Communist authorities will not condemn deportations, Moldovan historians

The Communist authorities of Moldova will never condemn the genocide against the own people, consider Moldovan historians, who participated Monday in a symposium dedicated to the anniversary of 60 years of the Stalinist depurations of 1949, Info-Prim Neo reports. Sergiu Musteata, president of the Association of Historians of Moldova, said that the Europeans justly equated the Soviet regime with the fascist regime. “The Russians are not right when they say that the Soviet regime ended the fascist regime because the Soviet regime was not more humane towards the European peoples,” Musteata said. “The present Communist authorities will not recognize the deportations as genocide. The Communist MPs’ refusal to remember the deportees by a moment of silence at a Parliament’s sitting in May, at the suggestion of the Opposition MPs, is a conclusive proof. They did not fulfill their moral obligation towards their past, though many of them were born in exile,” Sergiu Musteata said. “The Communists that administer our country are the successors of the totalitarian Communist regime from the last century. Those that erect now monuments to Lenin will not condemn the totalitarian regime because the depurations are a manifestation of this autocratic regime,” said historian Alexandru Mosanu, head of the first Parliament of the Republic of Moldova. According to him, the Soviet regime caused the greatest damage in the history of the mankind. “Nobody killed as many people as the Soviet totalitarian Communist regime did. “As long as the country is administered by Communists and their acolytes, the deportees will be permanently discriminated and will not have chances of getting their rights back,” Mosanu said. The victims of deportations attending the symposium related with tears in their eyes about the hard times when they lived far away from home and suffered hunger separated from their families. Maria Cultuclu-Paraschiv from Buseuca village of Rezina district said that she and her family were deported two times – in 1949 and then in 1955 – because they did not obey the forced collectivization. “After six years of coldness in Altai region, where we experienced fear of wolves, we were deported to Kazakhstan, where there were only deserts and it was very hot and we were afraid of snakes,” Maria Cultuclu-Paraschiv said. Viorica Olaru-Cemortan, an applicant for a Doctor’s Degree at the Faculty of History of the “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University in Iasi, showed a documentary with and about victims of the deportations of July 1949. She urged the elderly persons that had been deported to take part in the production of a series of films that would be shown on TV. “If we do not speak about those tragic events, the people will not speak about their sufferings,” she said. The Romanian invitees that traditionally participate in such meetings did not attend. According to the organizers, the Embassy of Moldova in Bucharest refused to issue visas to two historians from Braila for unfounded reasons. On July 6, it is 60 years of the depurations of 1949. That was the second wave of deportations conspiringly called “IUG” (South). It was carried out under the decision of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union “on the deportation of Moldovan kulaks, former landowners, great merchants and other groups of people and their families”. As many as 11,280 families (40,850 persons) were to be deported from the Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic for life in accordance with the given decision.