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| Anatol Țăranu | |
On June 28, 1940, Romania was militarily attacked by the Soviet Union, becoming by the Soviets’ invasion of Bessarabia a state involved directly in World War II. The ordeal of Stalinization of Bessarabia, which was interrupted in the summer of 1941 following the liberation of Moldova westward the Prut by the Romanian Army, started this way. The process was restarted in the summer of 1944 following the reoccupation of this Romanian territory by the Soviet Army and its re-annexation to the Soviet empire.
Stalinism, one of three facets of totalitarianism
Stalinism is the generic name of the state political system and ideology of the USSR in the period between the end of the 1920s and the start of the 1950s, which influenced profoundly and almost completely all the spheres of life of Soviet society and its members. It is characterized through the cult of the personality of Joseph Stalin – the Soviet leader of that period – and represents a political system dominated by one party with a powerful propaganda system and with the almightiness of an extended repressive apparatus. Stalinism, together with Hitlerism and Maoism, in political science is considered one of the classical varieties of totalitarianism.
Being the most faithful emanation of Bolshevik ideology, Stalinism distinguished itself by the wish to establish total control over the individual with the aim of fully re-socializing this, while the methods were influenced by the wish to obtain an obedient and docile instrument of dictatorship. At the same time, Stalinism was characterized by the presence of an absolutist regime of personal power of J. V. Stalin who was not only a symbol of the regime, but also a leader who took fundamental decisions and was the initiator of all the significant measures of the state. For example, of all the decisions adopted by the Political Bureau of the Bolshevik Party in 1930-1941, fewer than 4,000 were made public, while over 28,000 were secret and 5,000 of these were so secret that only a narrow circle of persons from inside knew about them.
Stalinist background of drought and famine
The social and spiritual atmosphere of Stalinism had embraced Bessarabian society since the Soviet occupation of 1940. The return of the Soviet power in Moldova in 1944 radically changed the sociopolitical and economic atmosphere to which the Bessarabians were used. The farmland was nationalized. Private banks and businesspeople disappeared. A large part of the wealthy population, intellectuality and clergy found refuge over the Prut. The private entrepreneurial instruments for regulating economic activity were eliminated. By the decisions of the Soviet government, maximum arable land quotas for peasant farms were set. The surpluses were confiscated. Agricultural officials were named and each of these was responsible for collecting taxes from 20-25 peasant farms. Most the population wasn’t at all adjusted to the new conditions of Socialist socioeconomic administration. Namely against such a sociopolitical and economic background, the postwar drought and famine arose in Bessarabia.
Together with the advancing of the Soviet Army in Bessarabia in 1944, the requisitioning of food products, fodder, cows from the population became a norm in the area around the front. In such conditions, in the spring-summer of 1944, Moldova’s population was dispossessed of large quantities of grain and other agricultural products from the food reserves primarily of rural population.
... they behaved like occupants
Regardless of the havoc caused by the war, Bessarabia’s population didn’t experience a serious shortage of foods products. Soviet lieutenant Vasili Bykov, a future famous Soviet writer, took part in the 1944 military operations in Moldova. In many years, he confessed that the Soviet soldiers in 1944 saw in Moldova a food situation of the population which was very different from that in Ukraine. Each home of Moldovans had bread, even white bread. There were plenty of milk, butter, cheese, dried fruits… But the Soviet soldiers who reached Bessarabia in 1944 behaved like occupants towards the local population. Such an attitude of the Soviet soldiers could also be deduced from the accounts of Alexei Guzun from Chițcani village of Telenești district, who told that in 1944 “the soldiers swept out the last barley amounts from the attic. Twelve soldiers lived in our old house in one room and another 12 soldiers lived in the other room. Those soldiers fed their horses and ignored the people from the village. If they had left to us those several poods of barley in the attic, we could have coped, but when the drought also struck, the people remained without anything.”
The Soviet occupation of Bessarabia meant the forced introduction of the Stalinist system for organizing the economic life, based on the principle of extra-economic constraint. The individual peasant farmsteads were obliged to voluntarily yield up grain and other agricultural products, such as sunflower seeds, potatoes, soybeans, eggs, milk, cheese, wool and hay to the state. There was also the burdening monetary tax imposed on the population. The fulfillment of the plan of delivery of agricultural products to the state was mandatory and implied harsh penalties for those with outstanding plans and for the agents who ensured requisitioning in case of non-fulfillment of the plan.
Total practice of taking every last item – sweeping out of the attic
The Soviet plans for collecting agricultural products for the state in Bessarabia were extremely exaggerated and fatally disorganized the social mechanisms established during centuries for protecting the population from famine. For example, the Bessarabian peasants knew that the Romanian agricultural tax was levied when they unconditionally pursued the objective of ensuring a minimum quantity of 80 kg of grain for each adult and of 40 kg for each child. They could not imagine that the Soviet state would confiscate all the food reserves from peasant families by “sweeping out the attic” for fulfilling the plan, condemning this way the people to death by starvation.
It is evident that the shortage of food products in Soviet Moldova during the first years after World War II was caused also by a severe drought. But the droughts are not an unordinary phenomenon in Moldova. This way, according to long-term observations, during each decade there were by two to four droughty years. So, the periodical drought and the poor harvest were rather often in Moldova. The Romanians accumulated experience of overcoming calamities from generation to generation. At first signs of imminent disaster, the people started to consume food products in a limited amount so that the available reserves were enough until the new harvest.
A criminal plan, a killer plan
Owing to drought and the poor harvest in Soviet Moldova in 1946, the gathered grain amounts totaled 365,000 tones. For comparison, this amount was 2.5 times lower than in 1945 and five times lower than in 1940. Given that Moldova in 1945 already witnessed local cases of famine, the grain reserves of 700,000 – 750,000 tonnes available that year was that critical line after which mass starvation was experienced. At the same time, in 1946 the republic was assigned a fully unrealistic plan for the mandatory delivery of grain to the state, of 265,000 tonnes. It was a criminal, killer plan. However, namely from this level the state mandatory grain acquisition campaign started in the summer of 1946.
The obligation to fulfill the unrealistic grain acquisition plans destroyed the century-old system that ensured the survival of the Bessarabian village in conditions of drought. As a result, in rural areas there were no additional supplies of grain and other products for emergencies. These went to fulfill the acquisition plans, while the confiscation of the extra amounts of grain from well-off families distanced the proprietors who usually helped the poor during famine from the rural life.
With head in the sand, on the one hand
The food shortage in the republic didn’t generate a reaction in the administration in Chisinau. The Moldovan authorities didn’t bother Moscow even when a rise in the death rate among the population due to the famine was recorded in December 1946. Thousands of people died from starvation, but the official Chisinau was busy only with the fulfillment of the state grain delivery plan. Namely the fact that Moscow wasn’t informed on time about the famine in the republic became a reason for criticism for Alexei Kosygin, deputy head of the government in Moscow, who was sent by Stalin on a fact-finding visit to Chisinau.
In reality, Kosygin cheated as he knew very well the rules of the game of the political regime of which he formed part. He surely knew the hostile reaction of Stalin to reports about the famine of 1946-1947, which were furnished by the administration of different regions of the USSR.
Deaf and blind to the sorrows, on the other hand
Moscow knew very well the catastrophic situation in Moldova. This way, in April-June 1946 alone, there were registered approximately 1,700 reports about mass starvation, while in 1947 – over 2,000. These reports told about the state of spirit of the starving population. Information about the famine in Bessarabia was provided to Stalin by Beria – one of the close confidants of the master from the Kremlin. Kosygin himself experienced Stalin’s fury when he returned from his visit to Chisinau and told about the famine and food dystrophy he ascertained in Moldova at the meeting of the Soviet government. When he heard this information, Stalin got angry and harshly criticized Kosygin, labeling later him our dystrophic brother.
The postwar famine expanded to many regions in the USSR, causing the death of over 1 million Soviet citizens. But the harshest famine was witnessed in Soviet Moldova in which about 200,000 people died. It happened at a time when, out of the total grain amount obtained in the USSR in 1946, when the harvest was low and was under the usual annual norm, 11.6 million tonnes went to satisfy internal state needs, while the other 5.9 million tonnes went into the state reserve and 1.1 million tonnes of these were exported. On February 1, 1947, the state reserves consisted of 10 million tonnes of grain, by 1.9 million tonnes more than in the corresponding period of 1946. If only a part of the grain reserves had been allocated, 1 million people could have been saved, including of 200,000 Moldovans.
Mass starvation as political instrument
The aforementioned data show that the postwar famine in the USSR in general and in Soviet Moldova in particular could have definitely been avoided of the Soviet state policy had pursued the goal of saving human lives. But the institutional logic of the Soviet regime had other parameters. In the name of victory of Socialism – the supreme goal of the Stalinist ideology and regime – the representation policies were widely applied, with the mass starvation policies being among the most efficient ones. The recurrent episodes of famine in the Soviet Union in 1920-1930 were a substantial ideological and political product of the Stalinist totalitarian regime and the famine of 1946-1947 also had an artificial and organized character.
The postwar famine organized by imbalanced polices to requisition food products, not to efficiently help those who were starving, alongside the reinvigoration of terror by the new wave of repression by the Stalinist regime, was aimed at imbedding at Union level abominable fear in the conscience of the people who won the war against fascism, while in the case of the Moldovan SSR the goal was to accelerate the process of Sovietizing the territory annexed from Romania and to pave the way for forced collectivization among peasants.
The Stalinist regime was responsible for the famine of 1946-47 in Soviet Moldova. It used the famine as an instrument for Sovietizing the population, for destroying an identity that was foreign to the Soviet one. By starving the population, they aimed to annihilate the feeling of owner in the social categories that were undesirable for the Socialist system, primarily of non-collectivized peasantry.
Famine and mass deportations hand in hand
An additional argument for the Soviet regime to subject Moldova’s population to starvation was the necessity of exterminating the Romanian element as national identity of the largest part of the republic’s population. This way, the effective incorporation of the Moldovan SSR into the USSR was ensured by generating a generalized atmosphere of fear that was induced by practices of physical and moral extermination of the yet non-Sovietized population. Even if there were no direct directives for organizing the famine, issued by the agents and organs of the Soviet system, the system bears responsibility for causing that ordeal. Starvation was one of the main instruments in the hands of the Soviet Stalinist regime, which consciously imposed an enormous tribute at demographic, social, identity, psychological and other levels on the population of the Moldovan SSR in the famine years 1946 – 1947 so as to change by force the market economic relations with the Soviet-type ones.
Terror, including through famine, was the main political instruments of the Soviet Stalinist system employed with the aim of ensuring socialist transformations. The fact that the episode of postwar famine was shortly followed by the mass deportations of 1949 confirms the correctness of the conclusion that terror through famine was consciously applied by the Soviet system in the Moldovan SSR in 1946-1947.
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