The main purpose of the deportations from the former MSSR was to deprive the region of the political, intellectual and economic elite and also to leave no room for any type of resistance, uprising and other elements related to possible ways of saying “no” to the regime. Also, the deportations were aimed at creating a society without values, the expert of IPN’s project Andrei Curăraru stated in a public debate titled “Decapitation and uprooting of the nation through deportations”.
The expert noted that all the waves of deportations were initiated from above, by the top leadership of the former Soviet Union. In the first wave, in 1941, the lists of people to be deported were drawn up on the basis of ownership documents, while in 1949 on the basis of semi-censuses that were carried out there. They were compiled according to a number of criteria, including related to intellectuality, property rights, ethnicity and others.
Andrei Curăraru also said that the totalitarian regime wanted to liquidate the local elites to the greatest extent possible so that the people who did not have property, those who did not have sufficient education, who did not participate in social life, especially in the interwar period, and those who were easy to subdue, remained in place. They wanted to create a society without values.
In his opinion, the responsibility for each deportation case must be now established and each deportee must be rehabilitated, while the processes of denationalization and destruction of local elites must be explained in detail.
The expert believes that there are yet weak elites now because the real elites were deported or destroyed. “When we see that we have a state that swings like a pendulum from east to west and back, we realize that this is also an effect of deportations,” he said, adding that upright people either left for Romania, in the interwar period, or were deported.
Andrei Curăraru stated that we go through a very difficult process of re-establishing the elites. The educational and media systems must bring back to the public space the real narratives about who is to blame for the deportations, counter the falsehoods, including regarding the small number of deported people and the alleged guilt of the locals for this act of genocide. “The real fault lies with the totalitarian regime, which is still relapsing through the war of aggression against Ukraine, including through massive deportations, of children as well,” he said.
The public debate entitled “Decapitation and uprooting of the nation through deportations” was the 38th installment of the project “Impact of the Past on Trust and Peace Building Processes”. IPN Agency implements this project with the support of the German Hanns Seidel Foundation.
