The government in Chișinău is trying to justify fascism, including by reinterpreting history and erecting monuments to Romanian World War 2 Nazi-aligned leader and war criminal Ion Antonescu, according to Russian propaganda, which quotes Vasile Tarlev, a former prime minister from the communist era.
NEWS: The leader of the “Future of Moldova” party, Vasile Tarlev, a member of Parliament and former prime minister, has stated that, by introducing a bill on criminal liability for denying Stalinist repressions, the ruling Action and Solidarity Party is simultaneously attempting to whitewash the regime of Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu, an ally of Hitler, responsible for mass crimes on the territory of Moldova and Ukraine, TASS reports.
Tarlev stressed that the crimes of the Stalinist era have no justification and were condemned at the 20th Congress of the CPSU; however, against this backdrop, the authorities’ attempts to portray Antonescu as a hero, to erect monuments to him, honour them with military fanfare, and to include him in history textbooks appear particularly cynical.
He recalled that the Nazis established a network of concentration camps in Moldova and the adjacent regions of Ukraine, where tens of thousands of people died, and that the Antonescu regime participated in the attack against the USSR.
Following the Iași–Chișinău operation, Antonescu was removed from power and executed by a Romanian court for war crimes. However, according to Tarlev, his contemporary followers fail to learn from history and, in an attempt to please their Western patrons, exploit the tragedies of the past, which leads to the division of Moldovan society and is unacceptable to the majority of citizens who do not agree with severing ties with Russia and the CIS.
NARRATIVES: 1. The government in Chișinău is glorifying Ion Antonescu, including by erecting monuments to him. 2. The government in Chișinău is attempting to reinterpret history to justify fascism.
PURPOSE: To create the impression that the government promotes or legitimizes historical figures associated with fascist regimes; to fuel social polarization by exploiting the memory of World War II and the crimes of totalitarian regimes; to delegitimize the official discourse on condemning historical crimes and portray it as revisionist or ideologically driven; to portray the legislative initiative on criminalizing public denial of the famine as pointless, with the aim of reducing public support for it.
WHY THE NARRATIVES ARE FALSE: For the sake of accuracy, it should be noted that the legislative initiative does not refer to all Stalinist crimes, but only to the public denial of the famine of 1946–1947. It stipulates that “the famine caused in 1946–1947 on the territory of the present-day Republic of Moldova is recognized as a crime against humanity, committed by the Soviet totalitarian regime against the local population on social and political grounds.” The authors, PAS deputies, have justified the need for this bill in part by noting that the famine of 1946–1947 was, for several decades, officially denied, downplayed, or justified. The bill also provides for penalties for publicly denying or disputing famine and deportations, equivalent to those for Holocaust denial.
Therefore, the legislative initiative in no way provides for the glorification of Nazism or Nazis.
The claim regarding the construction of monuments in honour of Marshal Ion Antonescu is also a matter of disinformation. There are no such monuments in the Republic of Moldova.
LOCAL CONTEXT/ ETHOS: The Republic of Moldova was part of the former USSR from 1940 to 1991 (with a brief interruption from 1941 to 1944), after being annexed following the secret agreement between Stalin and Hitler in 1939, known as the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact. The Bolshevik Soviet regime was totalitarian and imposed its rule in the occupied territories through methods of terror: individuals deemed a threat to the regime were imprisoned, summarily executed, sent to the gulag, or deported. A Commission for the Study and Assessment of the Totalitarian Communist Regime in the Republic of Moldova, established in 2010, determined that during the Soviet period, hundreds of thousands of citizens died or suffered as a result of the atrocities committed by that regime.
The famine of 1946–1947 is one such atrocity; dozens of research papers and monographs have been written about it over the past 30-plus years, following the collapse of the USSR, which highlight both its scale and its main causes. In his study “The Famine in the Moldavian SSR in 1946–1947,” historian Ion Șișcanu estimates, based on certain calculations and statistical data, that between 150,000 and 200,000 people died. These figures are also confirmed by other sources, such as historian Igor Cașu and the National Museum of History.
Mass deportations were another measure taken by the Soviet regime against the population of Bessarabia. They took place in three major waves: June 1941, July 1949 (Operation “Iug”), and April 1951 (Operation “Sever”). According to various sources, between approximately 70,000 and over 100,000 people were deported to Siberia and Kazakhstan under inhumane conditions.
Even after the collapse of the USSR, Russian propaganda—as well as certain politicians—denies or downplays the effects of these atrocities. Veridica has debunked false claims such as that the Soviet regime did not orchestrate the famine in Bessarabia or that Romania is to blame for the famine in Soviet Moldova in 1946–47, as well as misinformation attempting to compare the deportations to current population migration. Veridica has also debunked false claims such as that history textbooks are being rewritten or that Nazi monuments are being erected in the Republic of Moldova.
GRAIN OF TRUTH: PAS lawmakers have introduced a legislative initiative to commemorate the victims of the famine caused in 1946–1947 by the Soviet totalitarian regime on the territory of present-day Moldova, which includes provisions to criminalize the denial of the famine. However, it does not call for the glorification of fascism.
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