On the Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism on July 6, a number of activities will be staged in Chisinau and elsewhere in the country. In mourning, flags will be flown at half-mast, IPN reports.

The Ministry of Culture said that flowers will be laid at monuments to the victims of Stalinist deportations. Commemoration meetings will be held and moments of silence will be observed in honor of those who experienced the ordeal of deportations.

The National Cinematography Center will show the film “Siberia from Bones”, while the National Theater “Mihai Eminescu” will present the play “Dossiers of Siberia” for the 85th time. Within the Memory Tour the past month, the play was long applauded in Ungheni, Edineț, Chisinau, Soroca, Cimișlia, Hâncești and today in Rezina.

On July 6, it will be 74 years of the largest wave of Stalinist deportations. On the night of July 6, 1949, the Soviet regime took tens of thousands of Bessarabian peasants to forced labor camps in Siberia, confiscating their property. The operation involved over 4,000 agents of the Ministry of State Security of the USSR, including from other republics, more than 13,000 officers and soldiers and almost 25,000 party activists from Moldova.

Three waves of deportations were staged between 1941 and 1951 and historians put the total number of persons deported from Bessarabia at 80,000 to 120,000.