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60th anniversary of the 2nd wave of deportation marked in Moldova

July 07, 2009
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By Andrei Brezianu and Vlad Spanu*

On July 5-6, people in the Republic of Moldova marked the 60th anniversary of the second wave of deportation.

Under Soviet rule, several waves of deportations of Moldova's native population were carried out: the first one just months before the outbreak of World War II; the second in the war’s immediate aftermath; and a third one in the mid-1950s.

The first wave of mass deportations, linked with atrocities, was executed by the NKVD over a period of 12 months, between June 1940 and June 1941. In the first months of 1941, 3,470 families, with a total of 22,648 persons labelled as "anti-Soviet elements"—mostly landowners, merchants, priests, and members of the urban bourgeoisie—were deported to Kuzbas, Karaganda, Kazakhstan, and other faraway parts of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), amid reports of atrocities and exterminations. In Chişinău alone, evidence indicates that over 400 people slated for deportation were summarily executed in July 1940 and buried in the grounds of the Metropolitan Palace, the Chişinău Theological Institute and the backyard of the Italian Consulate, where the NKVD had established its headquarters. Historians estimate that just on 13-14 June 1941, some 300,000 persons (about 12 percent of the entire population of the annexed territories) were deported to other regions of the USSR. In Bălţi alone, according to eyewitnesses, almost half of the city's population of about 55,000 was deported to the interior of the USSR between 14 and 22 June 1941.

A second wave of deportations was carried out beginning with the Soviet reoccupation of Bessarabia of August 1944. It was executed in short and brutal installments over a period of several years by the NKVD and its successor agency, the MVD. The 1949 deportations from the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic (MSSR) were carried out under the code name "Iug" (Operation South), which enforced the confidential Executive Decision No. 390-138 issued by the Soviet Union's Council of Ministers on 29 January 1949. Moscow's decision was aimed, among other things, at expediting the forced collectivization of Moldova's agriculture by getting rid of all members of the rural population suspected of resistance to the suppression of private property (see RESISTANCE MOVEMENTS). On 17 February 1949, an action memo signed by Soviet General I. L. Mordovetz, who headed the Chişinău Ministry of Security, indicated that 40,854 persons, most them kulaks, or small landowners, had been earmarked for deportation from the MSSR. Enforcing the secret Decree No. 509 of 28 June 1949 issued by the Soviet authorities in Chişinău, on the night of 5-6 July 1949, 35,796 persons—9,864 men, 14,033 women and 11,889 children—were deported under military escort to several faraway regions of the USSR. On the night of 5 July that same year, some 25,000 Moldovans were deported from Bolgrad, Ismail, and Akkerman and sent to Siberia or Kazakhstan.

The immediate effects of these deportations in terms of eradicating resistance to surrendering private property to the Soviet state can be gauged by the fact that in only two months—July and August 1949—the number of Moldovan properties turned into Soviet kolkhozes more than doubled, growing from 32.2 percent at the end of June 1949 to 72.3 percent at the end of August 1949. By deportations as well as other means, the dramatic process leading to the eradication of private property in Moldova's countryside was completed by the end of 1950, when 97 percent of the Soviet republic's private farmlands had been wiped out and merged into state-controlled collective farms.

The last stroke of that second wave of deportations enforced secret Decree No. 00193 of the Soviet Union's State Security Ministry, issued in Moscow on 5 March 1951. It was carried out between 4:00 A.M. and 8:00 P.M. on 1 April 1951, when, under the code name "Sever" (Operation North), 2,617 persons—808 men, 967 women, and 842 children—making up 723 families of Jehovah’s Witnesses—were deported under military escort to Siberia.

Under the less brutal policies of "planned transfer of labor," a third wave of deportations began in 1955, with emphasis on the transfer of thousands of Moldova peasants to the trans-Ural regions of the USSR's Russian Federation, where they were lured to move by offers of lesser taxation and other forms of material assistance. Moldovan settlements bearing such names as Teiul, Zâmbreni, Bălcineşti, Logăneşti, Basarabia Nouă, are to be found, for instance, north of Vladivostok in the Ussury valley. Other Moldovan settlements can be found in the region of Tomsk, in the vicinity of Irkutsk, and in the Arkhangelsk region.

Definitive figures are hard to assess, but the number of Moldovan deportees throughout the years of Soviet rule is considered to be around half a million. According to the 1958 edition of the British Encyclopedia (volume 15, p. 662), it was estimated that by mid-1955, the Soviet authorities had deported about 500,000 people from the MSSR. A corroborating indication is the fact that in 1979, according to Soviet statistics, there were 415,371 Moldovans living in Ukraine, over 100,000 in various parts of the USSR's Russian Federation, including Siberia and the Russia's Far East, over 33,000 in Soviet Central Asia and other distant places of the USSR.

*Historical Dictionary of Moldova, 2nd edition, Scarecrow Press, USA, 2007

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