Vladimir Solonari
Vladimir Solonari is a Moldovan-American historian, university professor, and former politician.
Biography
Solonari was born in a family of ethnic Ukrainian speakers of Russian. He graduated from the Faculty of History at the State University of Chișinău in 1981 and, with the support of Alexandru Moșanu, he pursued doctoral studies at Moscow State University, obtaining the title of Candidate of Historical Sciences in 1986 with a thesis on the British Labour Party's programmatic issues in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Between 1986 and 1990, he taught at the State University of Chișinău and, between 1992-1993, at the University of Tiraspol.In 1990, Solonari was a founding leader of the pro-Soviet Unity Movement for Equality in Rights and he was elected as a deputy in the Supreme Soviet of the Moldavian SSR. Following the independence of the Republic of Moldova, which he opposed, he served as a member of the Moldovan Parliament from 1991 to 2001. During this period, he was a member of the commission that drafted the Moldovan Constitution between 1993 and 1994 and its amendments in 2000. He also served as Chairman of the Parliamentary Committee on Human Rights and National Minorities from 1994 to 2001 and as Rapporteur for the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe on the issue of the Muslim minority in Western Thrace, Greece, from 1999 to 2000.
In 1997, Solonari founded the Civic Party of Moldova and served as its president until 1999. The party joined the "For a Democratic and Prosperous Moldova" alliance to contest the 1998 elections. The alliance received 18% of the vote, winning 24 of the 101 seats and becoming the third-largest faction in Parliament. It formed the Alliance for Democracy and Reforms coalition together with the Democratic Convention of Moldova, the Christian Democratic Popular Front and the Party of Democratic Forces, which was able to form a government led by Ion Ciubuc. After 2001, he withdrew from political life and focused on his academic career.
In 2003, Solonari accepted a position at the University of Central Florida, where he is currently a professor in the Department of History. His research focuses on the policy of ethnic cleansing in World War II Romania. He has published several works on the history of Romania, the Republic of Moldova, and the Soviet Union, including the book Purifying the Nation: Population Exchange and Ethnic Cleansing in Nazi-Allied Romania. His book A Satellite Empire: Romanian Rule in Southwestern Ukraine, 1941–1944 received honorable mention from the American Association of Ukrainian Studies in 2021.
Criticism and controversies
Journalist Constantin Tănase wrote in his newspaper, Timpul de dimineață, in 2000, a critical article against Solonari. He accused the historian of hypocrisy, claiming that:In a March 2022 interview in Deutsche Welle, Solonari said about his political past: