I have been to the “Romanian” high school in Tiraspol three times.

Named after Lucian Blaga, the little school bills itself as the only place where the Romanian language is taught and spoken in Tiraspol, even though it definitely isn’t.

If there was a single person inclined to be sympathetic to this school, it would definitely be me. For the past 10 years, I’ve been telling everyone “I’m more Romanian than you!” And I’m certainly neither Russian nor Moldovan.

But there is something truly, terribly wrong going on over there at that school, and it all has to do with the school’s principal: Ion Iovcev (English phonetics: Yon Yovcheff).

I truly hate to say this, but he’s a delusional old man. I’ve known that for a while, but I never had any reason to really speak up about it.

But all that changed for me last week. On January 31, 2020, at a public event in Chisinau, he told the world that a genocide is occurring in Transnistria.

Honestly? My first reaction was to vomit. What kind of sick fuck tells the world that a “genocide” is going on in PMR just four days after the very real Holocaust Remembrance Day?

Let’s not forget that there were no fewer than six concentration camps set up by fascist Romanians in and around Tiraspol (link in Russian) between 1941-1945.

Iovcev has never once mentioned that or expressed any condolences for the 300 thousand Jews and 15 thousand gypsies his “countrymen” murdered here. January 31, 2020, is literally the first time he’s ever used the word “genocide” in any context.

In fact, here’s what he posted on Holocaust Remembrance Day on his personal Facebook page:

Then, I got angry. I realized that he didn’t “slip up” but is an unrepentant Nazi, the same as his virulently anti-Semitic colleague Eleanor Cercavschi.

Note: Cercavschi and Iovcev aren’t just both school principals “in Transnistria” – they’re also active members of the ACUM party led by perennial loser Andrei Nastase and Loony Tunes crazy Maia Sandu.

But after a while, I realized that Iovcev is just slipping into dementia and irrelevancy, a pathetic old man clearly bitterly hateful towards himself, his own culture, his students, his country, and his government.

The Hateful Eight

If you listen to the Moldovan media, there are “8 Romanian schools in Transnistria.” If you listen to Romanian media, there are eight schools that teach Romanian using the Latin alphabet in Transnistria.

The real truth is that there is exactly one Moldovan school in Pridnestrovie and zero schools that have anything whatsoever to do with the government of Romania.

Here is the so-called official list:

• Lucian Blaga HS – Tiraspol
• Alexander Cel Bun HS – Bender
• Evrica [Eureka] HS – Ribnita
• Mihai Eminescu HS – Dubasari
• Stefan cel Mare si Sfant HS – Grigoriopol
• A middle school in the village of Corjova, near Dubasari
• A middle school in the village of Roghi, near Dubasari
• A middle school in Bender

Except that:

• The middle school in Bender has a grand total of 3 students – it’s a boarding school for orphan children, so they live onsite
• Bender is, of course, jointly administered by RM and PMR
• Evrica HS is in the western slice of Ribnitsa that is controlled by RM
• Likewise, the school in Dubasari is in the part of town controlled by RM
• The high school in “Grigoriopol” is actually in the RM village of Dorotcaia
• Both Roghi and Corjova are also in RM-controlled territory

That means five out of the eight schools are in RM territory, and the two in Bender are in a city jointly administered between RM and PMR. Only the school in Tiraspol (where Ion Iovcev reigns) is fully inside PMR territory.

Furthermore, for some reason, the high school in the village of Varnita is never mentioned. Varnita is an RM exclave just 3km north of Bender. It is completely surrounded on all sides by PMR territory and its utilities (light, gas, water, etc) are provided by PMR.

But for some reason, Varnita’s HS never “makes the list”.

Furthermore, none of these schools are “Romanian” in any way. They aren’t financed by the Romanian government. The school books or any other supplies aren’t from Romania, and I don’t think Romania has given them so much as a paperclip in the past 10 years.

These eight schools (or nine, if you count Varnita) are entirely financed, organized, and run by the Department of Education in Chisinau. They use RM textbooks, RM curricula, and follow the same schedule as every school in the Republic of Moldova.

“Pro West” Indeed

Last Saturday’s conference was organized by the “Pro West Foundation” which seeks closer ties between the Republic of Moldova and the United States. That’s literally its stated reason for existence.

In attendance were the heads of the “8 schools”, a representative of the Moldovan Education Ministry, the “Reintegration” deputy prime minister (RM), and the US-sponsored “Promo LEX” propaganda organization.

Plenty of other participants were on hand to listen to Iovcev’s crazy banana bullshit, including this bloated suit:

And here he is, foaming at the mouth:

From here (my translation:

For the past 30 years, the only people who never forgot about the Romanians living on the Left Bank of the Dniester [i.e. PMR] was the Romanian government in Bucharest. But from the government in Chisinau? We got nothing from them, and we expect nothing.

Again, every cent Iovcev ever earned was paid for by the government in Chisinau. Every textbook in his class came from Chisinau. So why is he insulting the Republic of Moldova government? And whom in Romania does he think was going to hear this message?

Iovcev apparently hates the current government in Chisinau, but “they did nothing for us in 30 years” directly contradicts his own past statements.

Here he is in 2018, giving an interview to the self-same Promo-LEX (my translation):

Honestly? My job was a lot easier in the 90s when I first became director of the school. It’s interesting that I got so much support from [Education] Minister Ilie Vancea, who was an old Communist, because he recognized that the history of our people is also the history of the Romanian people.

Make up your damn mind, Iovcev!

Back to last Saturday:

What’s going on is a de-nationalization, a genocide against the indigenous population.

I’ve been told that Mr. Iovcev knows how to read, but apparently he doesn’t realize that, in order to have a genocide, at least one person has to, you know, actually die (be killed).

Literally no one has ever accused the PMR government of killing anyone in this country, especially not anyone related to Iovcev’s school (or any of the “eight” schools). Even during the 1992 war, no school teachers or parents of school kids or school kids or anyone related to these schools, not even the janitor, were ever killed by PMR authorities.

During the 1992 war, Iovcev didn’t even get arrested, for goodness sake!

Furthermore, he’s clearly convinced that there are “Romanians” living here in Tiraspol and that his school is where those “Romanian” students attend.

But when a reporter (who, by the way, is highly sympathetic to Iovcev) visited the school in 2019, here’s what he found (my translation):

Maxim, a tall, blond boy, is a native Russian speaker. When I tried to talk to him, his mother intervened, clearly suspicious, so I waited until later to talk to him [when she wasn’t around].

Maxim told me that he preferred if we speak in Russian. He said that he enrolled at the “Romanian” high school Lucian Blaga two years earlier.

So is Iovcev honestly saying that a blonde, tall, Russian-speaking kid with a Russian name who prefers to speak in Russian is secretly a “Romanian”? Because that is truly fucking ridiculous.

I can tell you for a fact that there are students at the Lucian Blaga high school who are Muslim, others who are Jewish, some who are Gagauz, one who is Abkhazian-Georgian, and a few Bulgarians, not to mention, of course, all the Russian kids.

And of the ones who speak “Romanian” at home, 99.9% of them consider themselves to be Moldovan. Literally, the only person crazy enough to call themselves a Romanian over there (when they clearly aren’t one) is Iovcev.

Back to Iovcev, speaking last Saturday:

Great efforts must be made to block [the PMR government’s] aggressive “Russification” policies.

Well, here’s another fun fact for you. At Iovcev’s precious “Romanian” school, they teach Russian. In fact, it’s a mandatory class for all students. Which makes it just a tiny bit hypocritical to say the PMR government is “Russifying” everything when your own school is also “Russifying” students.

Apparently, since nobody ever questions Iovcev’s fantastical tales, he’s gotten used to being treated like a normal person instead of an escaped patient from a mental asylum.

Iovcev’s Story

Ion Iovcev, with his very Slavic name, was actually born in Cahul (Moldova) during the Soviet era. Cahul is most definitely on the Right Bank of the Dniester and nowhere close to the area that is now Pridnestrovie.

As a young man, he attended the university in Tiraspol where he completed his education degree in 1974. He then got a job in Slobozia (part of PMR, near Tiraspol) teaching in Russian.

Here he is remembering those days (my translation):

I’ve spent my whole life dedicated to educating children on the Left Bank of the Dniester River. People on the Left Bank have a different mentality from those on the Right Bank. [Pridnestrovie] was, for a short while, under Romanian administration.

Yes, that was when Romanian troops burned people alive as part of the Holocaust.

Good times, am I right, Iovcev?

If Bessarabia [the Republic of Moldova] had been occupied by Russians since 1812, Tiraspol had been under Tsarist occupation since 1792. Between 1918 to 1940, the territory between the Prut and Dniester Rivers was part of our country, Greater Romania, but the lands east of the Dniester River continued to be under Russian occupation.

Christ on a cracker, this guy truly and honestly believes he is “Romanian.”

More Iovcev:

I believe there were between 50 and 60 schools which taught using the Latin alphabet between 1989 and 1992 in [Pridnestrovie]. Now, there are just eight.

Nope. There were a grand total of zero schools using the Latin alphabet as part of the official curriculum because the Language Law of 1990 specifically stated that the use of the Latin alphabet on the Left Bank would not take effect until 1996.

During that time, I was an inspector for the Education Department in Slobozia [near Tiraspol]. I started several [after school] classes that taught Romanian using the Latin alphabet.

And it wasn’t just kids who were coming to those classes – it was also government employees and high-ranking administrators in the [Slobozia] region.

Again, that’s because the 1990 Language Law made it mandatory for all government officials (in what was then Soviet Moldova) to speak and use Moldovan (not Romanian!!) using the Latin alphabet by 1996 or they would LOSE THEIR JOBS.

On March 4, 1992, when [Moldovan] President Mircea Snegur was in the United States to sign the papers for Moldova to join the United Nations, I was summoned to Tiraspol to take charge of the school that is now known as the Lucian Blaga High School.

In other words, right before Snegur sent in thousands of drunken looters to murder civilians in Bender.

The so-called authorities in Tiraspol closed the school for a few weeks. Then four of them [PMR guardsmen?] came in the room where I was talking to the former principal, Mrs. Lungu. Two of them had automatic weapons. One grabbed Mrs. Lungu and one grabbed me, putting his gun right in my back.

That’s when God saved us. That’s when I realized that these guys had no one to talk to, no one to call to figure out what to do with us, whether to take us down in some basement or do who knows what to us. Instead, they escorted us to the door and pushed us out with the butt of their guns.

I then returned to Slobozia. Petro Tolochenko, the former director of the University of Tiraspol, half-jokingly said to me, “Did you get scared? Looks like you don’t want to be a principal, coward!”

That word “coward” struck me right down to the marrow of my bones. That’s why, on May 27, 1992, I decided to become the principal of the school [again]. This was just a few days before the battle of Bender on June 19, 1992.

Yes, and what a grand time it was for old Iovcev. I guess he showed that he’s no coward by then running away to a nearby village to sip tea and wait for a victory that never came.

In 1992… the majority of the schools in PMR began teaching [again] in the so-called “Moldovan language” with Russian letters except for my school, the high school in Bender, the residential school for orphans in Corjova, and a school in Ribnita.

At first, it was just these four schools, but this later increased to eight because some people didn’t want to return to learning in the so-called “Moldovan” language.

So it went from 50 or 60 down to four and then up to eight, and everyone survived intact but yet it’s “genocide”?

The sad part is, in some ways, yes, he and some other teachers did face some harassment throughout the years. Some of these were genuine bad acts on the part of the Pridnestrovian authorities, but they never rose to the level of anyone being injured, wounded, beaten, tortured, or killed.

Other of these “harassment” claims are ridiculous, including the ones Iovcev never talks with Promo-LEX about, that were (somewhat hilariously) rejected by the judges at the European Court of Human Rights who have investigated them.

For instance, Iovcev was convinced up and down that the PMR government was tapping his phones. Why? Because he could “sometimes hear strange sounds” on the line when he was talking.

Furthermore, there is a huge difference between what the wartime-era government in Tiraspol was doing during President Igor Smirnov’s administration and what the current government under President Krasnoselsky is doing.

Since Krasnoselsky came to office in 2016, Iovcev hasn’t filed a single complaint or made a single allegation of anything, not even low-key harassment. Krasnoselsky has worked tirelessly to ensure that the Lucian Blaga school and the “7 others” have not been interfered with in any way.

In fact, thanks to Krasnoselsky, Iovcev now has a special pass that allows him to cross the border with no baggage/luggage checks. The library at his school is stocked full of Romanian-language journalists and magazines which are delivered by the PMR post office. And he’s allowed to recruit as many kids as he wants, regardless of whether they’re Russian, Gagauz, Moldovan, or anything else.

But Iovcev just can’t let go… and perhaps saddest of all, not a single media outlet in Romania paid him any attention whatsoever after claiming that he’s a victim of genocide last week.

The good news is that Iovcev, his equally fucking batshit insane assistant principal Raisa Padurean (who is dying of cancer and sees “undercover KGB” officers everywhere she goes), his Nazi colleague Eleanora Cercavschi (whom I am 90% convinced is the granddaughter of Marshal Antonescu’s secretary), and all the rest of the geriatric Russian-speaking Moldovans who are under the delusion that they are Romanian superpatriots aren’t going to live much longer.

After they’re finally gone, maybe, just maybe, we can have a rational conversation about what’s actually going on here in Pridnestrovie.

Because it sure the hell isn’t genocide…