These concerns found expression in the activism of the Moldovan Movement in Support of Restructuring—a movement of the intelligentsia oriented mostly towards generalized economic and political liberalization—and the Alexei Mateevici Literary-Musical Club, which pulled together prominent cultural and political figures, activists and citizens to celebrate and discuss the language, literature and history of the Moldovans.

By June 1988, the Moldovan republican government began taking its cue from social movement leaders and discussing these issues, touching off the events that culminated in the creation of the Transnistrian state.

Social mobilization came late to the eastern cities that became the centers of pro-Pridnestrovian activity (mid-1989) and it followed a different model than it did in western (Bessarabian) Moldova.

The "internationalist" (pro-Soviet) movement in Transnistria took advantage of workplace institutions to build a countermovement and looked to engineers and factory managers for leadership.

Newly empowered by the weakened CPSU, and increasingly pressured by the ascendant movement for national reawakening, the Moldavian Supreme Soviet (which became the Moldovan legislature in June 1990) announced the creation of a body—the Interdepartmental Commission for the Study of the History and Problems of the Development of Moldovan—to research the language question and make recommendations.

Staffed as it was with Moldova's Romanianized cultural elite, the commission recommended the republican government accept all three points of the national revivalists' demands.

While the group Intermovement-"Unitate-Edinstvo" ("Unity") was the first to organize significant opposition to the language legislation, more effective activity began in the workplace.

[10] Many that were to become active in the strike campaign had been suspicious of the language legislation from the beginning—they suspected this to be the first step towards "nationalization" of the republic at the expense of "their country," the Soviet Union.

Seeing that the new version would establish Moldovan as the only official language of the MSSR, activists from a number of Tiraspol factories came together to create the United Work Collective Council (Ob"edinnennyi Sovet trudovykh kollektivov, OSTK) and called an immediate strike that eventually led to the shutdown of most major industrial activity (concentrated in the Transnistrian region) throughout the SSR.

The peak of the strike movement came in September 1989 in the immediate aftermath of the MSSR Supreme Soviet's passage of the language legislation.

The strike failed in its immediate goal—to prevent the passage of the language legislation—but it did provide a watershed in Transnistrian history; after the strike, the left bank of the Dniester, and in particular the city of Tiraspol, were essentially controlled by a group of engineers and factory managers hostile to the government in Chișinău, a group that controls Transnistria to this day.

In the days immediately before the language legislation was considered by the Moldovan Supreme Soviet the OSTK began issuing a series of very credible threats to the local and republican leadership.

"[14] In effect, the OSTK leveraged its popular support in factories and their neighborhoods as well as its institutional entrenchment to prod local government acting on their behalf in Chișinău and to warn the Supreme Soviet away from its intended course.

[16] While the strikes were extremely effective in paralyzing Moldovan industry, there were many instances were individuals and groups happy with the language legislation managed to win the day and keep their factories open.

Supreme Soviet Deputy from Tiraspol and firm supporter of the language laws, Leonida Dicusar, talked in September about the extreme pressure experienced by those brave few who worked to keep the factories open in the face of overwhelming odds.

In Transnistria, activists for the opposing social movement were less of a presence on the streets, but the communist party attempted to reassert its power in the area after being marginalized by the OSTK in the summer and fall.

In both cases it was a tense winter as the communist party attempted to regain control of the republic in the face of revolts from two directions: one the national revivalists and the other to pro-Soviets.

At the end of a year that had seen Semion Grossu and his organization pummeled from both the national revivalist right and the "ultrarevolutionary" internationalist left, Moscow replaced the First Secretary in a snap Central Committee plenum in mid-November.

However, what is of interest to this chapter is that in 1990 as the republic polarized to the point of schism in September, those apparatus workers that were elected quickly aligned themselves with either the Popular Front and the parliamentary leadership, or with the OSTK-led opposition.

Moreover, in this election Igor Smirnov, (later to become in December 1991 the first president of the Pridnestrovian Moldovan Republic), first successfully ran for public office.

Throughout 1990, OSTK-controlled soviets in Transnistria battled with republican authorities in Chișinău, many of the latter also elected in 1990 and that on a platform of Moldovian national awakening.

The continued defiance prompted the Moldovan government to pass a law on May 10 making the acceptance of the new flag legally binding.

However, although the police and the court system were largely still loyal to the government in Chișinău, Supreme Soviet deputies were not willing to provoke the sort of outcry that would certainly have arisen if Moldovan officials had gone as far as arresting leading Transnistrian politicians.

Over the objections of the authorities in Chișinău, the Tighina city soviet held the election in July and then used the results as a further justification for separatist action.

Quickly moving down the unprecedented path of secession from a union republic, left-bank city and raion soviets needed a popular mandate to justify their extreme actions.

With the declaration of the PMSSR, city and raion soviets throughout Transnistria convened plenums and discussed the possibility of integrating themselves into the new republic.

[31] The loyalist raion soviets expressed their opposition by flying the Moldovan flag,[32] and refusing to accept the jurisdiction of Tiraspol.

On 17 September the Moldovan government held a working session in Dubăsari in the building of the raion soviet which was loyal to the central authorities in Chișinău.

[37] Throughout late 1991 and into early 1992, workers' battalions, increasingly the beneficiaries of weaponry from sympathetic Red Army officers and defections from among the local military personnel, grew better prepared than the loyalist Moldovan police in Transnistria.

The war left the separatists in Tiraspol with de facto control over most of Transnistria and the west-bank city of Tighina (from now on known as Bender or Bendery).