What's in a Name?

Old Orhei Monastery, July 31, 2005

Many were eager to dub last week's protests in Moldova the "Twitter Revolution." Leaving aside for a moment the fact that it's probably improper to strain to find in provocateur-instigated mob violence parallels to the color revolutions of a few years ago, if one seeks a name for the events in Chisinau, there would seem to be better monikers at hand.

Last week I noted a couple of the ones making the rounds - "#pman Revolution" and "Orphans' Revolution," a coinage which got another mention in this interesting post by a foreigner living in Moldova - and mentioned that I regard the tag I've been using to aggregate posts on the situation in Moldova, "Grape Revolution," as tongue-in-cheek and probably not the best name of the ones out there.

From the outset, the peaceful protesters on April 6th wanted to have a Candle Revolution - burning candles to mourn what they saw as the death of Moldovan democracy. At the demonstration on Sunday the 12th, I saw several people at the back of the crowd trying to keep the meme alive by lighting votive candles in plastic cups on the sidewalk. It didn't look like they were having much success. Gusts of wind kept blowing out the candles and tipping over the cups.

A couple of the other appellations which have been circulating in the Russian-language coverage of events in Moldova are somewhat indicative of Russians' tendency to look down their noses at Moldovans.

The first of these is the moniker "Mamaliga Revolution," after Moldova's polenta-like national dish. The Transdniestrian propagandists at LivePMR wasted no time in rolling out a post under this name. An item on Moldovanova earlier this year had this meditation on the idea of a Mamaliga Revolution:

Mamaliga, as we know, is tasty and pleasant while it's hot. When it gets cold people usually feed it to their dogs.

Calling the violence of last week a "Mamaliga Revolution" doesn't quite work, however, if one believes the riots were truly spontaneous - you see, one of the fundamental bits of conventional wisdom tossed around by those who hew to the view that the Moldovan people are politically passive is that "mamaliga doesn't explode" ("мамалыга не взрывается").

Another sobriquet that's been making the rounds in Russian mainstream media as well as online is "Tile Revolution" ("кафельная революция"), a reference to Russians' apparent belief that, since many of the Moldovans in Russia do construction work (and are regarded in the ethnic hierarchy of post-Soviet migrant workers as semi-skilled enough to be given the painting and tile-laying parts of the jobs), that must be what all of them do.

I first heard about this one from an ethnic Russian who lives in Chisinau. He was dismissive of the term, saying of his co-ethnics in Russia, "they'll say anything to put someone else down." A quick Yandex search shows that "Tile Revolution" - an appropriately derisive way to refer to Moldovans, and uppity Moldovans especially, at least from Moscow's point of view - seems to have received an official imprimatur, having appeared in the headline of this story on state-run news program Vesti. Komsomol'skaia Pravda also dropped this phrase in a somewhat interesting, if biased, roundup of Russophone blogs from Moldova, which is, however, missing links to the blogs in question.