In 1994, my friend Nikolai, a retired agronomist from Moldova adrift in a large American city, dictated the following story to me in Russian.
1.
In Moldova in the month of April the weather is warm and rainy. Spring is coming.
The peasants all together set about the spring fieldwork. Nature is waking up. Gardens are blooming.
After the warm days and showers on the fields the first shoots of the field crops appear all at once.
2.
The best season of the year is summer. In this season the days are hot. Fruits, berries, early vegetables, and different kinds of table grapes appear on the vine.
The water in the river Dniester and the lakes becomes warm, and people swim and sunbathe.
3.
Three million people live in Moldova. Moldavians make up the indigenous population, but other nationalities live there as well: Russians, Ukrainians, Georgians, Romanians, and Jews.
Moldova is an independent nation at the present time.
__________
Moldova: A mouse roaring a truth
Paul Canning
February 24, 2016
This story might appear obscure but it reflects a bigger issue: about how Russian revanchism is reported back through democratic Europe’s free media. The issues it describes have also often been the story in Ukraine. How solid, liberal ideas like ‘balance’ and reporting ‘both sides’ can become a failure to tell the truth. How inserted reporters don’t pay attention to the locals. How the messy ‘European ideal’ needs much closer reporting if we’re to truly live up to any democratic ideal.
In the 1959 British comedy The Mouse That Roared a tiny, obscure European country ends up through comedic slight-of-hand being feted by both sides in the Cold War. In comedy, it showed how much of Europe is to the British ‘Ruritania‘, an inexplicable country whose peoples and cultures all mess into one. As the article explains this approach lives on with today’s lens of geopolitics and ideas of ‘colour revolution’ (via Russian infowar) muddying the coverage yet more.
Read the rest of the story on oDR.
The Russian Reader 