Robot stayed behind in his adoptive region after Romania's 1940 cession of Bessarabia to the Soviet Union. This, Iurie Colesnic suggests, was "a conscious choice", and justified by Robot's belief that avant-garde poetry was well-appreciated by the Soviet administration (making him "the most obvious intellectual victim of Soviet propaganda"). Colesnic also writes: "I suppose that his disappointment after one year of living under the communist regime was profound and hard to mend." A similar argument is made by Eugen Lungu, who suggests that Robot "mimicked [...] the adherence to the happiness of the "kolkhozniks"" and, like other writers from the newly created Moldavian SSR, was made to comply with Socialist Realism. In particular, Lungu notes, Robot followed the official Soviet stance on a "Moldovan language", distinct from Romanian and regulated by the pedagogical institutions in Balta.