In 1940 Bessarabia was annexed by the Soviet Union, and Bronshtein, as with almost all other Bessarabian writers, moved back home. Later in World War II, he was mobilized into the Red Army at the outbreak of the German invasion (June 1941) and suffered a penetrating lung wound from shrapnel the following year. Bronshtein died of the wound in winter 1943 at a military hospital in Tashkent, Uzbek SSR (present-day Uzbekistan).