Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic
Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic
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1940–1991 | |||||||||||||||
Motto: "Пролетарь дин тоате цэриле, уници-вэ!" " Piotr Borodin | |||||||||||||||
• 1991 (last)[1] | Grigore Eremei | ||||||||||||||
Head of state | |||||||||||||||
• 1940–1951 (first) | Fyodor Brovko | ||||||||||||||
• 1989–1991 (last) | Mircea Snegur | ||||||||||||||
Head of government | |||||||||||||||
• 1940–1945 (first) | Tihon Konstantinov | ||||||||||||||
• 1991 (last) | Valeriu Muravschi | ||||||||||||||
Legislature | Supreme Soviet | ||||||||||||||
History | |||||||||||||||
28 June–3 July 1940 | |||||||||||||||
• Establishment | 2 August 1940 | ||||||||||||||
• Sovereignty | 23 June 1990 | ||||||||||||||
27 August 1991 | |||||||||||||||
26 December 1991 | |||||||||||||||
Soviet rouble (Rbl) (SUR) | |||||||||||||||
Calling code | +7 042 | ||||||||||||||
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Today part of | Moldova (including Transnistria) |
The Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic or Moldavian SSR (
After the
Geographically, the Moldavian SSR was bordered by the Socialist Republic of Romania to the west and the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic to the north, east, and south.
History
Background
After the failure of the
On 24 August 1939, the Soviet Union and
Establishment
On 26 June 1940, four days after the end of the
On 2 August 1940, the Supreme Soviet unanimously approved to dissolve the old Moldavian ASSR and organize the Moldavian SSR, from six full counties and small parts of three other Moldavian counties of Bessarabia (about 65 percent of its territory), and the six westernmost rayons of the Moldavian ASSR (about 40 percent of its territory).[9][10] Ninety percent of the territory of MSSR was west of the river Dniester, which had been the border between the USSR and Romania prior to 1940, and 10 percent east. Northern and southern parts of the territories occupied by the Soviet Union in June 1940 (the current Chernivtsi Oblast and Budjak), which were more heterogeneous ethnically, were transferred to the Ukrainian SSR, although their population also included 337,000 Moldavians.[9] As such, the strategically important Black Sea coast and Danube frontage were given to the Ukrainian SSR, considered more reliable than the Moldavian SSR, which could have been claimed by Romania.[11]
In the summer of 1941, Romania joined Hitler's Axis in the invasion of the Soviet Union, recovering Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, as well as occupying the territory to the east of the Dniester it dubbed "Transnistria". Soviet partisans continued to be active in both regions. By the end of World War II, the Soviet Union had reconquered all of the lost territories, reestablishing Soviet authority there.
Stalinist period
Repressions and deportations
History of Moldova |
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Moldova portal |
On 22 June 1941, during the first day of the
The Soviet authorities targeted several socio-economic groups due to their economic situation, political views, or ties to the former regime. They were deported to or resettled in Siberia and northern Kazakhstan; some were imprisoned or executed. According to a report by the Presidential 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 estimative 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.[13]
A de-kulakisation campaign was directed towards the rich Moldavian peasant families, which were deported to Kazakhstan and Siberia as well. 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".[13]
The number of the ethnic Bessarabia 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 to German-occupied Poland)[16] and forced removal as collaborators after the war.[13]
Collectivisation
Collectivisation was implemented between 1949 and 1950, although earlier attempts were made since 1946. During this time, a large-scale famine occurred: some sources give a minimum of 115,000 peasants who died of famine and related diseases between December 1946 and August 1947. According to Charles King, there is no evidence that it was provoked by Soviet requisitioning 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.[13]
Khrushchev and Brezhnev
With the regime of
Between 1969 and 1971, a clandestine National 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 December 1971, following an informative note from Ion Stănescu, the President of the Council of State Security of the
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, the
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 that
Perestroika
Although Brezhnev and other CPM first secretaries were largely successful in suppressing
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 the
Independence
On 17 March 1991,
Independence was quickly followed by civil war in
Relationship with Romania
In the 1947 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.[18] Throughout the Cold 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 the Romanian Communist Party tried to emphasise the links between the Romanians and Russians, the annexation being considered just a proof of Soviet Union's internationalism.[19] Starting in the 1960s, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej and Nicolae 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.[20]
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, the Romanian Academy published some notes by Karl Marx which talk about the "injustice" of the 1812 annexation of Bessarabia and Nicolae Ceaușescu in a 1965 speech quoted a letter by Friedrich Engels in which he criticized the Russian annexation, while in another 1966 speech, he denounced the pre-World War II calls of the Romanian Communist Party for the Soviet annexation of Bessarabia and Bukovina.[21]
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."[22]
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 from Iași, and the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Moldavia Ivan Bodiul, Kiril Iliashenko, and N. Merenișcev escorted them from the border until they left for Crimea at the Chișinău International Airport on 2 August. The move was widely interpreted as a sign of improved relations.[23] 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."[24]
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 a Romanian Communist Party delegation headed by Ion Iliescu, Political Executive Committee alternate member and Iași County Party Committee First Secretary.
As late as November 1989, as Russian support decreased, Ceaușescu brought up the Bessarabian question once again and denounced the Soviet invasion during the 14th Congress of the Romanian Communist Party.[25]
After the
Leadership
The
Until the 1978 Constitution of the Moldavian SSR (15 April 1978), the republic had four cities directly subordinated to the republican government: Chișinău, Bălți, Bender, and Tiraspol. By the new constitution, the following cities were added to this category: Orhei, Rîbnița, Soroca, and Ungheni.[28] The former four cities, and 40 raions were the first-tier administrative units of the land.
Economy
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.[29] 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.[29]
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.[30]
Major factories included the Rîbnița steel mill, Dubăsari and Moldavskaia power station and the factories near Tiraspol, producing refrigerators, clothing and alcohol.[29]
Society
Education and language
Beginning with the early 1950s, the government gradually abandoned the language standard based on the central Bessarabian speech, established as official during the
Access to Romanian authors born outside the medieval
Culture
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.[31]
The official stance of the Soviet government was that Moldavian culture was distinct from Romanian culture, but they had a more coherent policy than the previous one from the Moldavian ASSR.[32] 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.[33]
Moldavians were encouraged to adopt the
Demographics
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 of Budjak where the Bessarabia Germans previously were, but also the cities of Transnistria. All of these saw the proportion of ethnic Moldavians slowly drop throughout the Soviet rule.
Ethnic group | 1941 | 1959 | 1970 | 1979 | 1989 | |||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Moldavian | 1,620,800 | 68.8% | 1,886,566 | 65.4% | 2,303,916 | 64.6% | 2,525,687 | 63.9% | 2,794,749 | 64.5% |
Romanian | 1,663 | 0.06% | 1,581 | 1,657 | 2,477 | 0.06% | ||||
Ukrainian | 261 200 | 11.1% | 420,820 | 14.6% | 506,560 | 14.2% | 560,679 | 14.2% | 600,366 | 13.8% |
Russian | 158,100 | 6.7% | 292,930 | 10.2% | 414,444 | 11.6% | 505,730 | 12.8% | 562,069 | 13.0% |
Jewish | 95,107 | 3.2% | 98,072 | 2.7% | 80,127 | 2.0% | 65,672 | 1.5% | ||
Gagauz | 115,700 | 4.9% | 95,856 | 3.3% | 124,902 | 3.5% | 138,000 | 3.5% | 153,458 | 3.5% |
Bulgarian | 177,700 | 7.5% | 61,652 | 2.1% | 73,776 | 2.1% | 80,665 | 2.0% | 88,419 | 2.0% |
Romani | 7,265 | 0.2% | 9,235 | 0.2% | 10,666 | 0.3% | 11,571 | 0.3% | ||
Others | 23,200 | 1.0% | 22,618 | 0.8% | 43,768 | 1.1% | 48,202 | 1.2% | 56,579 | 1.3% |
Legacy
The widespread
References
Footnotes
- ^ On 27 April 1990, article 6 on the monopoly of the Communist Party of Moldavia on power was excluded from the Constitution of the Moldavian SSR
- ^ King 2000, p. 54.
- ^ Molotov & Ribbentrop 1939.
- ^ Roberts 2006, pp. 43, 82.
- ^ Wettig 2008, pp. 20–21.
- ^ Roberts 2006, p. 55.
- ^ Nekrich 1997, p. 181.
- ^ "Bessarabia Absorbed by Russia in New Republic". Associated Press. Chicago Tribune (Chicago, Illinois). 10 July 1940. p. 4.
- ^ a b King 2000, p. 94.
- ^ "Red Press Attacks Finns as Beating Pro-Russians". Associated Press. Daily News (New York, New York). 3 August 1940. p. 7.
- ^ King 2000, p. 95.
- ^ a b Dumitru Lazur, Omorâți mișelește de bolșevici comuniști, Curierul Ortodox, nr 6 (191), 15 June 2007.
- ^ a b c d e King 2000, p. 96.
- ^ "Forme de rezistenţă a populaţiei civile faţă de autorităţile sovietice în RSS Moldovenească (1940–1956) Petru Negura Elena Postica". Dystopia. 1 (1–2): 59–88. 2012. Retrieved 9 October 2013.
- ^ Păcurariu 2007, pp. 34–35.
- ISBN 9401179107.
- ^ Unioniști basarabeni, turnaţi de Securitate la KGB Archived 2009-04-13 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ Treaty of Peace with Roumania Part I, article 1. of "Australian Treaty Series" at the "Australasian Legal Information Institute" austlii.edu.au
- ^ King 2000, p. 103.
- ^ King 2000, pp. 103–104.
- ^ King 2000, p. 105.
- ^ "Foreign Relations of the United States, Memorandum of Conversation, Tuesday, June 22, 1976, 3:35–4:05 p.m., The White House" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2 December 2013. Retrieved 2 July 2013.
- ^ Andrei Brezianu, Vlad Spânu, The A to Z of Moldova
- ^ Watts, Larry. "The Soviet-Romanian Clash over History, Identity and Dominion". Wilson Center. CWIHP e-Dossier Series.
- ^ King 2000, p. 106.
- ^ "Iliescu a actionat pentru apararea intereselor URSS-ului - Arhiva noiembrie 2007 - HotNews.ro". www.hotnews.ro. 26 July 2004.
- ^ Armand Goșu, "Politica răsăriteană a României: 1990–2005" Archived 2009-05-21 at the Wayback Machine, Contrafort, No 1 (135), January 2006
- Radio Free Europebackground report
- ^ a b c King 2000, p. 99.
- ISBN 92-808-1079-0p. 135.
- ^ King 2000, pp. 99–102.
- ^ King 2000, p. 107.
- ^ King 2000, pp. 107–108.
- ^ V. V. Kembrovskiy, E. M. Zagorodnaya, "Naselenie soyuznyh respublik", Moscow, Statistika, 1977, p. 192.
- S2CID 236609974.
- ^ Lipka, Michael; Sahgal, Neha (10 May 2017). "9 key findings about religion and politics in Central, Eastern Europe". Pew Research Center. Retrieved 29 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.
- ^ Etco, Tatiana (19 September 2018). "In a Corner of Moldova, Marx Casts a Long Shadow". Balkan Insight. Retrieved 29 December 2021.
Bibliography
- Wikisource. . 23 August 1939 – via
- ISBN 9789975799027.
- ISBN 9780817997915.
- ISBN 9780231106764.
- Păcurariu, M. (2007). Martiri pentru Hristos din România (in Romanian). Bucharest: ISBN 9789736160929.
- ISBN 9780300112047.
- Wettig, G. (2008). Stalin and the Cold War in Europe, 1939–1953. Landham: ISBN 9780742555426.