Dmitrii Milev

Dmitrii or Dumitru Petrovici Milev (Moldovan Cyrillic and ; 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, and was decorated for bravery. Already sympathetic to socialist ideas, he embraced the Bolshevik ideology around the time of the October Revolution; he was strongly opposed to Greater Romania, and, after the Romanian–Bessarabian unification, foght in the Bolshevik underground. Arrested and indicted in 1919, he escaped custody and helped prepare the Tatarbunary Uprising. Upon its quashing, Milev 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". He was upheld as the MASSR's first short-story writer, as well as a pioneer translator. Working alongside Samuil Lehtțir, he 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. Milev was shocked by these developments, and maintained his friendship with disgraced figures—including Grigore Starîi, who joined him in translating the 1936 Soviet Constitution. After a period of uncertainty, in which he was allowed to reprise his literary work (but lost all political privileges), he was arrested and tortured by the NKVD cell at Tiraspol. He confessed to being a spy, then recanted, but was still put to death in that city's prison. Within twenty years of this event, de-Stalinization had him rehabilitated, and included among the founders of Moldovan literature. Milev's posthumous vindication was used by young authors in the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic to push for more creative liberties.

Biography

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." By contrast, an official biography, panned in 1959 by V. Tolochenko, had it that: "His parents were poor peasants who did not have their own land or even their own house, and were forced to rent small plots of land from the rich, paying for it with backbreaking labor and large taxes. From an early age, after the death of his parents, D. Milev earned his bread with his own labor." in a 1956 interrogation by the KGB, Milev's activist friend Ion Ocinschi reported that "he never made a secret of this."

Bolshevik recruitment poster, calling for the "liberation of Bessarabia". Published in Odessa in or around 1919 Milev was brought back into politics by the February Revolution, during which time he took part in "heated debates of the regimental military revolutionary committee". He was again taken out by a wound received during the Kerensky offensive, and had to recover at a military hospital in Kiev. Milev (who found permanent employment at Plugarul) 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.

Lionized author

Milev was initially affiliated with the Moldavian Regional Committee of the Ukrainian Communist (Bolshevik) Party (KPU), and assigned by it to the October Revolution Study Section. He and Ocinschi were therefore involved in the project to publish "the classics of Marxism-Leninism" in their "Moldavian" version. 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). 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.

Buciușcan's Russian–Moldavian dictionary, the Slovar, came out in 1929 with Chioru and Milev as editors. The same year, Milev translated from Maxim Gorky, producing Temnița ("The Prison"), which later reviewers have claimed as the first Gorky book to appear in "Moldavian". On June 1, 1929, Răsăritul hosted the first Moldavian writers' congress, which elected Milev as its chairman (replacing Mozes Kahana, who was sent by the Comintern to France), seconded by Lehtțir. 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.

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 those blood-stained days of the Romanian boyars in Bessarabia." Tolochenko disliked the latter piece for its treatment of the positive hero, the Polish student Vasile; he notes that, overall, Milev was "weaker" in his portrayals of innocent bystanders and Bolshevik heroes. Overall, he found that the author's merit was political, since Milev "correctly understood the life and political situation, took up the proper positions within the party, and, to the best of his ability, depicted one of the milestone periods in the history of the Moldavian people." 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. though Colesnic provides evidence that the distinction actually goes to Lehtțir's Biruința. 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. As recounted in 1990 by Milev's son Vladimir (born in 1936), it was there that Dmitrii engaged with Karl Radek, a respected figure Old Bolsheviks, and "fell in love with this man, was captivated by his Bolshevik passion, conviction, unshakable faith in revolutionary ideals." 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. Grigorieva and P. Crăciun were now credited as the authors, though there was virtually no change in content. He retained his convictions, as shown by one of his written articles of July 1936: "I am glad that I inhabit this happy country, a proletarian country, where the workers and peasants, under the leadership of the Communist Party, are engaged in building socialism for themselves. I feel even happier that I, too, am helping in this construction with my writing pen." The newspaper also commented on the bound edition of Pi douî maluri, whose cover had shown the Dniester's left bank colored in red—interpreting this as a malevolent, politicized clue. His translations of constitutional documents were cited as additional proof, with an allegation being made that he had engaged in their "deliberate distortion".

Milev was interrogated in Tiraspol prison by Lieutenant Burlaka. He denied the charges, though Burlaka warned him to reconsider: "Think about it, you will have plenty of time". 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. Already during Karpunin's investigation, expert witnesses such as Samuil Bernstein and Ruben Bugdanov informed that there was no actual difference between Romanian and Moldavian, and that theories to the contrary "did great harm to Soviet linguistics." His works were collected for print that same year. 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. The following year, Belenchi retrieved Milev's dossier and published excepts from it.