Moldovan PM says first Stalinist deportations from Bessarabia painful history that citizens must know

Prime Minister Alexandru Munteanu has invited citizens to visit the exhibition titled, State Terror in Soviet Moldova: Scope, Victims and Perpetrators, which will be inaugurated on the Great National Assembly Square on June 12. The event will  mark 85 years since the first Stalinist deportations from Bessarabia.

On the night of June 12–13, 1941, thousands of people were taken from their homes and deported to Siberia and Kazakhstan in cattle cars, as part of one of the most tragic repressive operations of the totalitarian Soviet regime.

“For many citizens of Moldova, the deportations are part of their family stories. Thus, we remember tens of thousands of people who were taken from their own homes and separated from their families. In my own family, my grandfather was deported and I never even got to know him, because he returned from the Murmansk region sick and died very young. This is the history of our family,” said Alexandru Munteanu.

The exhibition, State Terror in Soviet Moldova: Scope, Victims and Perpetrators, reconstructs, through documents, photographs, period artifacts and testimonies, the suffering of deported families and the memory of those who went through Stalinist repressions.

“I urge all my colleagues from the government and all citizens to visit the exhibition, because this is our history, a painful history that we must know. Memory means understanding how precious freedom, dignity, rights and the protection of democracy are,” emphasized Alexandru Munteanu.

The exhibition will be open as of June 12 till July 6, between 09:00 and 21:00. The schedule also includes more special events. On June 21, topic-related films from the reserves of the National Archives about Soviet repressions will be screened, and on June 28, a theater performance will be staged. On July 6, a special event dedicated to the deportations of the night of July 6–7, 1949, will be held. A novelty of this year’s edition is the organization of a similar exhibition in Balti.

Visitors will be able to see railcars similar to those in which people were transported, as well as documentary materials reflecting the scale of the tragedy and its impact on society. The exhibition is an exercise in collective memory and a tribute to all those who were deported, persecuted, dispossessed of their property and torn from their families.

It is organized by the Culture Ministry and the National Archives Agency, with the support of the Association of Former Deportees and Political Prisoners, the Railway of Moldova, the State Chancellery, the Blue Frame project, regional museums and other state institutions.

The mass deportation operation in the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic (MSSR) on the night of June 12–13, 1941, included 18,392 people and was part of a broader action to “cleanse” the new territories occupied by the USSR in 1939–1940, following the Ribbentrop–Molotov Pact. The mass deportation of July 6–9, 1949, was the largest on the current territory of Moldova. The operation affected more than 11,000 families; the contingent of those forcibly transported in cattle cars numbered 35,796 people, including 11,889 children, 14,033 women and 9,864 men.