REMEMBRANCE IN TIME - Index of

Viorica OLARU-CEMÎRTAN: Cojocaru Commission
or mixed villages, of the Hebrew towns, whole families, men, women, children and old
men, from Bessarabia to Northern Bucovina, were mounted with bayonets into cattle cars
and brought to the lands of Siberia, whence many did not return. The archival documents
consulted by the members of the Commission highlight disturbing data: even the newborn
babies in the Soviet “ox-wagon” were written, together with their parents, on the list
of the “people’s enemies”(!…). The deportation operation was initiated, authorized and
watched by the Political Office of CC of PC(b) throughout the Union, and the party,
Security and Internal-Affair structures of USSR and of MSSR were the logistical basis of
the repressive mechanism. Unfortunately, part of the executants of the of the deportation
operation from 12-13 June 1941 were recruited among the natives, to their greatest part,
delators and opportunists, declassed elements, who aimed a strictly personal benefice.
At the express indications of the Political Office of CC of PCUS, of USSR’ s Council of
Ministers and of USSR’s State Security, the Soviet totalitarian people-mincing machine
will hit twice in full force in the population of Moldavian SSR: on 6 July 1949, following
the adoption of the strictly secret Decision of MSSR’s Council of Ministers No. 509,
from 28 June 1949, as regards the deportation from the Moldavian SSR of the families of
the kulaks, former landlords and big merchants, and on 1 April 1951, based on MSSR’s
Council of Ministers, from 24 March 1951, as regards the confiscation and use of the
wealth of the deported ones from the territory of the Moldavian SSR, being targeted the
so-called “anti-Soviet” contingent of the confession “Jehovah’s Witnesses”. The
deportation operations were planned by the repression organs as full-fledged military
operations against the civil population. The peak of the Soviet-type justice was that the
people were first lifted from their homes, deported beyond the Ural mountains, thereafter
penal files of “people’s enemies” were addressed to them(!). The peak of these “crimes
against humanity”, as Moldavian SSR’ Supreme Soviet qualified them, on 23 June 1990,
was the party leadership, the official factor commissioned with taking a decision –
MSSR’s Council of Ministers, and the executants – the organs of security, internal affairs
and justice of USSR and MSSR.
The Commission for studying and assessing the totalitarian communist regime assessed
the number of the deported persons having undergone repressions during the 1929-1951
to more than 90 thousand persons.
An expected effect of the deportation from 1949 was the accelerated and massive
enrolling of the peasants in kolkhozes, the so-called collectivization or “decisive
offensive of the socialism” on the village between Prut and Dniester. Linking the peasant
to the kolkhoz land, through the dictate of the Bolshevik regime, resulted in the
liquidation of the private property and in the loss of the economic initiative in the
villages, in the des-peasantry and disinheritance of the peasants’ class. Once with the end
of collectivization, a special mechanism of the production and repartition relations was
instituted, mechanism that allowed the Soviet State to overall control the agricultural
production, the peasants receiving from the State only the necessary minimum for
surviving and working hard on the lands of the kolkhozes.
The conclusions of the Commission attest that the awful famine of the years 1946-1947
was not only a direct consequence of drought, but also of the economic and social policy
of the communist totalitarian regime towards the Moldavian SST’s population, towards
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