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| THE 61ST COMMEMORATION OF THE DEPORTATIONS IN BESSARABIA |
| (2010-07-08) |
| Last updated: 2010-07-08 14:14 EET |
For the first time in 61 years, the top political figures in the Republic of Moldova attended the commemoration of the deportations of July 6th 1949, the biggest in the Stalinist era. Politically speaking, the presence of interim president Mihai Ghimpu, prime minister Vlad Filat and Chisinau mayor Dorin Chirtoaca shows the desire of the new regime to break away with the country’s Soviet past, unlike the former governments in Chisinau. In the opinion of mayor Chirtoaca, this is a turning point both historically and morally, because the state finally recognises the crimes committed by the communist totalitarian regime.
The deportations used by the Kremlin as a means to get rid of the local elite are illustrative of the dictatorial and occupation regime. The present-day Republic of Moldova incorporated part of the Romanian territories annexed by Moscow on 28th June 1940 following an ultimatum, including Bassarabia, northern Bukovina and the Herta region. Almost 35,000 people were deported to Siberia and Kazakhstan in July 1949 alone. About two thirds were women and children, because the occupying regime deported entire families of intellectuals, former staff of the Romanian administration, priests and wealthy farmers, whom they regarded as enemies of the soviets. Some of the deported people were only able to return to Moldova towards the end of the 1950s against the backdrop of a so-called “destalinisation”. Many, however, met their end in the Siberian and Kazakh steppes. There is still no official statistics in Chisinau of the people who died as a result of deportations and an evaluation of the assets they left behind.
There is also no precise information available about the hundreds of thousands of people from Bassarabia and Bukovina who took refuge in the much smaller Romania after the Soviet annexation. One thing is certain, though, namely that the Soviets brought in allogenic settlers recruited mainly from Russia and Ukraine who changed the ethnic make-up of the region. This is why historians, political analysts and sociologists have described the capacity of the Romanians in the Republic of Moldova to create their own intellectual and moral elites after half a century of occupation as something close to a miracle. These elites led both the national revival movement culminating in the proclamation of Chisinau’s independence from Moscow in August 1991 and the large-scale protests of April 2009 following which the former pro-Russian communist regime was replaced by the current pro-Romanian and pro-western administration.
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2025-04-03
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