the Soviet Union. Inadvertently undermining the power of the communist party, Gorbachev set the stage for a devolution of power into a federated state structure which essentially resulted in the devolution of power to the governments of the fifteen Soviet republics. This devolution of centralized power to republican legislatures ("soviets" in the terminology of the Soviet Union) was matched by a simultaneous explosion of mass participation in the now open debate about the Soviet future. In the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic, as elsewhere in the Soviet Union, political activity was expressed in various ways, including by organizing groups and clubs independent of the government that had long withheld the right of association to any sort of civil organization. Two sets of concerns were particularly prominent in the debates that accompanied the opening of political dialogue in the late 1980s. The first was concern for the ecologic devastation that was so characteristic of Soviet industrial society. The second, and increasingly ascendant concern revolved around the Moldovan language and whether it was distinct from the Romanian language or not, and national heritage, which many felt had been trammeled by Soviet and Russian domination. 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. Cultural revival was just one of the issues championed by such informals in early 1988. However, during the course of that year events around the Soviet Union, and particularly the bloody clashes between Armenians and Azerbaijanis in Nagorno-Karabakh and the pogrom against Armenians in Sumgait, brought issues of ethnicity increasingly to the fore in the union press. In Moldova, social movements increasingly began to focus on three issues involving language: the identity of the Moldovan language and whether it was separate from the Romanian language or not, the artificiality of the use of the Cyrillic alphabet for this supposed Moldovan language, and need for Moldovan to be given the status of official language of the republic. 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