Crimes have no end date… No matter how much time has passed since they were perpetrated, they remain crimes. And the victims of these crimes remain victims … All crimes leave traces.

For the third consecutive year the Government decreed July 6 the Day of National Mourning throughout the country to commemorate the 70 years since the second and largest wave of Stalinist deportations in Bessarabia. In all state institutions the Tricolor was lowered. Flowers were laid on the graves and monuments raised in the memory of those lost in the Siberian and Kazakhstan abysses or slaughtered in the NKVD’s jails. And churches held memorial services  with candles and church bell tolling…

At 10.00 time “stopped” for a minute and everybody stood up in reverent silence in the memory of the victims of the three waves of Soviet deportations (12-13 June 1941, 5-6 July 1949, March 31 – 1 April 1951). The second wave of deportations caused the greatest number of victims. In just one night, 5 to 6 July as a result of the special Soviet services operation “Iug” (South) over 36 thousand people (11,606 families) were arrested, loaded in trains and exiled to the most severe regions of Siberia and Kazakhstan. The regime did not spare anyone. 9,233 of those deported were men, 13,702 were women (including the pregnant and lactating) and 11,828 were children. 

To carry out the “Iug” operation Moscow mobilized more than 4,000 state security operatives, over 13,000 officers and soldiers, nearly 25,000 Soviet Party nomenclature members of the Moldovan SSR, 4,000 vehicles and 30 locomotives with 1,575 cattle wagons. Mobilization as if for a war. Bessarabia, which had been through a lot over time, but did not yet know this hell, experienced it then. 

As a result of the three waves of criminal deportations, over 87,000 people (according to sources, up to 100,000) were taken out of their homes in the middle of the night, without the right to appeal, and sent to nowhere. The deportations of June 13, 1940, July 6, 1949, and April 1, 1951, along with the famine from 1946-1947, constitute the Tragedy of Bessarabia. These are crimes more serious and more pernicious than war crimes, for war has its laws and norms, while these offenses were committed in peacetime, against all rules.

In 1953 Stalin died. I met the late painter Victor Zambrea a former deportee and political dissident. He told me that the deportees were lucky that Stalin died. “His death saved us from death and renewed our hope that we could get back home. It did not happen right away, but it happened. It was different with Nikita Khrushchev than with Joseph Stalin. However, it was not as it used to be before them and without them. We rejoiced at the thought that we’d come back, return to the birthplace,” Mr. Zambrea confessed. However “here at home no one was waiting for us. And our houses and everything we left were not ours anymore. We found other owners in them or there was nothing left at all.” He said that even worse was that those who returned were forbidden to settle down in their hometown.  

They were mad at Moldova although the directive came from Moscow and not from Chisinau. in this context some of them moved to neighboring villages, while others went back or never attempted to return. I don’t know if there are any statistics about how many of those who left live in the place they were deported to (deported as “chiaburi” (landowners) they built even better households in exile). And today we have the largest diasporas in Russia and Kazakhstan. However Chisinau has never showed interest in the lives of these communities (it’s a good job that Romania does it via its Embassy in Moscow) just as it showed no interest (only occasionally on June 13 or July 6) in the lives and needs of deportees who chose to return home. 

Although it’s been 30 years since the USSR ceased to exist the attention and care of the state for those who suffered the ordeal of deportations remains with very few exceptions as in the Soviet period. The only thing that was done by the first Parliament was their political rehabilitation. And that was not immediate and not for all. Other than that, they were always left as beggars. When they had to deport them they deported them to Siberia in just one night and without any trial. And now if they want to regain their possessions they have to go through courts for years and even address the European Court of Human Rights and that if there’s anyone to represent them.

Since the proclamation of Independence there were five presidents, eight parliaments and about 13 governments in Chisinau. Half of them were pro-soviet. They treated the deportees as well as the combatants of the Independence War on Nistru as if they never existed. The other half tried to keep them closer (mostly out of electoral interest) but they did not do much either. Except that on July 6 they went to the Railway Station Square laid out flowers and wiped their eyes with handkerchiefs moistened in advance … Filat and Urechean slipped some coins into their pockets. There were the liberals too who promised and (unlike the others) kept their word and inaugurated in the Square The Train of Pain, a monumental work to which the former deportees bind their hopes of being remembered. This is all they got in the 30 years of Independence. Annually on June 12 and July 6 they gather here and remember what they think they should never forget. They figure out how many they are, they grow sad when they hear they are fewer and fewer (they are 7,000 of the 87,000 deported). And every time a government leaves and a new one takes office, they rejoice and hope that something will change in their lives too. The state treats them in the same manner. As if Stalin did not die. As if the USSR did not disappear.

Petru Grozavu,