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| Anatol Țăranu | |
This spring it will be 75 years of the apogee of one of the most tragic events of national history in the Romanian space eastward the Prut –the famine organized by the policies of the Soviet regime in 1946-1947. Recently, the Parliament of the Republic of Moldova, after an extended period of 30 years, ultimately adopted a decision to institute the day of remembrance for victims of the organized famine of 1946-1947, which will be marked each year on the third Saturday in April. The given Parliament decision was adopted by 53 PAS MPs attending the siting, with the Socialist-Communist and Șorist opposition leaving the assembly hall in protest at such a decision.
Political fuss about famine
It is worth to note the repeated attempts made by different legislatures of Moldova’s Parliament to institute a day to officially commemorate the victims of postwar famine in the Republic of Moldova. All the relevant initiatives had been blocked by the forces with post-Soviet nostalgia, which stopped the national awakening process in the young Moldovan state by different political stratagems, keeping the collective memory hostage to the distorted perceptions of history.
In the Soviet period, the tragedy of the famine lived by millions of citizens of the USSR during the first years after the war was under ban for being covered publicly, the phenomenon of the famine being a ‘taboo’ in the Soviet historiography. Only at the end of the 1980s – the start of the 1990s, when intense public debates started on a series of banned subjects of the past owing to the perestroika policy, the process of knowing the uncensored historical truth began in the Soviet society. During those years, in the yet Soviet Moldova, the issues related to the postwar famine were justly added to the most pressing problems of historical awareness owing to their non-dissimulated dramatist. The Moldovan historians were among the first in the Soviet space who accurately documented the truth about the famine of 1946-1947, editing in 1993 a broad collection of documents on the issue. But the Moldovan political class ignored during many years the work of historians, lamentably delaying a political-legal assessment of postwar famine in the republic.
The publication of the documented truth about the famine in Soviet Moldova required an adjustment of the position of the Soviet regime’s apologists on this phenomenon of national history. It became impossible to deny the existence of famine, by the model of the Soviet regime, and they started then to explain the phenomenon as an exclusive consequence of drought.
Century-old experience of fighting famine
It’s true that in 1945-1946, a harsh drought struck a huge territory of the then USSR, including Soviet Moldova. But as true is that periodical droughts have affected historical Moldova for centuries, but never before did the famine cause such human disasters as in 1946-1947. This way, as weather observations show, 33 years with drought were recorded between 1854 and 1946 and 16 of these were especially droughty, when the shortage of precipitation reached a critical limit. A severe drought similar in size to that of 1946 struck Bessarabia in 1891-1892. In those years of the end of the 19th century, the population of the region was seriously starving, but mass mortality was avoided. Furthermore, in Bender county that was the worst affected by drought then, a natural increase was recorded.
Even if Moldova is geographically situated in the area with climate risks to agriculture, when draughts and low harvests are often in this region, the Moldovans from generation to generation accumulated experience for overcoming these calamities. All the peasant farmsteads mandatorily had reserves of food for such cases. Together with the appearance of the first signs of drought, the peasants limited consumption of food products with the aim of securing supplies until the new harvest. During the periods of famine, life maintaining mechanisms for extreme conditions started to work in villages and the state began to use the food reserves of wealthy households in the fight against famine. Evidently, this wasn’t done gratis, but they usually managed to save human lives. The state also provided food aid to save the people. But this historical experience didn’t reproduce in 1946-1947, went about 300,000 Moldovans died during a short period of time, of only ten months. Why?
And the Soviets came…
The food crisis in Soviet Moldova started in 1945 and was caused by natural disasters and mostly by the fiscal policies of the Soviet state that dispossessed by force the peasants through exaggerated food collection plans. On January 1, 1946, the republic’s population was 2.183 million and the minimum volume of grain needed for such a population was calculated by renowned researchers at 600,000-700,000 tonnes a year for food, including for cows, and for seeds. According to official statistics, in the droughty year 1946, the republic harvested only 365,000 tonnes of grain. For comparison, the same sources note that in the droughty year 1945, there were harvested 926,000 tonnes (272,000 of which were offered to the state), while in the agricultural year 1940, which had favorable weather conditions, there were collected over 1.8 million tons of grain. This means the grain harvest, which ensured food security, in Moldova eastwards the Prut in 1946 was five times lower than in 1940 and 2.5 times lower than in 1945.
After the Soviet regime was established in 1944, Moldova eastwards the Prut annually increased the plan for handing over agricultural products to the state. This way, in 1944 the republic’s plan was 201.2 tonnes, in 1945 – 272,000 tonnes, while in the harsh droughty year 1946 this was reduced insignificantly to 265,000 tonnes. The fiscal burden intensified and the peasants had to sell agricultural products for money at the market so as to be able to pay the tax in rubles. As a result, in 1945 already, when the population remained with a grain supply of almost 700,000 tonnes after yielding 272,000 tonnes of grain to the state, frequent cases of undernutrition among particular categories of people started to be recorded. In 1946, even if Moscow decreased the initial grain plan for Moldova to 72,727 tonnes in August, this quantity was taken from the minimal vital amount of the republic. To survive at the poverty limit, the republic needed to have all the state taxes annulled and to urgently receive food aid in the amount of 200,000 to 300,000 tonnes from the state’s grain reserves.
Human lives didn’t cost anything
Instead of helping the republic’s population with food aid for counteracting the imminent danger of famine, when the state reserves consisted of 10 million tonnes of grain on February 1, 1947, being by 1.9 million tonnes of grain more than in the same period of 1946, the Soviet regime deprived the starving population of the last grain reserves by mandatory requesting instruments. Furthermore, the Soviet regime in 1946-47 exported 2 500 000 tonnes. Official statistics show the postwar famine in the USSR and, in Moldova in particular, could have been definitely avoided if the Soviet state policy had been aimed at keeping the human lives. The state had sufficient grain reserves for achieving such a result. If a part of the grain stored in the Soviet state reserves had been disbursed, those who suffered famine could have been saved.
But the institutional logic of the Soviet regime followed different parameters. In the name of the victory of socialism, which was the supreme goal of the Stalinist ideology and regime, the repression policies were widely applied without discernment, with the mass starvation policies being the most efficient among these. Similar to the repeated episodes of the famine in 1920-1930, in the Soviet Union these policies represented a substantial ideological and political product of the Stalinist totalitarian regime, the famine of 1946-1947 having been organized by the unbalanced policies to requisition food products, to not efficiently help the starving people.
In similar conditions, death didn’t cause havoc
In the immediate period after World War II, postwar famine in the Soviet Union organically matched the process of reinvigorating the terror by the new wave of repression of the Stalinist regime, whose major goal was to implant abdominal fear in the population eager for freedom against the background of the victory in the war against fascism. In the case of the Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic, an additional goal pursued was to accelerate the process of Sovietizing the territory annexed from Romania and to prepare conditions for the forced collectivization of the peasants. The fact that the Stalinist regime is responsible for the cannibal famine in Moldova eastwards the Prut is confirmed by the experience of Moldova from the right side of the Prut, where the drought and ruin caused by the war were similar to those in the Soviet space and where the famine also entered the homes of the Moldovan-Romanians, but the death rate there due to this rose to only several hundred people, not to hundreds of thousands of people as in Moldova eastwards the Prut.
Starvation as state policy
The fact that the Soviet regime cruelly reprimanded any public mention of postwar famine (explicit instructions banning the use of the word ‘famine” in party and military documents and also in medical files and statistical reports were circulated all over the Soviet Union) points to the regime’s complicity in the organization of famine. The hiding and distorting of this historical truth perfectly matches the current policies to reinvigorate Sovietism as an ideological instrument for promoting the imperialist concept about “historical Russia”. In the neighboring Ukraine, the historical truth about the Holodomor of 1932-33, when there was no drought, but about 6 million Ukrainians died from hunger, became a basic element of the identity construct in this state. On November 28, 2006, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine adopted a resolution by which it defines the Holodomor as a deliberate act of genocide. The Holodomor was recognized as genocide by 16 states: Australia, Canada, Columbia, Columbia, Ecuador, Estonia, Georgia, Hungarian, Latvia, Lithuania, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Ukraine, the United States of America, Vatican. The defect identity policy of the Moldovan officials prevented the Republic of Moldova from being among these states even if the Holodomor in 1932-33 killed about 30,000 people in Moldovan Transnistria.
The Holodomor and its reply in 1946-47 remain among the greatest and most atrocious crimes against humanity committed by the Soviet regime and confirm the genocidal essence of Communist totalitarianism. Not at all accidentally, the Socialist-Communist opposition of the current Parliament in Chisinau, which speculates politically on the post-Soviet nostalgia of an important segment of the Moldovan society that cannot clearly establish its identity, opposed the legalization of the day of remembrance for victims of postwar famine. The Republic of Moldova, together with Ukraine, paid an incredibly high price as part of the “Russian world”, including the Holodomor of 1932-33 and the famine of 1946-47.
A political step towards strengthening identity of Moldovan society
History is the one that confirms the identity of a nation. It is somehow a mirror that reflects the past of a nation and makes it resist in time. Today the people of Ukraine, awakened by the historical truth about the Holodomor, with the arms in their hands heroically defend the right to freedom against the aggressive “Russian world”. In the Republic of Moldova, the awakening of the population by realizing the truth about the most tragic page in the recent national history – the famine of 1946-47 – faces the fierce riposte of the collaborationists of the Russian imperial camp who boycotted the vote in Parliament on the commemoration of the victims of postwar famine. The fact that these political forces are broadly represented in Parliament point to a serious problem of the identity construct in the Republic of Moldova. At the same time, the adoption by Moldova’s Parliament of the decision to commemorate the victims of the organized famine of 1946-47 is a resonant political step towards strengthening the identity of Moldovan society that this way implicitly strengthens the state’s resilience to the danger of foreign aggression.
IPN publishes in the Op-Ed rubric opinion pieces submitted by authors not affiliated with our editorial board. The opinions expressed in these articles do not necessarily coincide with the opinions of our editorial board.
