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| Anatol Țăranu | |
On the night of July 6, 1949, thousands of people in Soviet Moldova were picked up from their homes, boarded on trains composed of cattle wagons and transported to Siberia and Kazakhstan. It is estimated that more than 11,000 families consisting of more than 35,000 people were deported during this operation known as “Operation South” (in Russian “Юг”), which was aimed at deporting a large number of people considered “socially dangerous elements” or “enemies of the people”. Entire families, including the elderly, women and children, were sent to remote regions where the living conditions were extremely difficult.
Deportations as a specific form of Stalinist repression
After World War II, the Soviet Union consolidated its control over the occupied territories, including Bessarabia, which had been annexed from Romania in 1940. The policies of forced collectivization and suppression of anti-communist resistance led to repression against the local population, operated by the Stalinist regime. The deportations or forced migrations were one of the forms of political repression undertaken by the Soviet state against citizens with the use of force or coercion. In many cases, the deportations were only a prelude to the physical destruction of the deportees or an element of more comprehensive repression, when the Soviet punitive system was used as an architect of the construct of the new national identity – the Soviet people.
The Stalinist deportations as a form of repression had their own specific characteristics. First of all, they stood out by their administrative or extrajudicial nature. Secondly, the repression was directed not at a particular person, but at a whole group of people, usually very numerous, not seldom against entire peoples. Decisions on repression were usually taken by the leaders of the Soviet party and government and were accepted at the highest level, personally by Stalin and a small circle of associates. On the one hand, the deportations were legally formalized: decrees of the Supreme Council of the USSR, resolutions of the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR, State Defense Committees, etc. On the other hand, all these decisions ran counter to the Constitutions of the USSR and the Union Republics and therefore were initially illegal.
Repression with the aim of uprooting masses of people from their established and familiar habitat and placing them in a new environment that was unusual and risky for their survival was another, more common feature of deportations. At the same time, the new settlements were many thousands of kilometers away from their native places. In this way, the entire repressed contingent (class, ethnicity, religion, etc.) was subjected to a ferocious process of desocialization and denationalization.
Goal: reduction of resistance and suppression of national identity
The Soviet occupation of Romanian Bessarabia turned this territory during and after World War II into a scene of massive deportations to Siberia and other remote regions of the USSR. These deportations were orchestrated by the Soviet authorities, especially in the 1940s and 1950s, and were aimed at eliminating resistance against the communist regime and reducing the influence of the Romanian national factor. Already in December 1948, as soon as the pressure of the famine of 1946-47 decreased, the Minister of Security in Chisinau, Mordovets, informed the top security official in Moscow, Abakumov, about the intention to deport 8,000 families of kulaks and other nationalist elements from Moldova.
The Soviet authorities targeted the wealthy peasants (kulaks) through their policies of repression, considered a threat to collectivization policies and, therefore, to the economic and social organization of Soviet society. The former members of political parties, former Romanian officials, including those from public administration and education, were a special target. The deported people were often intellectuals, priests, teachers, former officials of the Romanian administration who were seen as potential opponents of the communist regime and of the policies to stifle the Romanian national identity of the majority population.
Devastating impact
The deportations of 1949 had a devastating impact on Moldovan society. Many families were torn apart, while the survivors lived in conditions of forced labor and extreme deprivation. At the same time, the deportations contributed to the frightening and subjugation of the local population, thus facilitating the implementation of Soviet policies of collectivization and social control. The deportations led to the disintegration of communities and families in Bessarabia, contributing to the formation of generational trauma, the psychological and social effects of which are still felt today among the Bessarabian population.
The deportations’ impact on the Romanian national identity in Moldova eastward the Prut was manifested by the severing of family and community ties, fundamental elements of national identity. Many of those deported were local leaders, intellectuals, and active community members, whose loss led to the weakening of social cohesion and communities’ capacity to withstand external pressures.
In the Soviet times, the Romanian national identity was subjected to a process of forced deconstruction and its replacement by the Moldovan identity, supported by forced Russification. The deportations were an integral part of this strategy, eliminating voices that could have promoted the Romanian culture and language. The library, schools, and other cultural institutions were subjected to censorship and, in many cases, closed or transformed to serve Soviet propaganda.
The deportations had a devastating psychological impact on those who remained in Moldova. The fear of reprisals and the insecurity created a climate of terror, negatively affecting solidarity and trust within the community. The collective trauma had been passed on from generation to generation, influencing the perceptions of true national identity and of the past. In this context, the Soviet authorities rewrote the history of Moldova, presenting the deportations as a necessity to combat the “anti-Soviet” elements. This led to a distortion of collective memory and difficulties in correctly recognizing and commemorating these events in the post-Soviet period.
“Their echo is still alive now...”
After the dismemberment of the Soviet Union, the deportations of 1949 were recognized as an act of political repression. In the Republic of Moldova, these events are commemorated annually, while the survivors and descendants of the victims continue to demand recognition and compensation for the suffering they endured. Currently, there are multiple initiatives to investigate and commemorate these tragic events, even if the Moldovan legislators haven’t yet fully paid the debt regarding the recovery by the state of the damage sustained by the deported persons.
Although the deportations operated by Stalin’s regime in Romanian Bessarabia had devastating effects on the national consciousness of the Bessarabians, keeping the truth about these events contributes to the revival and consolidation of a sense of authentic national identity, resistance to the attempts to reaffirm in the Moldovan society the concept of anti-Romanian Moldovenism. In the post-Soviet period, the efforts to recover the memory, including the recognition of the victims of deportations, contribute to building cultural resilience of the Moldovan society by intensifying the efforts to rediscover the Romanian national identity whose assertion becomes a factor of major importance in shaping the European future of the Republic of Moldova.
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.