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Romania is to blame for the famine in Soviet Moldavia in the years 1946-1947, because it removed the agricultural equipment and inventory from the region, the Vice President of the Russian Security Council, former president Dmitri Medvedev, commented on a statement by the President of the Parliament in Chisinau, Igor Grosu, who claims that those tragic events could be declared as genocide.
NEWS: In the years 1946-1947, the inhabitants of Moldova suffered from famine. And so, now, the president of the country's parliament, Igor Grosu, has proposed to consider those events as genocide, by analogy with Kyiv’s decision regarding the "Holodomor" against the Ukrainian people in the famine years of 1932-1933.
The Vice-President of the Security Council of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev, in a post on his "VKontakte" page, commented on the idea of the President of the Moldovan Parliament to declare the post-war famine as a genocide against the Moldovan people.
In his opinion, Grosu is just a "cheeky and hypocritical fool" who disregards not only historical facts, but also basic common sense for the sake of "15 minutes of petty fame". After all, anyone who is even slightly familiar with Soviet history knows that at the end of the Great War for the Defense of the Fatherland, the USSR economy was in an extremely difficult state. According to Medvedev, the male population had diminished considerably and agricultural production had almost halved during the war years. Added to all this was a severe drought affecting several regions of the European part of the USSR, which destroyed the grain harvest there. And at the same time, the rains hit the east of the country for a long time.
As a result, the famine began, which severely affected the Russian regions of the Volga, the North Caucasus, Siberia, as well as Ukraine and Belarus. The population of Soviet Moldavia also suffered.
In addition to that, during the years of occupation, the Romanian occupation authorities actively exported everything of any value, including agricultural equipment, right before the sowing season, condemning the local population to starvation. Medvedev believes that it would be more correct to call these actions “genocide”.
NARRATIVE: The Soviet Union doesn’t bare the blame for the famine of 1946-1947, and in fact Romania is the one who caused the "genocide".
PURPOSE: The statements aim to dissociate the former USSR and, respectively, Russia, as its legal successor, from negative events, in this case, man-made famine. At the same time, the aim is to present Romania, as part of the West, as the main factor that caused the hunger, death and suffering of hundreds of thousands of people
WHY THE NARRATIVES ARE FALSE: This is not the first time that Russian propaganda has tried to deny the famine of 1946-1947 or put the main blame on drought and local decision makers, and Veridica has written about it before. However, the narrative that, in fact, Romania, which withdrew from the current territory of the Republic of Moldova in 1944, would have caused the famine, is a new one, which has no factual basis, as the director of the History Institute of the Moldovan Academy of Sciences, Gheorghe Cojocaru, told Veridica. According to him, historical research and archival documents clearly demonstrate that the famine was caused by the Soviet regime that left the inhabitants of the former MSSR without grain. "The specialists who saw the archives, studied the documents, demonstrated very clearly who took what and who swept the bridges, where all those huge amounts of grain went, leaving people with no bread and causing tens and hundreds of thousands of deaths and a humanitarian disaster. Romania could not get involved because Bessarabia and Northern Bucovina had been annexed by the Soviet Union, by the Red Army, and the Soviet regime back then was responsible for what happened in the territory of the former Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic".
According to Gheorghe Cojocaru, there is no evidence to support Medvedev's statement that Romania confiscated agricultural machinery from the territory of the Republic of Moldova. According to him, Romania also suffered from the drought, there were victims, but much fewer, thanks to a more correct policy and actions of the regime at that time. "The Romanian Communist Party acted correctly in relation to the starving citizens, it allowed international aid, including from the Red Cross. There were victims of hunger, but not as many as in Bessarabia. Here, it was the regime that was responsible for the horrors that happened then, for the famine, which became extremely severe. Anyone claiming otherwise should come not with statements of this kind, but with evidence. The evidence demonstrated by scientists, studied by historians, undoubtedly shows that the people suffered from the criminal attitude of the authorities, which left them without a crumb of bread", says the historian.
In the more than 30 years since the collapse of the USSR, dozens of researches and monographs have been written about the famine of 1946-1947, highlighting its severity and also the main causes. In his study "Famine in the Moldavian SSR in 1946-1947, historian Ion Şișcanu estimates, based on certain calculations and statistical data, that between 150,000 and 200,000 people died back then. He mentions that there were several factors causing that, including the drought, but the main one was the policy promoted by the former USSR. "The main responsibility for the death of hundreds of thousands of people in the Moldavian SSR belongs to the leadership of the Communist (Bolshevik) Party in Moscow, the CC Bureau of the CP for the Moldavian SSR, the party leadership in Chisinau and the local Bolshevik structures in counties and districts", concludes the author.
A Commission for the study and assessment of the totalitarian communist regime in the Republic of Moldova , set up in 2010, established that during the Soviet period, hundreds of thousands of citizens died or suffered because of the atrocities committed by the Soviet regime.
LOCAL CONTEXT/ETHOS: The famine is not the only atrocity of the Soviet regime that Russian propaganda tries to deny, or minimize its scope and impact. Comparing the Stalinist deportations after 1940 with social phenomena currently taking place in the Republic of Moldova, such as the (voluntary) migration of hundreds of thousands of citizens, especially to the West, or with the EU sanctions imposed on some Moldovan citizens affiliated with Russia , is another Kremlin propaganda technique, meant to distract the attention from the behavior of the Bolshevik regime towards the local population.
Similarly, Moscow is sensitive about recognizing the Holodomor in Ukraine as genocide.
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