“Torment, suffering and despair – this is what hundreds of thousands of innocent people of all ethnicities felt during the famine organized by the Soviet authorities in 1946-1947 – a terrible wound that will never heal completely,” said Prime Minister Dorin Recean. In a message disseminated on the occasion of the Day of Remembrance for the victims of the famine of 1946-1947, the official noted that our responsibility is to preserve the memory of those people, to consolidate peace and democracy, IPN reports.
Dorin Recean said that the relentless famine that was brutally imposed and used by the communist regime as an instrument of oppression and control immediately after the Second World War led to the death of over 123,000 people in all regions of the country. About 400,000 people were severely affected by malnutrition, but survived.
“Today we remember with sorrow the most traumatic phenomenon in the recent history of our country, which historians say was more terrible than the mass deportations by the number of human lives lost in peacetime. Our responsibility is to preserve the memory of those people, to consolidate peace and democracy, to do everything we can to build a developed society, where citizens are respected and protected,” said Premier Recean.
President Maia Sandu also circulated a message mentioning that a big tragedy in the country’s history – the famine caused by the Stalinist regime in 1946-1947 – is remembered on every third Saturday of April
The head of state noted that, according to historians, between December 1946 and August 1947, that is in just nine months, over 123,000 people were killed by starvation in the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic. Another 400,000 people were severely affected by malnutrition, and in the following years many of them lost their lives. The south of the country was most affected by the tragedy. Some of the Gagauz villages lost even half of their inhabitants. Almost 450 people died of hunger every day in Moldova, whether they called themselves Moldovans, Romanians, Russians, Gagauz, Jews, Romanies or Bulgarians.
According to President Sandu, the Soviet power forbade people to talk about famine. For generations, the survivors had to mourn their losses in silence. “In memory of our grandparents and great-grandparents, in front of our parents, we are obliged not to forget this tragedy, to talk about it, about those responsible for this crime and to commemorate the innocent victims. We bow with gratitude to our peasants from both banks of the Nistru, regardless of their ethnicity, who went through those sacrifices, but survived with their heads held high, resisted and gave life to new generations. To them we owe our life now, in the Republic of Moldova. It is a painful past for all of us, those who inherited this land, a past from which we must learn in order to build together a good future, a future in which our country no longer goes through such sufferings,” said Maia Sandu.
