The deportations of the night of June 13, 1941 were organized by the then administration of the Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic and a special representative of the Bolshevik Party sent from Moscow. The representative of the Soviet NKVD was one of the main figures who staged those deportations, IPN reports.

“On May 7, 1941, a kind of exile request was made to Stalin for the reason that elements hostile to the Soviet power and persons who continued to fight against the Soviet Union remained in Bessarabia after it was annexed by the Soviet Union. These ideological arguments were at the basis of the request to allow deportations from Bessarabia,” historian Anatol Petrencu stated in the talk show “Emphasis on today” on TVR Moldova channel.

A number of 22,648 people were deported in total. Of this number, 652 persons were mayors, who were considered leaders, intellectuals with model families in society. “They were considered kulaks. The Soviet power worked against those who considered that it exploits the work of other people. The kulaks included namely the most assiduous and notable people. We could call them farmers with particular reservations. They provided models of agricultural farms in that period and particularly those persons were deported,” noted the historian.

According to him, besides mayors and their families, there were exported 980 activists of political parties, 137 landowners, 440 police officers, officers of the white army, officers of the tsarist army, 64 Romanian officers, 1,948 large traders and 411 owners of important real estate in the state.

Romanian historian Marius Diaconescu said the Soviets targeted the intellectual class, state functionaries and mayors who were the elite of society. “When you destroy the intellectuals of a nation, you practically destroy the whole nation. This was the strategy of the Soviets.

“Russia wasn’t a friend. Russia wasn’t a mother or a father. Russia was the biggest enemy of the Romanians at all times. Tens of thousands of people were taken from homes at night, without clothes, without food. They were put in wagons and transported like cows, in hotness or in the cold, without water and food. They were taken far from home without sister knowing where the brother was or without the mother knowing where the father was,” stated Marius Diaconesc.

The deportations of June 13, 1941 covered the territories annexed by the USSR from Romania in June 1940. There were to be seized 32,423 persons, 6,250 of whom were to be arrested, while the rest 26,173 were to be deported, including 5,033 persons arrested and 14,542 persons deported from the Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic.