PHOTO // Speaker: Deportations part of chain of crimes committed by Stalinist regime against our people and other peoples

The top leadership of the Republic of Moldova, together with dozens of citizens, commemorated today the victims of the second wave of Stalinist deportations from Bessarabia. In this context, Speaker Igor Grosu condemned the crimes of the Stalinist regime.




“Today we mark the Day of the Victims of the Stalinist Deportations of 1949, the largest operation of this kind on the territory of our country – over 35,000 people, of whom 12,000 were children, were deported. These people were torn, perhaps forever, from their homes and their land, only to ultimately die in the wagons of terror or be condemned to years of inhuman labor,” Igor Grosu declared.


The Speaker stressed that the deportations were part of a chain of crimes committed by the Stalinist regime against the population, including famine, poverty, denationalization, religious persecution, political purges, and the suppression of fundamental freedoms.


“We have a sacred duty – not to forget, not to repeat!” Igor Grosu further stated.










The Republic of Moldova is commemorating today 77 years since the second deportation operation.

The commemorative program began at 07:45 at the Monument in Memory of the Victims of the Communist Regime Deportations on the Railway Station Alley in Chișinău. Also today, within the Film and History Festival in Mereni, two events will be organized at the “Ion Creangă” State Pedagogical University. At 13:15, the debate “Unity through Memory: the Integration of the Republic of Moldova into the EU” will take place, and at 15:45 the film “The New Year That Never Was” will be screened.

In the evening, starting at 20:00, in the Great National Assembly Square, in front of the exhibition “State Terror in Soviet Moldova: Scale, Victims and Perpetrators,” a requiem concert will be held by Select Quartet, dedicated to the victims of the totalitarian communist regime.

According to the organizers, the events aim to bring back to the public’s attention the repressions committed by the communist regime on the territory of today’s Republic of Moldova between 1917 and 1989, including the mass deportations organized by the Soviet authorities.

The commemorative program evokes both the deportation during the night of 12 to 13 June 1941, when over 18,000 people were deported as part of the “cleansing” operations of the territories occupied by the Soviet Union following the Ribbentrop–Molotov Pact, and the deportations of 6–9 July 1949, considered the largest operation of this kind carried out on the current territory of the Republic of Moldova.

As a result of the July 1949 deportations, over 11,000 families – a total of 35,796 people – were rounded up and forcibly deported to remote regions of the Soviet Union. Among them were 11,889 children, 14,033 women and 9,864 men.

At the same time, this year marks 80 years since the onset of the organized famine of 1946–1947, one of the most dramatic consequences of the Soviet repressive policies. The commemoration aims to keep alive the memory of the victims and to contribute to strengthening the culture of historical memory.