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On November 24, 1924, Joseph Stalin noted: "The idea to solve the question of Bessarabia by armed force, simultaneously ceasing any activity against Poland, I think is the best method to produce results in the politics of "gathering Russia" [...] If Bessarabia would be propagandistically prepared for union with Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic and if the necessary effort would be applied, the occupation of this province by the Red Army can be achieved with rapidity."

In international legal terms, the Soviet invasion of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina represented an act of agression.

The premeditated Soviet invasion and occupation unfolded in a complex fashion, in distinct but complementary dimensions: military, ideological, ethno-political, and ethno-cultiural.

Refugees
The number of refugees on June 28th- July 2nd, 1940 is estimated at 200,000 people. In the following months, new Soviet authorities proposed that further people who want to seek refuge in the rump Romania could enter their names on special lists; in spite of fear of Soviet persecution, some 40,000 elected to do so. Some people were arrested by the Soviets as "political". Approximately half were allowed to leave Bessarabia and Bukovina. The rest were rejected. Their names were later used as preferable targets of deportations.

Before the Soviet administration returned in 1944, the fear of more repressions or deportations drove several hundred thousand people to seek refuge in the remaining territory of Romania; this was paramount in the cities, among teachers, engineers, doctors, lawyers, and intellectuals in general; the major cities in Bessarabia and northern Bukovina were left with only a small part of their pre-1940 population.

Soviet repressions

 * Massacres of civilians perpetrated by the NKVD, such as the Fântâna Albă massacre and Tatarka common graves.
 * Massacres of political prisoners, such as the killing June-July 1941 by the NKVD of between 1,000 and 2,000 political detainees, or numerous summary executions in June-July 1940.[Dima, Rummel] (See also: NKVD prisoner massacres.)
 * 8,360 known political sentences to death or deaths during interrogation during the lifetime of Joseph Stalin.
 * 32,433 known political sentences to long terms (generally, not less than 10 years) in the Gulag during Stalin's era. The harsh weather and working conditions, malnutrition and personal abuse resulted in the death of many prisoners. The arrival in a Gulag camp of a train with 5,000 Bessarabians is described in Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago.
 * Disappearances of prominent people and community leaders, including priests and rabbis.
 * Deportation to forced settlements and labor in Siberia and northern Kazakhstan of families identified as "politically unreliable" or "alien social class" (intelligentsia, above-average farmers, former functionaries, former rail workers, former students) involved some 200,000 people.
 * During the Soviet occupation of rump Romania (after 1944), many Bessarabian and Bukovinan refugees were "discovered" and forcibly repatriated to the Soviet Union (to Gulag camps or to forced settlements in the Siberia).
 * 216,500 died and 375,000 seek of dystrophy during the 1946-1947 Moldavian famine.
 * Romanian POW that were originally from Bessarabia and northern Bukovina.

Other measures included:
 * Labor camp recruitments of young people for grand industrial and infrastructure projects. In 1940 alone there were 56,365 labor recruitments in Bessarabia and Nrothern Bukovina.
 * Mass conscription into the Soviet Army in August 1944, when they took over the territory. Some sources poetically compare the recruits with "cannon fodder". One third of the approximately 300,000 conscripts died until the end of the war in May 1945, another third suffered wounds.
 * Romanian ethnics evicted from cities, many disappeared into the USSR.
 * Confiscation of goods and property affected especially the Romanian intelligentsia, the Jewish shop holders, the arrested and the deportees of all ethnic groups, as well as the Church.
 * General collectivization of farmland (1949-1951).

Political prisoners and massacres of civilians
In the summer and autumn of 1940, tens of thousands of people, chosen on both cultural and ethnic criteria, were deported as the repressive apparatus was gaining strength. Many people were arrested, tortured, deported; some of them were former supporters of Marxist ideology.

In total, in the first year of Soviet occupation (1940-1941), at least 86,604 people in Bessatrabia, Northern Bukovina, and Hertsa Region were arrested and deported. This figure correlates with that of approximately 90,000 people apprehended, arrested and deported in the first year of Soviet occupation, calculated by Russian historians analyzing documents in archives in Moscow The arrests continued even after the start of Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941. Well above half of deportations were from the Moldavian SSR, the rest from the Chernivtsi Oblast and Izmail Oblast of Ukrainian SSR.

Up to one thousand corpses were discovered after the retreat of the Soviets in 1941 in the cellars, courtyards and wells of the NKVD headquarters in the county centers, including 450 corpses in Chişinau, mostly of priests, university and high school students, and railroad workers.

In April-August 1943, in Tatarka, near Odessa, a mass common grave was discovered on a lot of 1,000 sq. meters. 42 separate common graves of several dozen bodies each were identified, containing ca. 3,500 bodies, of which 516 were exhumed, studied, and buried in cemetery before the region became a front line. Among the victims were persons arrested in the Moldavian ASSR in 1938-1940, and in Bessarabia and northern Bukovina in 1940-1941.

Serious incidents occurred in Northern Bukovina, where many locals tried in 1940-1941 to cross the border into Romania by any price. Families and relatives of people that were discovered by NKVD to have crossed into Romania were often arrested, and in several villages concentration camps of these were organized. (See also Fântâna Albă massacre.)

Deportations
According to a document signed by Ivan Serov, Deputy Minister of Interior of the USSR, on July 1, 1953, 46,616 deportees from Moldavian SSR were reported in localities with special regime (spetsposeleniya) in Russian SFSR and Kazakhstan, of which 10,387 were deported in 1941 (including 1,780 children), and 36,147 - in 1949 (including 10,447 children). In the meantime (1940/41-1953), many of the deported have died of harsh transportation, detention and climate conditions, disease, and malnutrition; thus at least 80% of the 1940-1941 deportees from the Moldavian SSR have died or otherwise excluded from the special regime category before 1 July 1953.

Deportations of locals on grounds of belonging to the intelligentsia or kulak classes, or of having anti-Soviet nationalist ideas occurred almost daily throughout 1940-41 and 1944-1950, and with less frequency in 1950-1956. These deportations touched all local ethnic groups: Romanians, Ukrainians, Russians, Jews, Bulgarians, Gagauzes. Significant deportations happened on three separate occasions: according to Alexandru Usatiuc-Bulgăr, 29,839 people were deported to Siberia on 13 June 1941, 35,796 on 6 July 1949 (operation South) and 2,617 on 1 April 1951 (during the Operation North).

These people were taken during the night; sometimes whole families with children were uprooted. They had to be ready within one hour, and were transported to Siberia or Eastern Kazakhstan, in overcrowded railway cars for cattle, for four to six weeks, with no sanitation and very little food. Finally, after journeys by foot that would last for weeks, they were taken to different destination points, often deep in Taiga forests, where they were forced to work in extreme cold and suffer humiliation, to the extent that half of them died in Siberia or on the way there.

After Stalin's death in 1953, the deportees were allowed to return to Moldova, and around half chose to do so. But they found that their houses and property had been confiscated, they could obtain no registration or documents, could be hired only with difficulty, were not eligible for pensions, health care, or social services. According to some estimates, at the dissolution of the USSR, 180,000 of the descendants of the surviving deportees still lived in the Russian Federation, and 20,000 in Kazakhstan.

Smaller size deportations often targeted the inhabitants of the cities, as well as the areas covered by anti-Soviet movements during 1945-1950, i.e. Bukovina, Herţa region, as well as Orhei, Bălţi and Soroca counties.

Romanian POW

 * See also: Soviet war crimes.

In 1941-1944, many young male inhabitants of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina were recruited into the Romanian Army. From February to August 1944, hostilities took place properly in the region, as the Romanians attempted to hold the territory from being overrun by the Soviet Union. After the Jassy-Kishinev Operation on August 20-24, 1944, the Soviets took over the entire territory, while somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 were taken prisoners of war, a significant number of them locals.

In total, during World War II, Romanian Army has lost 475,070 people on the Eastern Front, of which 245,388 were KIA, disappeared, or died in hospitals or non-battle circumstances, and 229,682 (according to Soviet archival documents) were taken POW by the Red Army, of which 187,367 were counted as Romanian POWs in NKVD camps, kept until 1956 (on April 22, 1956, 54,612 were counted as died in captivity, and 132,755 as freshly released), 27,800 were counted as Romanians released by the Front-levels of the Soviet Army, and 14,515 as Moldovans released by the Front-levels of the Soviet Army.

In the wake of the Jassy-Kishinev Operation several prisoner camps were created, including in Chişinău and Bălţi. In the latter city, the NKVD organized a smaller regular camp, and a larger concentration camp, which contained some 45,000 prisoners, including 35 to 40 thousand soldiers of the Romanian Army (many of which were originally from Bessarabia and Bukovina) and Romanian civilians, 5,000 German POWs, and 5,000 Hungarian, Italian, and Czech POWs fighting for the Axis. The harsh food and hygene conditions in the camp meant the survival of only the fittest prisoners in the winter of 1944-1945, to be sent to NKVD POW camps in the interior of USSR. The common graves of many thousands of perished in the Bălţi prisoner camp were uncovered after the fall of the Soviet system, until which time the Soviets kept the area of the former camp outside landscape development.

Local economy, requisitions, and collectivisation
During 1940–1941, political persecution of locals in the form of arrests, torture, executions and deportations to Siberia took place, resulting in 57,000 dead, and over 100,000 displaced of all ethnic backgrounds. Only in Northern Bukovina, the Soviets targeted the Romanian element. The economic life was destroyed by forbidding private initiative. Industrial enterprises were expropriated. By instating high quotas of agricultural products that each landowner had to deliver without payment to the state if the land is cultivated, and by frequent requisitions, the Soviets forced many peasants to give up their land and/or to refrain from cultivating parts of it. As a result, the agricultural production became extremely low. An artificial exchange rate of 40 Romanian lei for 1 Soviet ruble was established, which resulted in Soviet soldiers and officials buying out everything from the shops (generally owned by the local Jewish Community) at very low prices within the first two months. As no other goods were being brought in the country, the shops emptied and closed, resulting in a disastrous situation for the service sector of the economy.

Famine
During 1946-1947, 216,000 people died on hunger on the territory of the Moldavian SSR, provoked by the quasi-total food requisitions by the Soviets from the farmers' households "for the needs of the state", by poor harvest, and by absence of a large number of local males, conscripted into the Soviet Army. Several other thousand people have starved in Southern Bessarabia.

Forced labor

 * See also Involuntary settlements in the Soviet Union.

Thousands were mobilized into work camps (but at least they were formally, although very little, paid), and sent far away through the Soviet Union. In 1940 alone there were 56,365 such.

It took no less than 25 years for a new local intelligentsia to emerge, mainly from among the farmers' class, which by itself was a remarkable phenomenon of national regeneration.

Social and cultural consequences
Bessarabia was subject to a complex transformation process. Since the first days of the invasion, the Soviets have imposed a Stalinist political regime. It implied the imposition of the Russian language, rules and customs by means of far more brutal methods than those used in the past by the Tsarist authorities. The Romanian culture and traditions was subject to considerable pressure on the part of the Soviets. The use of the Latin Alphabet was forbidden, while the use of the Cyrillic alphabet became compulsive, so that speakers of Romanian gradually became speakers of "Moldovan". Harsh censorship measures were taken in regard to cultural and educational institutions. The teaching stuff was informed that education must follow the Communist ideology.

Churches were transformed in auditoria, stables, storehouses or dormitories for Soviet troops. Officiating service was forbidden, not only for Romanians but also for the other ethnic groups - Lipovans, Gagauz, or Russians.

The deportations have had most of the times also a role of "ethnic cleansing" of some territories under Soviet rule in which Russian speakers were far from a majority. This was the case of Bessarabia, from where tens of thousands of Romanians (and first of all intellectuals) were expulsed to Siberia, Kazakhstan and the Russian Far East. Moreover, as in any colonial "receipt", the autochthonous Romanians were marginalized; all post of social importance were with rare exceptions entrusted to local Russians and Ukrainians, or to people brought into this territory.

The real (as opposed to theoretical) Communism has exercised upon its subjects a more drastic and constraining pressure than what post-colonial studies today call "acoloniality of the power". The colonial feature of the Soviet power was exercised not only in the economy, political and national domains, but especially upon the consciousness of every individual, gravely limiting his rights of opinion and expression. The most serious effect and the most durable was the colonization of the mind through forced indoctrination and through terror: people where arrested and locked up often for what they said or wrote in intimacy; the ideological colonization was constantly supported by a well organized power apparatus. This forced and generalized indoctrination can be regarded as a secular replica to the anachronistic Evangelisation of the indigenous in Africa by Western colonialists. Communist sympathizers considered this discrimination as a form of class warfare.

Demographics
Although, not targeting Romanians as an ethnic group, but rather the pre-Soviet civil society as a political class, the Soviet occupation inaugurated also an anti-Romanian Soviet politicide and ethnic cleansing of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina. Between 1940 and 1941, 300,000 Romanians were persecuted, conscripted into forced labor camps, or deported with the entire family, of whom 57,000 were killed (not counting those died in the Gulag). These policies also continued from 1944 until 1956, after which they were reduced to isolated cases.

According to some sources, in total throughout the duration of the USSR, around 2,344,000 people originally from Bessarabia, Northern Bukovina, and the former Moldavian ASSR were victims of arrests, political persecution, deportation, forced labour, of whom 703,000 perished. The latter number includes the 298,500 victims of the 1946-47 famine, and an estimation of 100,000 of perished POWs which were locals. The remainder are victims of executions, massacres, arrested perished in Gulag, and deportees died.

These policies mostly targeted the elites of Bessarabians and Bukovinains which did not leave for Romania in 1940 and 1944-1945, including former teachers, doctors, clergymen, lawyers, policemen and soldiers, larger landowners (nobility and richer peasants, called by the Soviets kulaks), members of political parties (including former members of the clandestine Communist Party of Romania), as well as those who expressed any kind of dissent, which altogether constituted a significant part of the population and included the majority of the educated population, the bearers of Romanian culture. However, they were by no means restricted to ethnic Romanians, as many thousand ethnic Ukrainians, Russians, Jews who inhabited the region before 1940 were also deported en masse together with local Romanians on social and political grounds. Only in northern Bukovina, the persecutions resulted in a disproportionate number of ethnic Romanian victims. However, this could be also explained by the social nature of villages in the region, which rejected Soviet social tactics, and by local Ukrainians keeping a low profile to avoid themselves persectution. (Local Ukainians who expressed any anti-Soviet ideas were persecutted without any mercy.)

During the Soviet takeover in 1940, Bessarabian Germans (82,000) and Bukovinain Germans (40,000-45,000) were repatriated to Germany at the request of Hitler's government. Some of them were forcibly settled by the Nazis in the German-occupied Poland (they preferred proper German regions), and had to move again in 1944-1945. The people affected by the resettlement were not persecuted, but they were given no choice to stay or live, and had to change their entire livelihood within weeks or even days.

The biggest blow during World War II was suffered by the local Jewish community. (See also Bessarabian Jews.)

Immigration
As the Soviet persecutions, as well as the grave reduction of the German, Jewish and Polish communities affected the local intelligentsia most of all, basically eradicating it, Soviet authorities sought to fill the intellectual gap formed in the region in 1940s, and also to build a Soviet and party apparatus. Immediately after the war, Stalin carried out a major colonization and de facto Russification campaign in what was now Soviet Moldova, Chernivtsi oblast, and Budjak under the flag of Sovietization and building a communist society in which there would be plenty and no money. Many Russians and Ukrainians, along with a smaller number of other ethnic groups, who migrated from the rest of the USSR to Moldova, arrived to rebuild the heavily war-damaged economy. They were mostly factory and construction workers who settled in major urban areas, as well as military personnel stationed in the region. During the Soviet rule, up to one million people settled in Moldova. From a socio-economic point of view, this group was quite diverse: in addition to industrial and construction workers, as well as retired officers and soldiers of the Soviet army, it also included engineers, technicians, a handful of scientists, but mostly unqualified workers, or people without strong family or native land ties, many of which with little or no education at all. A few were outright criminals.

Access of local Romanians to positions in administration and economy was limited. The first local to became minister in the Moldavian SSR was only in 1960s as minister of health. The same restriction generally applied to representatives of local minority groups that were in the region before 1940, as they were considered also not trustworthy. The antagonism between the Romanians/Moldovans, and often also the pre-1940 Russian and Ukrainian minorities on one side, and the "newcomers" (cf. "venetici" in Romanian) persisted till the end of communism and was clear during the anti-Soviet and anti-Communist events in 1988-1992. (It was also an important reason for the brief 1992 War of Transnistria that took the lives of several hundred people, after Moldova became independent.) The immigration affected mostly the cities of Bessarabia, Northern Bukovina, as well as the countryside of Budjak where the Bessarabian Germans previously were, but also the cities of Trasnistria. All of these saw the proportion of ethnic Moldavians (Romanians) drop throughout the Soviet rule.

Despite this huge immigration, the 1959 census showed a significant drop in population from 1940, showing how badly the local population was affected by the events of 1940-1956.

Education and language
Until 1952, the education for the locals was done in a very broken language (extremely low vocabulary and many borrowing from Russian and from the Soviet bureaucratic speech) that was spoken by a handful of ethnically Moldavian communist activists from the former Moldavian ASSR, and using the Cyrillic script. At that point, realizing that to create a whole literature for a speech shared by only a few hundred individuals and impose it on 3 millions was impossible, the Soviet authorities decided to drop it "because the local peasants can not understand it", and return to the normal language. Hence, Mihai Eminescu and Ion Creangă were again allowed, and the standard written language became the same as Romanian, except that it was written with Cyrillic script.

The Soviet authorities policy of describing 1918-1940 period as a yoke of feodal boyars and rich bourgeois speaking in half-French assigned to the word Romanian a negative connotation. Locals' ethnicity was written as Moldavians in documents, and the language was renamed Moldavian language. In the Bukovinain part of the Chernivtsi oblast, locals did not have the habit of calling themselves both Moldavians and Romanians before 1918, as they did in Bessarabia, and hence the Soviet authorities allowed them to keep their ethnic group as Romanians in the documents. This also became handy, as split into Moldavians and Ukrainians, the share of the ethnic group in the population of the oblast was statistically less observable. Children of deportees that were prevented to return to Moldova from Siberia and Kazakhstan were allowed to be schooled only in Russian.

In Moldavian SSR, Soviet authorities opened many more Russian schools than Romanian ones in the cities, calling for locals to send their children to Russian-language schools, explaining them that without knowing Russian they would not be able to get normal jobs. Russian schools were also less crowded with respect to the number of students in a class. The authorities encouraged in addition the creation of mixed schools, generally having three Romanian-language for every Russian-language class, thus all administration being in Russian.

A new local intelligentsia, to replace the virtually exterminated one, started to form in late 1960s and early 1970s. However, being composed generally of descendants from farmers, it did not have the benefit of direct ties to the pre-war intelligentsia. The contacts with classical Romanian literature were greatly limited, as a big number of authors and books were forbidden, including all authors born in Romanian localities outside the medieval Principality of Moldavia, as well as all works touching on their connected to politics of even authors such as Mihai Eminescu, Mihail Kogălniceanu, Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu, Constantin Stere (the former two are classic and well-known, the latter two are in addition born in Bessarabia). However, these contacts were not severed, since after 1956 people were slowly allowed to visit or get visits from relatives in Romania, since Romanian press could be freely bought in Moscow (not in Moldova), and since a poor quality Romanian TV and radio could be heard with a makeshift antenna, and even by ordinary transistor-based radios. The programs of the latter, however, were created by the Communist authorities of Romania, which never dared to cross the Soviet authorities, especially in the question of education and press for ethnic Romanians in USSR, which was a political taboo, especially because the Romanian communists did not totally sided with Soviets against the Chinese after 1959, sometimes even trying to play the brokers.

The Soviet-Romanian border along the Prut river, separating Bessarbia from Romania, was closed for the general public all throughout the Soviet era. In general, visits abroad by Soviet citizens were very rare (comparing to the citizens of Communist Eastern European countries).