The deportations from Bessarabia, which decapitated the intellectuality of a community, were meant to leave the localities without benchmarks, the member of Moldova’s first Parliament Alecu Reniță stated in a public debate hosted by IPN News Agency. According to the columnist, the memory of the deportations must keep the population of the Republic of Moldova vigilant and as far away from Russia as possible. He noted that an eventual arrival of the Russians in the Republic of Moldova will make all the representatives of the fifth column to act in the same way as the traitors acted during the Stalinist deportations.
On the night of June 13, 1941, the first wave of deportations from Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina took place and thousands of families were forcibly displaced to Siberia and Northern Kazakhstan. The columnist said the deportations targeted, in particular, the intellectuals of a locality. The purpose of this drama was to destroy the backbone of the community and instill fear in the people who remained at home so that they later accepted collectivization and dispossession.
“A book about the deportations said that not Stalin or the Soviet Union deported us, but those who wrote denunciations. This is not right. These deportations, assassinations, stealing of property and separation of families were a direct consequence of the regime brought here, in Bessarabia. Without this regime, the elements that collaborated with the Soviet power, who wanted to extend the lists, could not have done so, and the interwar period when they sat quietly is a proof of this. In 1941, when the deportations took place, these directly targeted the values and benchmarks of a locality, a community. The mayor was a benchmark in the community, as the school and the church were. The intellectual part was decapitated to leave the localities empty. Those communities lost their landmarks. When you go somewhere and you don’t have a guide, you start wandering. This long wandering generated that homo sovieticus,” stated Alecu Reniță.
He noted that the purpose of deportations was to destroy the national identity and create the so-called “homo sovieticus”, a person who renounced the identity and identified themselves with the USSR, passively accepting everything that the Soviet authorities imposed.
“During the Soviet Union, it was said that the Soviet citizens had the right to choose their ethnicity or nationality when they reached the age of majority, at the age of 18, not by birth. There were university mates who changed their nationality. They indicated that they were not Moldovans, but Russians. Through propaganda, they aimed at the Russification and the creation of an empire. Putin called the collapse of the USSR the greatest catastrophe of the twentieth century because they already achieved great results in the Asian space, except the Caucasus and the Baltic space. On the European side, they obtained good results. They wanted to appear as a huge Soviet people, a Russia with many national minorities, assimilated to a large extent, including Moldovans. When Gorbachev came in 1985, it was the last cry that we didn’t want to be homo sovieticus, that we weren’t ashamed of our grandparents, our parents. Without people’s uprisings in the colonies, the Soviet Union wouldn’t have collapsed so quickly, but the revolt belonged to the peoples who realized that they were in a prison,” said Alecu Reniță.
He also said that Vladimir Putin’s Russia continues the practices of the Soviet period, the war in Ukraine being the most eloquent example in this regard. The Republic of Moldova must keep as far away as possible from the Russian world so as not to experience again the atrocities of history.
“Beyond the huge crimes against humanity, those massacres and human dramas that occurred from 1917 until the collapse of the USSR have no justification. It is yet another proof that any totalitarian regime causes only desolation and disasters, without any individual, collective, or imperial perspective. We must understand the essence of this regime that has done so much harm to peoples and humanity and flee as far away from it as possible. The Soviet Union was reborn and generated this huge war in Ukraine. It is endangering peace on the entire planet. It is endangering Europe and the freedom of peoples. Today, if Putin reaches Chisinau, the entire network he has in the Republic of Moldova will do exactly the same as they did in 1940-1941. Deportations must keep us vigilant and keep us as far away as possible from this monster that is struggling and hasn’t disappeared from this part of the world,” concluded the columnist.
The public debate entitled “Decapitation and uprooting of the nation through deportations” was the 38th installment of the project “Impact of the Past on Trust and Peace Building Processes”. IPN Agency implements this project with the support of the German Hanns Seidel Foundation.
