The famine in Bessarabia was not organized by the Soviet regime, it was a consequence of the drought and the local authorities’ lack of action, and Moscow helped Moldavians. The false narrative appears in an online publication close to the Kremlin, and the purpose is to exonerate the totalitarian Soviet regime, which imposed itself through terror.
NEWS: The RuBaltic.Ru portal writes that “the key events that constitute anti-Soviet propaganda in the Republic of Moldova are the famine of 1946-47 and the deportations of 1949. A system of lies was built around these events, which collapses when confronted with historical evidence. A deeper look at the post-war events in the Moldavian SSR clearly shows that the conclusions reached by “pro-Western” researchers about the famine in Moldova are preposterous. The Soviet Union did not organize the “genocide of the Moldavians” - the post-war famine in the Moldavian SSR had a mass character precisely because Chisinau did not inform Moscow on time, and help came from the Union Center too late”.
The publication writes that the main cause of the famine was the drought of 1946 and the precarious situation in the republic caused by war and occupation; in addition to this, the state plans for the delivery of wheat had to be fulfilled, which worsened the critical situation in the Moldavian SSR. The publication writes that in this context, the Union government decided to downscale the wheat plans and that aid and loans of wheat and seed material were granted. The additional aid requested by the Moldavian leadership in the letter addressed to Stalin on December 21, 1946 was delayed by a month and a half, which constitutes the second human, subjective factor that negatively influenced the situation.
The Union Government decided “to grant additional aid to collective farms, state farms and peasant households in the Moldavian SSR [to compensate] for the lack of harvest in 1946”. The Soviet government sent to Moldova the deputy secretary of the Soviet of Ministers of the USSR, A.N. Kosighin. In Kosighin's opinion, the mistake of the leadership of the republic was that, out of fear or because of the generally complicated situation in the country, did not inform the Union governing bodies on time and fully about the situation in the Moldavian republic. “The leadership of the USSR learned that the situation in Moldova was unfavorable not from the CC of the CPM, but from the reports submitted by the prosecutor's office and other departments”, the publication writes.
“Currently, many pro-Western researchers are trying to present the events as a genocide committed by the Union leadership against the people of Moldavia. An objective look at the historical facts, however, shows that they do not correspond to this biased “research”. These “researches” have an exclusively propagandistic character and aim to rewrite the true history of Moldova”, RuBaltic.Ru. concludes.
NARRATIVES: 1. The famine was not organized by the Soviet regime, and Moscow helped Moldova during the famine. 2. Starvation and deportations are not Bolshevik terror, but untruthful anti-Soviet propaganda. 3. The famine of 1947 was a consequence of the local authorities’ lack of action, it was not organized by the central leadership of the USSR. 4. The research conducted by pro-Western historians in the Republic of Moldova is biased and aims to rewrite its true history.PURPOSE: The narratives are intended to exonerate the totalitarian communist regime of the crimes it committed and to distort the historical truth that surfaced along with the collapse of the USSR and the independence of the former Soviet republics.CONTEXT: The current territory of the Republic of Moldova was part of the USSR, occupied on June 28, 1940 following the secret agreement between Stalin and Hitler in 1939, known as the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact. The Bolshevik Soviet regime was a totalitarian one and imposed itself in the occupied territories through terror: people who were inconvenient to the regime would be imprisoned, summarily executed, sent to the gulag, deported. Throughout the Soviet history, millions of people were victims of political repression, which was a domestic policy tool used by the USSR leadership, culminating in the Stalin era. One of the manifestations of this terror was organized famine, not only in Moldova, but in the entire USSR. For example, the Russian organized famine of 1921 killed more than five million people, four million Ukrainians and two million other nationalities died during the 1932-1933 famine, and hundreds of thousands died during the famine in the MSSR, between 1946-1947.
These topics were taboo during the Soviet period. The topic of organized famine was one of the deepest secrets in the history of the USSR.
Starting this year, the victims of the organized famine of 1946-1947 are commemorated on the third Saturday of April. The decision was voted in Parliament by the PAS deputies, while the MPs from the socialist-communist group and those from the Shor Party left the meeting hall.
WHY THE NARRATIVES ARE FALSE: The communist regime showed from the very beginning of the occupation of the MSSR that terror was the fastest and most effective method for inoculating the new order. In addition to the arrests, deportations, assassinations carried out by the Soviet power against the population, according to historians, the organized famine killed between 150 and 350 thousand people in the MSSR, one third of the population of the Republic being affected by hunger and disease. At the same time, the famine of 1946-1947 forced the peasants to accept collectivization.
The taxation of the peasants by the Soviet regime began as early as 1944, immediately after the reoccupation of Bessarabia, according to Mariana Țăranu, PhD in history. The general staff would increase taxes every year, the Soviet leadership demanded from each family a tax in products - eggs, wool, cheese, grain for the Red Army - but also a sum of money. The state also demanded other products that the people did not grow, being forced to buy them.
Party bodies were focused on fulfilling the plan to collect agricultural products and requisitioned people's food reserves. Families that failed to pay the taxes had their property confiscated, and the heads of the families were tried by the Military Tribunal and sentenced to forced labor. To carry out the plan, the party activists were accompanied by armed soldiers who would literally sweep the peasants’ homes of their last reserves. These taxes made life in the countryside even more difficult.
The Soviet leadership used the climatic conditions to camouflage the policy of starving the population. Given that in 1946, 365 thousand tons of grain were harvested, which was half of the population's needs, and the requisition plan in Bessarabia was 255 thousand tons, famine was imminent, historian Anatol Țăranu says.
The famine could have been avoided, according to historian Ion Şișcanu: “Mass mortality from starvation was not the result of the drought, but of the economic and social policy of the communist totalitarian regime towards the population of the Moldavian SSR, of the Soviet system of access to food products. The main responsibility for the death of hundreds of thousands of people in the Moldavian SSR lies with the Moscow leadership and the Bolshevik Communist Party, the Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Moldavian SSR. Along with Stalin and the leadership at the Kremlin, also guilty of starving people to death were: the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Moldavia and the first secretary Sologor, the council of ministers and its president Nicolai Coval, the Moscow’s representative for grain collection, Sîci and other dignitaries who would decide the Soviet citizens’ fate.”
The famine in the MSSR was a crime against humanity, which must be condemned at international level, believes historian Lidia Pădureac: “There is enough evidence that indicates from an international legal point of view that the famine in the Moldavian SSR in 1946-1947 is a crime against humanity. The large number of victims, the persecution of people are arguments that impose the need for the official condemnation of the Soviet occupation regime on the territories between the Dniester and the Prut and the declaration at national and international level of the famine caused by the Soviet-communist officials of the Moldavian SSR in the years 46-47 as a crime against humanity”.
The very fact that the Soviet leadership forbade any mention of the famine in the USSR is evidence of the complicity of the regime in organizing the famine.
The commission for the study and assessment of the totalitarian communist regime in the Republic of Moldova found that the regime was, from the beginning until the last moment, a criminal and repressive one, which committed acts of genocide and crimes against humanity through mass terror, political repression, organized starvation, deportations, violation of human dignity and fundamental human rights.
GRAIN OF TRUTH: It is true that the famine of 1947 was preceded by a terrible drought that affected a large part of the territory of the USSR, but drought affects the territory of Moldova regularly and the droughts have never led to such humanitarian crises. Living in a dry area, the Moldavian peasants had experience in surviving such calamities, they knew how to make food and seed reserves for such cases, they would limit consumption, and the wealthy would help the poor to survive. The fiscal policies of the Soviet state, however, forcibly deprived the peasants of food and supplies.
Indeed, the Moscow representatives became aware of the scale of the disaster in the MSSR. After Kosîghin's inspection visit he reported that the level of mortality, disease and food dystrophy caused by hunger was very high. Relief decisions, however, came too late, when the famine had already claimed too many victims, were insufficient and did not reduce mortality.
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