In Transnistria, sentences stop before they reach the end

I learned to read Romanian from my grandfather, Pavel. He was Ukrainian, yet he read and wrote Romanian with a patience that I have never encountered in anyone else. My mother had found an old textbook when I was five, and my evenings were spent beside Pavel, repeating letters while he corrected me calmly, without haste, letting each word run its full course.

“I went to school with Romanians. They made you learn,” he would say, never elaborating further. For me, it was simply a language. For him, it was continuity.

Growing up in Transnistria – the breakaway republic of Moldova – it was not always a given that you would speak Romanian. But for me, Romanian was always there, in my mother’s voice, carried further by Pavel, reinforced at school, and anchored, though I did not realise it at the time, through the poetry of Mihai Eminescu. At home, we spoke and read Romanian. Beyond the yard, however, the language shifted almost automatically. Russian, thus, became the framework through which relationships between children unfolded.

My mother would often tell me, almost in a whisper, that Transnistria was Moldova. Then her voice would lower further, and she would caution me that such things were not to be said outside the house. The difference between what could be spoken aloud and what had to remain constrained was learned through tone, pauses and the way sentences stopped before reaching their conclusion.

What silence protects

During my childhood, there was a black car that people spoke about in whispers. The way it surfaced in conversations was enough to understand that any direct explanation was unnecessary. One way to avoid it, was to keep your language to yourself. A neighbour of mine was taken away after speaking openly against the system. His two-week absence became more present than words themselves. Every gesture, every glance and every conversation seemed marked by his disappearance.

When he returned, life resumed, though in a recalibrated form, where questions no longer had a place and answers remained outside language itself, as though there was a point beyond which meaning could no longer be carried forward without disturbing the fragile balance in which people continued to live. At the time, the name did not matter. What remained was simply the phrase: the black car. Years later, when I first heard the name Volga, it settled onto a reality I had already learned long before language had fully explained it.

In my conversations with Svetlana, Marian, Nicolae and Maria – which I had conducted for this essay – I recognised similar formulations, expressed in different ways.

“Sometimes the language you choose determines whether the conversation continues or not,” says Nicolae, a Romanian land surveyor who grew up in a village near the Transnistrian city of Dubăsari. He studied for six years in Romania. Raised between Romanian-speaking schools and a predominantly Russian-speaking environment, he describes adaptation as something that eventually becomes automatic. “If I go into a shop and the cashier speaks Russian, I know perfectly well that I could continue in Romanian,” he added “But almost subconsciously, I start speaking Russian as well.”

The Russian military presence sustains this form of control in a constant and understated way. The troops that remain in the region, together with the ammunition depot at Cobasna, exist outside everyday life, yet they fix the boundaries within which the system operates. Their presence is enough.

This reality marks a frontier where European rules stop and where the functioning of the system depends on the degree of acceptance. The resulting space operates as a system of influence sustained through repetition. Checks are constant, rules are applied in silence and institutions remain permanently visible. Daily life organises itself around these routines.

Any given morning in Transnistria begins as it does anywhere else. People go to work, children leave for school and buses arrive at the same hours each day. The difference appears in small things, repeated often enough to become part of the background. On a bus, conversations remain short. Subjects adjust according to who gets on and who might be listening. The shift is never openly marked, yet it is felt. At a checkpoint, the gestures are already known. Documents are prepared before they are requested. A glance pauses for a fraction of a second in exactly the right place.

The classroom after the war

Education follows the same logic. Schools operate within understood limits, even when those limits remain unspoken, while language and curriculum adjust themselves through practice. Today, eight schools remain in Transnistria where Romanian continues to be taught. Their existence depends on a fragile balance maintained through constant adaptation, where each lesson not only carries the curriculum forward, but also keeps open the space in which it can still be spoken.

“The problem was never the building. The problem was the right to study in Romanian,” says Svetlana Jitariuc, a 66-year-old former teacher at the “Ștefan cel Mare și Sfânt” Theoretical Lyceum in Grigoriopol. She spent 47 years in education, 42 of them at that school, and remembers the years after the 1992 war as the moment when fear entered the classroom.

Parents understood early that language carried consequences beyond the classroom. Some spoke Romanian freely at home, then switched almost instinctively in public spaces. Children learned the difference long before anyone explained it to them directly.

 

In public spaces, the Russian language provides access to institutions and administration, while Romanian remains present in the quieter settings. In the classroom, the differences appear in the way teachers phrase things and in what they choose to leave outside the lesson. The textbook remains the same, yet the lesson changes. For teachers who continue to teach in Romanian, each lesson involves a constant adjustment, both of content and of the way it is delivered. Adaptation becomes continuous and discreet. Students understand these things early and absorb them without needing to articulate them. During a history lesson, a student raises his hand and asks: “Is the language we speak Romanian or Moldovan?” The teacher lowers her eyes for a moment, smiles briefly and says: “It depends on who you ask.” The classroom falls silent, the lesson moves on.

Maria was ten when she realised that the language spoken at home differed from the one outside. For her, it was enough that Romanian was spoken within the house. Today she is 80 years old. She spent her life teaching primary school children.

“Language is learned from people, not only from textbooks,” she says, smoothing her hands across the table in a slow, repeated gesture.

Her grandfather came from Maramureș, a region now in northern Romania where Romanian communities had existed for centuries, including during the years when the area formed part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, before becoming part of the Romanian state after the First World War. For her, that continuity remained present in the way language was passed on beyond textbooks, through people themselves. Above all, language lived at home, in the stories told in the evenings and in the way people carried their world forward to the next generation.

“Here, we speak our language,” Maria recalls.

Marian, a 35-year-old from Rîbnița who has never left the Republic of Moldova, describes identity as something that changes tone depending on where it is spoken.

“I am Romanian,” he says quietly. “The difference appears the moment it is spoken publicly. Within the family, identity remains stable. Outside, it is forced to adjust.”

Like most in Transnistria, Marian learned to read reactions before words. In a shop, on a bus or in a brief conversation, language becomes the first filter, a reflex shaped over time.

The reflex precedes intention, and from that point choice becomes secondary. The system produces stable reflexes and a predictable form of adaptation, in which the inner self remains constant while expression adjusts itself to context. School makes these limits visible, and language functions as an indicator of position.

Identity spoken quietly

The choice of language in conversation communicates context. It reveals where you are, who you are addressing and how much of yourself you are prepared to expose. In certain situations, this choice happens instantly. A rapid adjustment to the environment takes place. Gradually, that adjustment becomes automatic. Identity remains internally constant, while the way it is expressed continues to adapt. The separation becomes functional: the interior preserves stability while the exterior adjusts itself to context. Over time, the distinction settles into the shape of normality. This separation between the inner and outer self produces a particular kind of precision.

Romanian once formed part of everyday normality at the school where Svetlana worked for nearly half a century. After 1992, that normality was pushed beyond the classroom through constant administrative pressure. Lessons continued outside the building. Textbooks disappeared during inspections and returned afterwards. Sometimes there were not enough for all the students. One official report records a teacher being summoned to court for teaching in Romanian. In certain cases, the pressure extended beyond administrative measures and into detention. Local media turned teachers into a problem.

In 2002, when the school was shut down, Svetlana arrived at the gate with her husband and a few bags. She said she was entering only to collect her belongings. The decision to close the school had already been made. She went inside, gathered what was hers and left.

 

In the days that followed, books began to be removed whenever it became possible. Packages were passed over the fence, from the schoolyard into the hands of children carrying them onwards to houses and garages. Some made it through. Others disappeared along the way. Every movement required speed. Every delay meant loss.

The gestures repeated themselves until everything that could be saved had crossed beyond the fence. At that point, the school did not close. It was moved, piece by piece, across a fence. When the Romanian-language school in Grigoriopol was forced to shut down, students, parents and teachers left for Doroțcaia, a village in Moldova’s Security Zone under Chișinău’s control. Classes continued there with the support of Moldova’s Ministry of Education. What crossed that line was more than a school. It was the refusal to surrender a language.

Cristian, 42, from Dubăsari, remembers the sound of an explosion and the cellar where his family spent several nights. Fear settled in as background noise. At school, the conflict appeared in other forms. “Entire classes would fight. Russian-speaking children against Romanian-speaking children,” Cristian recalls. “We were called fascists.”

At home, the rules were transmitted through experience. Gradually, identity became a mechanism of adaptation. A conversation on a bus could begin in Romanian and continue in Russian, following the rhythm of the situation. For Nicolae, the shift between languages functions as reflex.

“Most of the time, you had to stay silent,” he says.

The road to Chișinău involves passing through checkpoints where documents are constantly inspected. To an outside observer, such details may appear minor. For those who live here, they define reality. The same logic of functioning appears in other spaces too, where influence settles into everyday life until it is no longer observed, only lived.

This reality exists only a few hours from the borders of the European Union and NATO. The distance is not geographical. It lies in the capacity to intervene and shape reality beyond those borders – an operational distance, defined through geopolitics and influence.

This is where the limits of Europe become visible; where norms stop and control continues to function through other mechanisms. Such control does not require visibility in order to expand. It stabilises itself over time so long as its limits remain uncontested. In this space, integration encounters a frontier defined not by geography, but by the capacity to intervene.

Life inside such a system shapes identity profoundly. Identity calibrates itself according to context, while communication passes through an internalised filter. For many, this duality becomes normal. The difference only appears at the moment of departure.

Crossing the Prut changes that balance. The river separates the Republic of Moldova from Romania and, by extension, from the space of the European Union. Beyond it, sentences are allowed to reach their end.

Language becomes political through use. Through the places where it is accepted and those where it becomes uncomfortable. The freedom of language is felt in those moments when you no longer search for the other person’s reaction before continuing, in the way a sentence reaches its full conclusion.

Where Europe begins to sound different

For someone outside this experience, the difference remains difficult to define. For those who have lived it, it appears clearly through contrast. The freedom of language means continuity. A sentence carried through to the end.

The system functions through repetition. It becomes visible in small gestures: the choice of language, pauses, sentences stopped at the right moment. This discipline accumulates over time.

Maria carries it forward without naming it. Marian manages it consciously. Nicolae notices it. Cristian only understands it from a distance. Life continues in a balance sustained by a presence that establishes limits without direct intervention. Europe remains geographically close and operationally distant. Its values are known. Its guarantees remain selective.

When I asked them how they felt living in Transnistria, the answers remained unclear. Some stopped before finishing the sentence. Others answered indirectly. A few changed the subject entirely.

It was not an absence of words, but a form of adaptation. The answer exists, but adjusts itself according to context, following the logic of the environment in which it is spoken. The answer changes according to the moment, the place and the person being addressed. The same individual may describe the experience differently without contradiction, as variations of the same underlying condition.

I recognised this kind of response because I already knew it. For me, the feeling itself never had a precise formulation. Fear and safety overlap in ways that are difficult to separate – a state of attentive presence in which you understand more than you say. The system operates through learned limits rather than visible prohibitions. Once internalised, those limits become part of the way people speak, choose and stop. The result is a form of internalised control in which reflex replaces choice.

After you leave, the difference appears later, during an ordinary conversation, when a sentence continues further than you normally expect, and nothing stops it. That is when you realise how accustomed you had become to holding it back. In Transnistria, sentences stop earlier.

This article was written within the Ratiu Forum Journalism Mentorship Programme, under the guidance of Adam Reichardt, editor in chief of New Eastern Europe. Several interviewees are identified by pseudonyms due to the sensitive nature of the topic.

Ana Pisarenco is a journalist based in Moldova. She runs the independent media project eurOpinii.