A group of members of the Youth Organization of the Liberal Party (PL) staged a flash-mob, on June 28 they called “a live chain of memory”, in front of the Moldovan Presidency, to commemorate the Soviet Union's occupation of Basarabia in 1940, Info-Prim Neo reports. The young Liberals, accompanied by PL leaders, lit candles to the memory of the victims of the Soviet Regime and carried tricolor flags with black ribbons. “It's a mourning day in the history of the Romanian people in general and, especially, a tragic day for the Romanians from Basarabia because this day of June 28 cut the body of the country, we remained orphans for tens of years and it held us back in our way within the European countries,” a prominent Liberal, Corina Fusu, has told media. “If not for the occupation, we would have been in the EU a long time ago and we would not have had the problems we have now, first of all the poverty. We don't have economy, language, healthy people, anything and this is because of the 1940 occupation,” PL president, Mihai Ghimpu, said. “The policy led by the Communist rulers for years was to crackdown on and to degrade the population. They want to erase this mourning day from the citizens' memory,” one young man reasoned the decision to stage the action in front of the Presidency. Later, the manifestation was joined by Chisinau's general mayor and PL deputy president, Dorin Chirtoaca, who lit a candle “for the ones having suffered from the totalitarian Communist regime, from the reprisals from 1940 and 1949 and then during the Soviet era, to the memory of the ones sent to the Communist jails and who wanted that Moldova become free”. “Their dream has partially come true, yet, our duty is to finish their task,” Dorin Chirtoaca said. According to him, the consequences of that period are felt today, too. “There are very many wrongdoings which have not been corrected by any Government in Moldova since 1990 and, unfortunately, the law on rehabilitating the victims of the Communist totalitarian regime is totally unfair, the compensations have no relevance compared with the losses of the deportees,” the mayor said. The presidential advisor, Marc Tcaciuc, who happened to pass near the protesters, was called by Dorin Chirtoaca to join them. The advisor preferred to go on however. Asked by journalists, Marc Tcaciuc has said he feels nothing for that historical period, “irrelevant for Moldova.” “The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact has nothing with Moldova and deals only with the relationships between the USSR and the Romanian Kingdom,” he said. The protesters put their candles to St. Teodora from Sihla Church, in the end. On June 28, 1940,the Romanian Kingdom yielded Basarabia and Northern Bucovina to the USSR, which asked to evacuate the civil administration and the military from these territories. The context of the event is the fact that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were sharing their spheres of influence in Eastern Europe. They signed anon-aggression pact on August 23, 1939, known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Then,on the largest part of the occupied territory, the USSR formed the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic, the Souther Part – the Budjak and Bucovina's North were given to Ukraine.