After the failure of theTatarbunary Uprising, the Soviets promoted the newly createdMoldavian Autonomous Oblast existing within theUkrainian SSR on part of the territory between theDniester andBug rivers, to aMoldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (Moldavian ASSR), on 12 October 1924, as a way to primarily prop up the Soviet propaganda effort in Bessarabia, but also to exert pressure on Bucharest in the negotiations on Bessarabia, and even to help a possible Communist revolution in Romania.[3]
On 24 August 1939, the Soviet Union andNazi Germany signed a 10-year non-aggression treaty, officially known as theMolotov–Ribbentrop Pact. However, the pact contained a secret protocol, revealed only after Germany's defeat in 1945, according to which the states ofNorthern andEastern Europe were divided into German and Sovietspheres of influence. The secret protocol placed the province of Bessarabia, back then controlled by Romania, in the Soviet "sphere of influence."[4] Thereafter, both the Soviet Union and Germany invaded their respective portions of Poland,[5] while the Soviet Union occupied andannexed Lithuania,Estonia, andLatvia in June 1940, alongsidewaging war upon Finland.[6]
On 26 June 1940, four days after the end of theBattle of France, the Soviet Unionissued an ultimatum to theKingdom of Romania, demanding that the latter cede its territories ofBessarabia andBukovina.[7] After the Soviets agreed with Germany that they would limit their claims in Bukovina, which was outside theMolotov–Ribbentrop Pact's secret protocols, to Northern Bukovina, Germany urged Romania to accept the ultimatum, which Romania did two days later.[8] On 28 June, Soviet troops entered the area, and on 9 July, the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic was formed and applied to theSupreme Soviet for formal incorporation into the Soviet Union.[9]
On 2 August 1940, the Supreme Soviet unanimously approved the dissolution of the old Moldavian ASSR, while it organized the Moldavian SSR. The new SSR included six full counties and small parts of three otherMoldavian counties ofBessarabia (approximately 65 percent of its entire territory), together with the six westernmostraions of the Moldavian ASSR (approximately 40 percent of its entire territory).[10][11] Considering that, ninety percent of the territory of the MSSR was situated west of the riverDniester, which had been the border between the USSR and Romania before 1940, and ten percent east. Northern and southern parts of the territories occupied by the Soviet Union in June 1940 (the currentChernivtsi Oblast andBudjak), which were more heterogeneous ethnically, were transferred to the Ukrainian SSR, despite their population also including 337,000 Moldovans.[10] Consequently, the strategically important Black Sea coast and Danube frontage were handed to the Ukrainian SSR, considered more reliable than the Moldavian SSR, which could have been claimed by Romania.[12] In the summer of 1941, Romania joined Hitler's Axis in theinvasion of the Soviet Union, recovering Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, and also occupying the territory to the east of the Dniester, dubbed "Transnistria."Pro-Soviet partisans remained active in both regions. By the end ofWorld War II, the Soviet Union had reconquered all of the lost territories, reestablishing Soviet authority there.
During the Soviet occupation, the USSR's authorities systematically targeted and harshly persecuted several socio-economic groups due to their economic situation, political views, or ties to the former regime of the Kingdom of Romania. They were deported to or resettled inSiberia and theKazakh SSR; some were imprisoned or executed. According to a report by thePresidential Commission for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania, no less than 86,604 people were arrested and deported in 1940 and 1941 alone, comparable to the estimated number of 90,000 repressed put forward by Russian historians.
Immediately after the Soviet reoccupation, in 1944, a so-called "repatriation" of the Bessarabians who fled to Romania before the advancing Red Army was organized by the Soviet security forces; many were shot or deported, blamed as collaborators of Romania and Nazi Germany.[14]
Furthermore, adekulakization campaign was directed towards the rich Moldavian peasant families, whose members were rounded up and systematically deported to distant regions of the Soviet Union, such as Kazakhstan and Siberia. For instance, in just two days, from 6 to 7 July 1949, over 11,342 Moldavian families were deported by the order of the Minister of State Security, Iosif Mordovets under a plan named "Operation South."[14]
The number of the ethnicBessarabia Germans also decreased from over 81,000 in 1930 to under 4,000 in 1959 due to voluntary wartime migration (90,000 were transferred in 1940 toGerman-occupied Poland)[17] and forced removal as collaborators after the war.[14]
Collectivisation was implemented between 1949 and 1950, although earlier attempts were made since 1946. During this time, a large-scalefamine occurred: some sources give a minimum of 115,000 peasants who died of famine and related diseases between December 1946 and August 1947. According toCharles King, there is no evidence that it was provoked by Sovietrequisitioning of large amounts of agricultural products and directed towards the largest ethnic group living in the countryside, the Moldavians. Contributing factors were the recent war and the drought of 1946.[14]
With the regime ofNikita Khrushchev replacing that ofJoseph Stalin, the survivors ofGulag camps and of the deportees were gradually allowed to return to the Moldavian SSR. The political thaw ended the unchecked power of theNKVD–MGB, and thecommand economy gave rise to development in the areas such as education, technology and science, health care, and industry.
Between 1969 and 1971, a clandestineNational Patriotic Front was established by several young intellectuals in Chișinău by Mihail Munteanu, vowing to fight for the secession of Moldavia from the Soviet Union and union with Romania.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Moldavia received substantial investment from the budget of the USSR to develop industrial, scientific facilities, as well as housing. In 1971, theSoviet Council of Ministers adopted a decision "About the measures for further development ofKishinev city" that secured more than one billionroubles of investment from the USSR budget.
Subsequent decisions directed enormous wealth and brought highly qualified specialists from all over the USSR to develop the Soviet republic. Such an allocation of USSR assets was partially influenced by the fact thatLeonid Brezhnev, the effective ruler of the USSR from 1964 to 1982, was the First Secretary of theCommunist Party of Moldavia from 1950 to 1952. These allocations stopped in 1991 with theBelavezha Accords, when the nation became independent.
Victory Day celebrations in the Moldavian SSR in 1980
Although Brezhnev and other CPM first secretaries were largely successful in suppressingMoldavian nationalism,Mikhail Gorbachev's administration facilitated the revival of the movement in the region. His policies ofglasnost andperestroika created conditions in which national feelings could be openly expressed and in which the Soviet republics could consider reforms independently from the central government.
The Moldavian SSR's drive towards independence from the USSR was marked by civil strife as conservative activists in the east —especially in Tiraspol—as well as communist party activists in Chișinău worked to keep the Moldavian SSR within the Soviet Union. The main success of the national movement from 1988 to 1989 was the official adoption of theMoldovan language on 31 August 1989, by theSupreme Soviet of Moldova, the declaration in the preamble of thedeclaration of independence of a Moldavian–Romanian linguistic unity, and the return of the language to the pre-SovietLatin alphabet. In 1990, when it became clear that Moldavia was eventually going to secede, a group of nationalist pro-Soviet activists inGagauzia andTransnistria proclaimed themselves as separate from the Moldavian SSR in order to remain within the USSR. TheGagauz Republic was eventually peacefully incorporated into Moldavia as theAutonomous Territorial Unit of Gagauzia, but relations with Transnistria soured. Its sovereignty was declared on 23 June 1990 on its territory.
In the1947 Paris Peace Treaty, the Soviet Union and Romania reaffirmed each other's borders, recognizing Bessarabia, Northern Bukovina and the Herza region as territory of the respective Soviet republics.[19] Throughout theCold War, the issue of Bessarabia remained largely dormant in Romania. In the 1950s, research on history and of Bessarabia was a banned subject in Romania, as theRomanian Communist Party tried to emphasise the links between the Romanians and Russians, the annexation being considered just a proof of Soviet Union'sinternationalism.[20] Starting in the 1960s,Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej andNicolae Ceaușescu began a policy of distancing from the Soviet Union, but the debate over Bessarabia was discussed only in scholarship fields such as historiography and linguistics, not at a political level.[21]
As Soviet–Romanian relations reached an all-time low in the mid-1960s, Soviet scholars published historical papers on the "Struggle of Unification of Bessarabia with the Soviet Motherland" (Artiom Lazarev) and the "Development of the Moldovan Language" (Nicolae Corlăteanu). On the other side, theRomanian Academy published some notes byKarl Marx which talk about the "injustice" of the 1812 annexation of Bessarabia and Nicolae Ceaușescu in a 1965 speech quoted a letter byFriedrich Engels in which he criticized the Russian annexation, while in another 1966 speech, he denounced the pre-World War II calls of theRomanian Communist Party for the Soviet annexation of Bessarabia and Bukovina.[22]
The issue was brought to light whenever the relationships with the Soviets were waning, but never became a serious subject of high-level negotiations in itself. On 22 June 1976,Ștefan Andrei, a member on the Permanent Bureau of the Political Executive Committee of Romania and a future Minister of Foreign Affairs, underscored that the republic harbored no territorial claims and recognized "the Moldavian Socialist Republic as an integral part of the USSR," yet that it "cannot accept the idea that Moldavians are not Romanians."[23]
On 1 August 1976,Nicolae Ceaușescu,Elena Ceaușescu,Nicu Ceaușescu,Ștefan Andrei, and Ambassador Gheorghe Badrus were the first high-level Romanian visitors to Moldova since World War II. On 1 August, they came fromIași, and the First Secretary of the Communist Party of MoldaviaIvan Bodiul, Kiril Iliashenko, and N. Merenișcev escorted them from the border until they left for Crimea at theChișinău International Airport on 2 August. The move was widely interpreted as a sign of improved relations.[24] During a meeting, Brezhnev insisted that Ceaușescu himself had the opportunity to see that the Moldavians existed as a separate people with a separate language during his 1976 visit. "Yes," Ceaușescu replied, "I did, but they spoke with me in Romanian."[25]
In December 1976, Bodiul and his wife Claudia arrived for a return visit of five days at Ceaușescu's invitation. Bodiul's visit was a "first" in the history of postwar bilateral relations. At one of his meetings in Bucharest, Bodiul said that "the good relationship was initiated by Ceaușescu's visit to Soviet Moldavia, which led to the expansion of contacts and exchanges in all fields. A visit was paid from 14 to 16 June 1979, to the Moldavian SSR by aRomanian Communist Party delegation headed byIon Iliescu, Political Executive Committee alternate member andIași County Party Committee First Secretary.
As late as November 1989, as Russian support decreased, Ceaușescu brought up theBessarabian question once again and denounced the Soviet invasion during the 14th Congress of the Romanian Communist Party.[26]
After thefall of communism in Romania, on 5 April 1991, its presidentIon Iliescu, and Soviet PresidentMikhail Gorbachev signed a political treaty which among other things recognized the Soviet-Romanian border. However, theParliament of Romania refused to ratify it.[27] Romania and Russia eventually signed and ratified a treaty in 2003, after the independence of Moldova and Ukraine.[28]
Until the1978 Constitution of the Moldavian SSR (15 April 1978), the republic had four cities directly subordinated to the republican government:Chișinău,Bălți,Bender, andTiraspol. By the new constitution, the following cities were added to this category:Orhei,Rîbnița,Soroca, andUngheni.[29] The former four cities, and 40 raions were the first-tier administrative units of the land.
Although it was the most densely populated republic of the USSR, the Moldavian SSR was meant to be a rural country specialized in agriculture. Kyrgyzstan was the only Soviet Republic to hold a larger percentage of rural population.[30]While holding just 0.2% of the Soviet territory, it accounted for 10% of the canned food production, 4.2% of its vegetables, 12.3% of its fruits and 8.2% of its wine production.[30]
At the same time, most of the Moldavian industry was built in Transnistria. While accounting for roughly 15% of the population of Moldavian SSR, Transnistria was responsible for 40% of its GDP and for 90% of electricity production.[31]
Major factories included theRîbnița steel mill,Dubăsari and Moldavskaia power station and the factories near Tiraspol, producing refrigerators, clothing and alcohol.[30]
Beginning with the early 1950s, the government gradually abandoned the language standard based on the central Bessarabian speech, established as official during theMoldavian ASSR, in favour of the Romanian standard. Hence,Mihai Eminescu andVasile Alecsandri were again allowed, and the standard written language became the same as Romanian, except that it was written withCyrillic script.
Access to Romanian authors born outside the medievalPrincipality of Moldavia was restricted, as was the case with works by authors such as Eminescu,Mihail Kogălniceanu,Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu,Constantin Stere that promoted a Romanian national sentiment. Contacts with Romania were not severed and, after 1956, people were slowly allowed to visit or receive relatives in Romania. Romanian press became accessible, and cross-border Romanian TV and radio programmes could be easily received. Nevertheless, the Soviet–Romanian border along thePrut river, separating Bessarabia from Romania, was closed for the general public.
The little nationalism which existed in the Moldavian elite manifested itself in poems and articles in literary journals, before their authors were purged in campaigns against "anti-Soviet feelings" and "local nationalism" organized by Bodiul and Grossu.[32]
The official stance of the Soviet government was thatMoldavian culture was distinct fromRomanian culture, but they had a more coherent policy than the previous one from the Moldavian ASSR.[33] There were no more attempts in creating a Moldovan language that is different from Romanian, the literary Romanian written with the Cyrillic alphabet being accepted as the linguistic standard for Moldavia. The only difference was in some technical terms borrowed from Russian.[34]
Moldavians were encouraged to adopt theRussian language, which was required for any leadership job (Russian was intended to be theLingua Franca of interethnic communication in the Soviet Union). In the early years, political and academic positions were given to members of non-Moldavian ethnic groups (only 14% of the Moldavian SSR's political leaders were ethnic Moldavians in 1946), although this gradually changed as time went on.
In the aftermath of World War II, many Russians and Ukrainians, along with a smaller number of other ethnic groups, migrated from the rest of the USSR to Moldavia in order to help 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. 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.[citation needed]
Access of native Bessarabians to positions in administration and economy was limited, as they were considered untrustworthy. The first local to become minister in the Moldavian SSR was only in the 1960s as minister of health. The antagonism between "natives", and "newcomers" persisted until the dissolution of the Soviet Union and was clear during the anti-Soviet and anti-Communist events from 1988 to 1992.[citation needed] The immigration affected mostly the cities of Bessarabia, Northern Bukovina, as well as the countryside ofBudjak where theBessarabia Germans previously were, but also the cities of Transnistria. All of these saw the proportion of ethnic Moldavians slowly drop throughout the Soviet rule.
^Radspieler, Tony (1955).The Ethnic German Refugee in Austria 1945 to 1954. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands. p. 33.ISBN9401179107.{{cite book}}:ISBN / Date incompatibility (help)
^John Mackinlay and Peter Cross (editors),Regional Peacekeepers: The Paradox of Russian Peacekeeping, United Nations University Press, 2003,ISBN92-808-1079-0 p. 135.
^Lipka, Michael; Sahgal, Neha (10 May 2017)."9 key findings about religion and politics in Central, Eastern Europe".Pew Research Center. Retrieved29 December 2021.Nostalgia for the USSR is common. In several former Soviet republics, there is a robust strain of nostalgia for the USSR. In Armenia (79%) and Moldova (70%) – in addition to Russia (69%) – substantial majorities say the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 was a bad thing for their country, while 54% of adults in Belarus take this position.
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