The 71st anniversary of the Stalinist deportations is marked on July 6, 2020. On July 6, 1949, more than 35,000 people during only several hours were embarked on wagons and taken to forced labor camps. There were deported women, children, elderly people and the most hard-working persons. Many of them returned after years, while others didn’t survive. The event was commemorated today by Prime Minister Ion Chicu and by representatives of parliamentary and extraparliamentary parties, who laid flowers at the monument to victims of the Stalinist deportations called “Pain Train”, IPN reports.
“Those who are still among us today, the victims and the descendants of deportees, are the proof of acerbic resistance. Probably no government will be able to compensate them for their physical and spiritual losses, but it is our duty to keep their memory and to thank them. What this history lesson taught us is that, regardless of the atrocities and sufferings experienced by our people, our dignity hasn’t been affected and the love for the country does not die in a wagon and is not destroyed by Siberia’s frosts,” stated Premier Chicu.
Flowers were also laid by members of the Party of Action and Solidarity led by Maia Sandu. According to the PAS, the deportations were conducted with the aim of uprooting the native population so as to build the new Soviet person. “Today the mentality of the “Soviet man” is deep in the souls of many nostalgic persons and politicians from Chisinau who, if time is turned back, would not hesitate to repeat this ordeal. Now more than ever we should be united and keep the memory of those who became the victims of the Soviet regime and lost everything. Unity is the weapon with which we can win and can build a solid society based on liberty, wellbeing and mutual respect,” the PAS says in a press release.
President of the Party “Dignity and Truth Platform” Andrei Năstase said the memory of the innocent victims of a criminal regime obliges us to reiterate the firm condemnation of oppression and totalitarianism in any ideological form. The best example for our mates is not to allow the amateurs of political authoritarianism to prevent us from following the irreversible path – strengthening of the national identity and pride, alignment with the European nations, with the democratic spirit that dominates in a state with the rule of law and, surely, urgent replacement of the “catastrophe government” in the Republic of Moldova,” he stated.
The event was also commemorated by the Union Political Movement. The leader of the Liberal Party Dorin Chirtoacă said that regrettably, Russia returns to the annexation of territories, as it did in Ukraine with Crimea and Donbas, and says it openly that time will come when it will take us back as part of Great Russia. “They do not renounce the crimes committed in 1929 and 1940. Even if those crimes were condemned by the Soviet Union in 1989, they now return to Stalin’s policy, to the aggressive method of behavior of Hitler with whom they shared Europe, Poland, the Baltic Countries. A big danger is threatening us and it’s serious that no one says something against it,” stated the politician.
The mass deportations took place in three successive waves. Known under the name of “IUG” (South), the deportations of July 5-6, 1949 are the second and largest wave of deportations. The victims of Stalinist deportations are commemorated annually on July 6.
