Soviet genocide actions. Moldova June deportations. 29,839 Moldova Romanians deported
In 1940, after the Romanian government capitulated to a Soviet ultimatum and retreated from Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, these regions were occupied by the Soviet Union, most of the former being organized as the Moldavian SSR, while the other areas were attributed to the Ukrainian SSR.
On June 12–13, 1941, 29,839 members of families of "counter-revolutionaries and nationalists" from the Moldavian SSR, and from the Chernivtsi (of Northern Bukovina) and Izmail oblasts of the Ukrainian SSR were deported to Kazakhstan, the Komi ASSR, the Krasnoyarsk Krai, and the Omsk and Novosibirsk oblasts.
For the fate of such a deportee from Bessarabia, see the example of Eufrosinia Kersnovskaya. The Georgian NKVD official Sergo Goglidze, trusted henchman of Lavrenty Beria, was in charge of this deportation from Bessarabia.
***
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. 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.
Related events
Map
Persons
Name | ||
---|---|---|
1 | Сергей Гоглидзе | |
2 | Lavrentiy Beriya | |
3 | Vyacheslav Molotov | |
4 | Joseph Stalin |