Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic
The Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic or Moldavian SSR, also known as the Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic, Moldovan SSR, Soviet Moldavia, Soviet Moldova, or simply Moldavia or Moldova, was one of the 15 republics of the Soviet Union that existed from 1940 to 1991. The republic was formed on 2 August 1940 from parts of Bessarabia, a region annexed from Romania on 28 June of that year, and parts of the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, an autonomous Soviet republic within the Ukrainian SSR.
From the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic Supreme Soviet's adoption of the declaration of sovereignty on 23 June 1990 to 23 May 1991, the country was internationally recognized as the Soviet Socialist Republic of Moldova. Furthermore, from 23 May 1991 until the declaration of independence on 27 August 1991, it was renamed to the Republic of Moldova while remaining a constituent republic of the USSR. Its independence was officially recognized by the international community on 26 December of that year when the USSR was dissolved.
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 Tatarbunary Uprising, the Soviets promoted the newly created Moldavian Autonomous Oblast existing within the Ukrainian SSR on part of the territory between the Dniester and Bug rivers, into the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, on 12 October 1924, as a way to primarily prop up Soviet propaganda efforst in Bessarabia, but also to exert pressure on Bucharest in the negotiations on Bessarabia, and even to help a possible Communist revolution in Romania.On 24 August 1939, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed a 10-year non-aggression treaty, officially known as the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. However, the pact contained a secret protocol, revealed only after Germany's defeat in 1945, according to which the states of Northern and Eastern Europe were divided into German and Soviet spheres of influence. The secret protocol placed the province of Bessarabia, back then controlled by Romania, in the Soviet "sphere of influence." Thereafter, both the Soviet Union and Germany invaded their respective portions of Poland, while the Soviet Union occupied and annexed Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia in June 1940, alongside waging war upon Finland.
Establishment
On 26 June 1940, four days after the end of the Battle of France, the Soviet Union issued an ultimatum to the Kingdom of Romania, demanding that the latter cede its territories of Bessarabia and Bukovina. After the Soviets agreed with Germany that they would limit their claims in Bukovina, which was outside the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact's secret protocols, to Northern Bukovina, Germany urged Romania to accept the ultimatum, which Romania did two days later. On 28 June, Soviet troops entered the area, and on 9 July, the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic was formed and applied to the Supreme Soviet for formal incorporation into the Soviet Union.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 other Moldavian counties of Bessarabia, together with the six westernmost raions of the Moldavian ASSR. Considering that, ninety percent of the territory of the MSSR was situated west of the river Dniester, 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, which were more heterogeneous ethnically, were transferred to the Ukrainian SSR, despite their population also including 337,000 Moldovans. 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. In the summer of 1941, Romania joined Hitler's Axis in the invasion 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 of World War II, the Soviet Union had reconquered all of the lost territories, reestablishing Soviet authority there.
Stalinist period
Repressions and deportations
On 22 June 1941, during the initial days of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, 10 people were summarily executed in Răzeni by Soviet authorities and buried in several mass graves. In July 1941, after Operation Barbarossa, a commemorative plaque was installed in Răzeni. A memorial to victims of the Răzeni Massacre was opened in 2009.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 in Siberia and the Kazakh SSR; 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 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.
NKVD/MGB also struck at anti-Soviet groups, which were most active from 1944 to 1952. Anti-Soviet organizations, including the Democratic Agrarian Party, the Freedom Party, the Democratic Union of Freedom, Arcașii lui Ștefan, the Vasile Lupu High School Group, and Vocea Basarabiei were severely reprimanded and their leaders faced persecution by the communist authorities.
Furthermore, a dekulakization 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."
Additionally, as a part of religious persecutions during the Soviet Union's occupation, numerous priests and other religious figures were targeted with a campaign of state-sponsored violence. After the Soviet occupation began, the religious life underwent a persecution similar to the one in Russia between the two World Wars. Religious minorities, 700 families, especially Jehovah's Witnesses, were deported to Siberia in Operation North in April 1951.
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 and forced removal as collaborators after the war.
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.Khrushchev and Brezhnev
With the regime of Nikita Khrushchev replacing that of Joseph Stalin, the survivors of Gulag camps and of the deportees were gradually allowed to return to the Moldavian SSR. The political thaw ended the unchecked power of the NKVD–MGB, and the command economy gave rise to development in areas such as education, technology and science, health care, and industry.Between 1969 and 1971, the clandestine National Patriotic Front was established by several young intellectuals in Chișinău, led 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 Romanian Socialist Republic, to Yuri Andropov, the chief of KGB, three of the leaders of the National Patriotic Front, Alexandru Usatiuc-Bulgăr, Gheorghe Ghimpu and Valeriu Graur, as well as a fourth person, Alexandru Șoltoianu, the leader of a similar clandestine movement in Northern Bukovina, were arrested and later sentenced to long prison terms.
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 Soviet Council of Ministers adopted a decision "About the measures for further development of Kishinev city" that secured more than one billion roubles 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 that Leonid Brezhnev, the effective ruler of the USSR from 1964 to 1982, was the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Moldavia from 1950 to 1952. These allocations stopped in 1991 with the Belavezha Accords, when the nation became independent.
Perestroika
Although Brezhnev and other CPM first secretaries were largely successful in suppressing Moldavian nationalism, Mikhail Gorbachev's administration facilitated the revival of the movement in the region. His policies of glasnost and perestroika 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 the Moldovan language on 31 August 1989, by the Supreme Soviet of Moldova, the declaration in the preamble of the declaration of independence of a Moldavian–Romanian linguistic unity, and the return of the language to the pre-Soviet Latin alphabet. In 1990, when it became clear that Moldavia was eventually going to secede, a group of nationalist pro-Soviet activists in Gagauzia and Transnistria proclaimed themselves as separate from the Moldavian SSR in order to remain within the USSR. The Gagauz Republic was eventually peacefully incorporated into Moldavia as the Autonomous Territorial Unit of Gagauzia, but relations with Transnistria soured. Its sovereignty was declared on 23 June 1990 on its territory.