REMEMBRANCE IN TIME - Index of

Viorica OLARU-CEMÎRTAN: Cojocaru Commission
The forced collectivization in the beginnings of the `30s, through applying constraint
and violence in the relations between the Bolshevik regime and the peasantry, through
instrumenting administrative and ex-communication measures against the wealthy
peasants, through instigating the poor and middle ones against the so-called “kulaks”,
resulted in the cancellation of the private property in the village, in a new civil war
against the peasants, in the terrible famine during 1932-1933. On 7 August 1932, when
famine ravaged in Ukraine, the famous Law on the „five stalks of wheat” entered into
force, in I. Stalin’s redaction which, even for the smallest thefts stipulated shooting and
only in very rare cases a “milder” punishment was stipulated – 10 prison years. The Law
savagely hit the hungry peasants who, in the desperate situation because of the criminal
requisition policies, were condemned to steal from the wealth of the kolkhozes, to save
themselves from death. On 27 December 1932, the system of Soviet passports was
instituted, but only for the urban population, not for the peasants, who were condemned
to die in their villages, with no reserve of cereals.
The terrible famine, the repressions and deportations operated by the communist
authorities generated a massive population exodus – the flee accross the Dniester, in
Romania. For stopping this exodus, which constituted a conclusive evidence of the
catastrophic failure of the policies promoted by the communist authorities, there was
resorted to fortifying the guard of the Soviet border, accompanied by the use of the
weapons against the hungry stowaways. In 1932, the Committee for Helping the
Stowaways across the Dniester dispatched to the League of the Nations, a memorandum
wherein mention was made: „… Having no choice, they leave their lands and ancestral
homes and, in the blind despair to save their only wealth left in the world, God’s gift, life,
they venture to flee across the Dniester, in Romania. … The Soviet regime, however,
knows no pity and, this way, the fugitive Moldavians are shot in mass with gunshots, with
tens, hundreds, with no mercy, along the Dniester…”.
The victim number of the famine during 1932-1933 from MASSR has not yet been
precisely established, being about tens of thousand people.
The Great Depuration from `30 in USSR heavily impacted on the Moldavian ASSR.
The mechanism of the mass terror made no distinctions among the victims, admitted no
indulgences. Under the guillotine of the so-called “Special Troika”, fell one after the
other, peasants, intellectuals, workers, priests, innocent people who benefited from no
trial, no Christian funeral. Victims became the very commissioners in the party and
administrative hierarchies. The “bourgeois” social origin, the „kulak” status, the
maintenance of the contacts with the relatives in the „capitalist countries” served as
counts of indictment as „people’s enemy” at anyone’s address. Answering the political
commandments of the Communist Party, the repression organs of the regime competed to
condemn not for real infractions, but for invented infractions, ignoring the laws and the
human right, sowing behind them death, pain, humility.
The Commission proved that the communist totalitarian regime is guilty of cultural
crimes against the spirit and identity of the Moldavians across the Dniester and,
subsequently, after 1940, of the Bessarabians, through imposing a counterfeit Moldavian
literary “language”, according to aberrant “class” principles and through inventing, in
default of any historical and ethno-cultural benchmarks, a “Moldavian” nation, apart from
373