The Soviet occupation of Bessarabia after June 28, 1940 was marked by incredible atrocities and immense losses of life, historian Ion Varta stated in a public debate hosted by IPN News Agency. According to him, about 200,000 people managed to retreat across the Prut following the annexation of Bessarabia by the USSR, while the rest of the population was subjected to the massacres committed by the Soviet power, including the three waves of deportations.
Following the signing of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, the Red Army entered Bessarabia on June 28, 1940. Ion Varta said that the date is a tragic one for the native population that was subjected to repression. A part of the Romanian army and administration was also subjected to mistreatment and reprehensible actions.
“The reaction of society was not unanimous because, under Russian domination here, massive infiltrations happened since 1918. The ethnic component was variegated and so the reactions were different. The alien population was attached to the values of imperial Russia, and the Soviet Union was the legal successor of that empire. Some minorities indulged in reprehensible acts committed in a stampede because the retreat was a disorganized one. The representatives of Bessarabian society manifested themselves differently. Some tried to find refuge on the right side of the Prut. According to estimates of our historians, about 200,000 inhabitants of Bessarabia managed to cross the Prut River because some were turned back by the Red Army. The Red Army entered on June 28 and the representatives of the units of the Romanian army, the police, the gendarmerie, who did not manage to retreat, were mistreated,” said the historian.
Ion Varta noted that the first year of the Soviet occupation was marked in Bessarabia by terror, executions in the street, actions that led to the establishment of a criminal regime.
“The terrible drama of Bessarabia started from the first year of occupation. From the very first days, the prisons were filled with absolutely innocent people, sporadic executions occurred in the street without a trial. People were mobilized for forced labor. We are talking about 100,000 young people lured with fanciful baits. They were promised to go to trade school, to become skilled workers, but in fact, they found themselves beyond the Urals. Stalin wanted to create a second military industrial base beyond the Urals, and these poor naïve young people ended up there, in incredible conditions, in barracks made of beams at the temperature of 40-50 degrees of Siberian frost. The first year of occupation was absolutely devastating, with huge losses of human lives and all the atrocities committed by the Soviet occupation regime,” explained Ion Varta.
The atrocities committed by the Soviet power in Bessarabia included the three massive waves of deportations. Hundreds of thousands of people were displaced in inhumane conditions from Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina and taken to Siberia or Kazakhstan.
“The first large wave of deportations, in 1941, was sinister because, unlike the other waves, the family heads were separated from the rest of the family in railway stations. They were boarded onto other wagons and had an itinerary of death because they were taken to two camps out of the seven established by Beria’s directive, after Poland was invaded in 1939 and where the Polish military elites were exterminated. Those camps were then deserted and were waiting for new victims,” said the doctor of history.
The public debate entitled “June 28, 1940 between celebration and catastrophe” was the 39th installment of the project “Impact of the Past on Confidence and Peace Building Processes”. IPN Agency implements the project with the support of the German “Hanns Seidel” Foundation.
