elephant".

On June 1, 1929, Răsăritul hosted the first Moldavian writers' congress, which elected Milev as its chairman, seconded by Lehtțir. As noted by Ocinschi, he was a political figure of importance in the Moldavian section of the Ukrainian Communist (Bolshevik) Party, and personally involved in the land collectivization campaign, including as a collector of grain. He continued to write prose: published by Octombrie in 1931, Pi douî maluri ("On Two Banks") was praised by Ocinschi and panned by Smochină. As summarized by scholar Petru Negură, it showed Bessarabia as overwhelmed by the Gendarmerie, in service to the prosperous and exploitative bourgeois class who "would do anything to get rid of the peasants". The piece also alleged that destitute Bessarabians risked punishments for communism, "a word that most of them have not even heard", whenever they dared protest; conversely, it claimed that Bessarabians waved red flags on October Revolution Day, and thus marked their support for the MASSR.

Lionized author and Purge victim

Milev's core contribution to literature was a booklet titled Călătórii ("The Travelers"), or "stories from occupied Bessarabia". Printed in Tiraspol in 1930, it was celebrated by his colleague Lehtțir as "precious for our literature, but also from a historical point of view", in that it "recall[s] those blood-stained days of the Romanian boyars in Bessarabia." Smochină rated the sketches as "below mediocrity", though noting that humorous fragments, such as Stănescu and Eu gioc în cărți ("I Play Them Cards"), show more stylistic vigor in their depiction of petty corruption. The eponymous hero of Moș Gorițî (Мош Горицэ, "Old Man Gorițî") was in fact a 30-something veteran of World War I. Upon his return to Cetireni village, he issues a protest against the oppressive gendarmes, but is captured, tortured, and finally imprisoned as a "Bolshevik". Other stories in the book state similar claims about Romanian abuse against native Bessarabians, while the title piece, Călătórii, shows Romanian students (branded as "fascists") arriving in Ungheni to disrupt the local Jewish community.

In early 1932, Milev and Ocinschi tried to oppose Soviet Latinization, which briefly adopted the Romanian alphabet as a national standard for "Moldavian". Writing in early 1936, Smochină suggested that: "Intellectually, Milev is exactly at that same cultural level he had back when he left Bessarabia. Favored by circumstances, he did not know how to make use of them and cultivate himself; hence, his star shall fade out as a new generation takes over." The scholar sees Milev's writing after Latinization as fully incomprehensible to his target audience of workers, superficial, and entirely devoid of narrative logic. Milev's one play, Două lumi ("Two Worlds") was performed at the Tiraspol State Theater in late 1933. According to Smochină, it was the inaugural production of that new institution, though Colesnic provides evidence that the distinction actually goes to Lehtțir's Biruința. The work builds on the vision of Bessarabia as abandoned to the Romanian persecutors; according to Smochină, it is "unaccomplished"—not least of all because of its "incomprehensible language", almost entirely modeled on the Madan standards.

Those years saw Milev's participation in the Latin-based literacy campaign. In 1933, he and D. Grigorieva co-authored a primer for adult education (Abecedar: Pentru școala de vîrstnici), which placed emphasis on the terms-of-art in industrial life, as well as on the ideological tropes of Marxism-Leninism. From mid-1935, as acting chairman of the Moldavian Union of Writers, Milev was sending reports to the Agitprop directorate about its ineffectiveness in areas around Rîbnița. He and Lehtțir were MASSR envoys to the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in August–September 1934, though only as members of Soviet Ukraine's larger delegation. By then, the issue of differentiating between Romanian and Moldavian had become a large-scale political controversy; Soviet theater historian Pyotr Yershov suggests that "the higher Party organizations' insistence on a sharp distinction between Rumanian and Moldavian" clashed with a "natural desire of some Moldavian writers and philologists to use as a base for the formulation of a Moldavian literary language the already crystallized Rumanian, which is in fact extremely close to Moldavian". Overall, he notes: "Moldavian creative writing was an accomplished, if embryonic, art by the beginning of the twentieth century. Moldavian material that could be used in [declamation] classes included prose works by D. Milev".

As noted by historian Alexandru Molcosean, Milev was ostensibly marginalized in 1935, when he was first accused of Romanian nationalism, and had his name removed from the standard primer. Grivoreva and P. Crăciun were now credited as the authors, though content had remained virtually the same. He was eventually brought down during the Great Purge, which in the MASSR was mostly manifested as a clampdown on alleged spies and nationalists. One of the charges brought up against him was that he had established a "counterrevolutionary Moldavian nationalist organization" as early as 1927, into which he had then co-opted other figures of the MASSR's cultural establishment; he was executed by shooting at Tiraspol, on October 13, 1937. This was part of a wave of similar death sentences, with victims that mostly included intellectuals who had either promoted, or had come to accept, the Romanian literary standard. Almost exactly one year later, Malai was sentenced to be shot as Milev's collaborator in crimes of sabotage, alleged to have begun in 1937. Literary scholar Nina Scutaru notes that both Milev and Buciușcan, who had greeted Istrati in 1928, were eventually killed by the NKVD as "Romanian spies".

During World War II, a Soviet occupation of Bessarabia inaugurated the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic, fusing that region with much of the former MASSR. Soviet historiography now viewed Milev's killing, as well as those of other MASSR writers, as embarrassing, and records were falsified to show that he had died, at an unspecified location, on October 3, 1944. A reopening of the Milev dossier during de-Stalinization (in August 1956) included Ocinschi's description of him as a "very conscious" man, whose literary work had produced "healthy socialist content." He was formally rehabilitated at that stage, along with other victims of the Purge—his new status, which saw his work included in primers and textbooks, allowed dissenting Moldavian authors, who had remarked that Latinization was no longer criminalized, to push for the full recognition of Romanian literature as part of the regional canon. A 1958 issue of Literaturnaya Gazeta featured critic Vasile Coroban's musings about the growth of Moldavian literature, listing Milev as a founding figure. Into the 1970s, Coroban continued to describe Milev and Ion Canna as the "sources of all Moldavian Soviet prose", but, as noted in 2019 by critic Cristina Antoni, his assessment failed to make the authors regain popularity: "The writers' total grounding in ideological themes [...], along with their schematism, their lack of imagination, their linguistic inability, drastically reduced any interest that readers of the sixties and seventies could have maintained for such narratives."

In May 1971, Ivan Bodiul, who chaired the Communist Party of Moldavia, spoke about the need to conserve Moldavian literature as a venue for Soviet patriotism and communist partisanship. In his overview, Bodiul assessed that the aesthetic model should be based on works produced "when Soviet power was being established." Philologist Michael Bruchis argues that this effectively reduced the literary canon to "completely uninspired literary attempts" by authors such as Milev and Canna—any earlier Bessarabian author was in fact supportive of Romanian nationalism. At an unknown date, Ada Zevin was commissioned to paint Milev's portrait, which is kept at the Chișinău Museum of Literature. The actual circumstances of his death were first explored during the Perestroika years, beginning with a biographical article by N. Moraru for a 1989 issue of Nistru magazine. In post-Soviet Moldova, he was formally commemorated, including by having his name inscribed on a votive cross in Chișinău, alongside Chioru, Lehtțir, Malai, and 29 other writers described as "massacred or deported by the diabolical communist-Stalinist regime."