Soviet deportations from Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina

The Soviet deportations from Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina were a series of mass deportations of Romanians from Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina between 1940 and 1951. The deportations were conducted by the Soviet Union. Historians said that Joseph Stalin ordered the deportations to crush certain opposition to his power.

Overview

Most victims of the deportations, which happened after the Soviet occupation of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina (northeastern Romania) in July 1940, were sent to "special settlements" (Russian: спецпоселения) across the Soviet Union. In June 2021, Moldovan historian Ion Varta called the deportations a "genocide in all law".

Background

Due to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, the Romanian government was made to give up Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina to the Soviet Union in June 1940. The deportations started after the Soviets took over Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina.

Events


1941

On June 12–13, 1941, 29,839 members of families of "counter-revolutionaries and nationalists" from the Moldavian SSR, Chernivtsi of Northern Bukovina, and the Ukrainian SSR's Izmail oblasts were deported to Kazakhstan, the Komi ASSR, the Krasnoyarsk Krai, and the Omsk and Novosibirsk oblasts. Sergo Goglidze, an NKVD official close to Lavrentiy Beria, was liable for the deportations.

Rudolph Rummel (1932–2014)An American political scientist, a statistician and professor at Indiana University, Yale University, and University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa estimated that 200,000–300,000 Romanian Bessarabians were persecuted or deported to forced labor camps between 1940 and 1941.Rudolph J. Rummel, Table 6.A. 5,104,000 victims during the pre-World War II period: sources, calculations and estimates, Freedom, Democracy, Peace; Power, Democide, and War, University of Hawaii. 

As many as 57,000 did not survive. Some historians claimed that the declassified Soviet archives did not support Prof. Rummel's estimation however.


1949

On April 6, 1949, the Political Bureau of the Central Committee issued decision number 1290-467cc for the deportation of another 11,280 families from Moldavian SSR, accusing them of being "kulaks" and "Nazi collaborators". 

11,239 families (35,050 persons) were deported on July 6, 1949. In an official Romanian investigation in 2009, 40,000 persons were found to have been deported by the Soviets in total. The deportations roughly ended in 1951.


Related pages

 Holodomor
 Soviet deportation of Greeks
 Soviet deportation of Koreans
 Soviet deportations of Chechens and Ingush
 Soviet persecution of Poles during World War II

Footnotes

References

Category:Racism
Category:Communism
Category:Deportations
Category:Soviet crimes against humanity