In February 1907, a peasant uprising spread from a noble estate in northern Moldova and quickly engulfed the entire country. Terrifying the ruling elites, after three months it left an estimated 11,000 people dead. Listening to the sounds and silences in accounts of the 1907 peasant uprising helps identify the micro-level interactions that drove the violence and shows how both sides understood and remembered what was happening. This paper builds on Christian Gerlach’s work on the sounds of massacres and ethnic violence in twentieth century Poland, Rwanda, and East Pakistan. It examines how official reports, newspapers and oral histories reported the noises of the 1907 uprising, arguing that the choice of noises mentioned and how they were described depended heavily on the perspectives and motivations of the authors, showing that not only do opposing actors remember the past differently, they also hear it differently.
