Vladimir Putin teaches his people to die because he was unable to teach them to live, writer Maria Pilchin stated in a debate hosted by IPN. According to her, Putin was unable to invent a new paradigm of Russia and therefore prefers to take the people to the past, which presents the Russian empire as an almighty one.

“The Russian propaganda over the past ten years has worked very actively in our zone too. The country’s population has watched these broadcast programs. This way, Putin takes the people to the past that is described as glorious and victorious – that golden century. However, for us it is a period during which the Russian soldiers destroyed the bridges of our grandparents, when our people died from famine,” stated the writer.

She said that the cult of war was taken further to arts, books, cinematography. “They wrote so many books and so many novels. Where are now those books that not even the Russians read?”, asked rhetorically Maria Pilchin.

However, she is convinced that most of the people in the Republic of Moldova do not want in the post. “We want in the future – a future we would build, assume and realize by a proactive gesture.”

Maria Pilchin considers the Russian Federation has always dominated this piece of land that is now called the Republic of Moldova and it never cared about the fate of the people.

“In the Soviet times, the Italians wanted to send a protein substance as they heard that the people in some parts of the USSR died from starvation. But the Soviets said that there was no such a problem and they should better send grapevines. The Russians needed vineyards and orchards,” said the writer.

As to the holidays that some of the Moldovans prefer to celebrate on May 9 and February 23, the writer noted that these were imbedded in society through the agency of propaganda.

“I wonder what the relationship between the Bessarabians and the Red Army is. We didn’t even take part in the constitution of this entity. Why don’t some of the Moldovans want to realize the truth or the real configuration of the Red Army in history? This derives from the cultivation and imbedding of a religion of death, of an ideology of death and war during the 70 Soviet years and later. Since 2010, Russia has insisted a lot on this dimension. When we permanently commemorate the Red Army, we realize that we can be attacked and there is an enemy,” stated Maria Pilchin.

As to the historical explanation of this phenomenon, the writer said the essence of the Bessarabians has been from the start that of an orphan child.

“During the last 200 years, we haven’t developed as part of our nation. We have a handicap and this explains the difference between Bessarabians, Ukrainians, Moldovans and the Baltic states. The Ukrainians remained in their matrix. We have always been penalized for looking over the river. Critics serving the regime always underlined that someone looks over the Prut and this spoiled the image. These waves of oppression that affected us built a cautious personage that waited for the other republics to declare their independence first and then we also did it. It’s time to change something,” noted Pilchin.

The public debate entitled “What did we celebrate and why did we celebrate on February 23?” was the fourth installment of IPN’s project “Impact of the Past on Confidence and Peace Building Processes” that is supported by the Hanns Seidel Foundation of Germany.