Communist regime condemned tens of thousands of people to death and deportation

More than 2,400 persons in the Moldovan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic had been condemned to death, while over 3000 taken to special camps by 1938. The commission for studying and assessing the totalitarian Communist regime in Moldova made public the data in a news conference on February 22. According to them, the figure spread earlier was 700 persons condemned. The new data were collected from the archives of the Moldovan Ministry of the Interior, Info-Prim Neo reports. The members of the commission say the terror mechanism did not chose who to liquidate. People of different ethnicity were condemned, but the Moldovan-Romanians were also accused of promoting the national values. The persons were condemned at the meeting of the Special Troika of the Moldovan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. The republic's Minister of the Interior, Prosecutor General and First Secretary of the Communists Party met three to eleven times a day to decide the fate of hundreds of people: “Shoot them. Confiscate their Property.” Historian Mihai Tasca, the commission's secretary, said there were fewer cases when the people were sent to concentration camps and were not shot. “In some cases, the person was sentenced to prison in the morning, but in the afternoon the Troika decided that he/she should be shot dead,” Tasca said. “The reasons for the condemnation were ridiculous. The people were commended for being normal, putting question and not accepting the reality. They were often accused of espionage and of predicting the regime's fall,” said historian Gheorghe Negru. Gheorghe Palade, a member of the Commission, said that in 1944, when the Soviet troops entered Bessarabia, about 50,000 persons were arrested and more than 22,000 of them were condemned during raids to identify the enemies of the Soviet regime. The Commission's vice president Sergiu Musteata spoke about the ideology of the Communist regime. “We will focus on the quality of the textbooks introduced by the Soviet regime. The children were indoctrinated from the first grade. The history of this land started to be described in the textbooks compiled in 1958. Until then, they used the books written in 1937,” he said. A large part of the data made public by the members of the commission was discovered after the archives of the Moldovan ministries were desecretized by a decision made by the present Government, at the request of the commission The commission for studying and assessing the totalitarian Communist regime was set up by presidential decree on January 14 this year. It is obliged to periodically inform the society about its work and prepare a study, a collection of documents and an analytical report on the historical, political and legal assessment of the totalitarian regime. The commission is composed of 30 members, who are historians and philologists.