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Moldavian SSR
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The Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic (Moldavian (Romanian): ????????? ???????? ?????????? ???????????? or Republica Sovietica Socialista Moldoveneasca; Moldavskaya Sovetskaya Sotsialisticheskaya Respublika), commonly abbreviated to Moldavian SSR or MSSR, was one of the 15 republics of the Soviet Union. In 1990-1991, it was officially referred to as Soviet Socialist Republic of Moldova.
The Moldavian SSR was formed in 1940.
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Encyclopedia
The Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic (Moldavian (Romanian): ????????? ???????? ?????????? ???????????? or Republica Sovietica Socialista Moldoveneasca; Moldavskaya Sovetskaya Sotsialisticheskaya Respublika), commonly abbreviated to Moldavian SSR or MSSR, was one of the 15 republics of the Soviet Union. In 1990-1991, it was officially referred to as Soviet Socialist Republic of Moldova.
The Moldavian SSR was formed in 1940. It gained independence in 1991 as the Republic of Moldova.
History
Creation
The Soviet Union set up an autonomous Moldavian ASSR on October 12, 1924 as a part of the Ukrainian SSR on part of the territory between the Dniester and Bug rivers (Transnistria), as a way to prop up their propaganda and help a potential communist revolution in Romania.
The Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic was created after the Soviet occupation of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina on June 28, 1940, which occurred after an ultimatum delivered to Romania and according to the provisions of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Soviet Union and Hitler's Reich.
The old Moldavian ASSR was dismantled and the Moldavian SSR was organized on August 2, 1940 from six counties of Bessarabia and six westernmost rayons of the Moldavian ASSR (about 40% of its territory). 90% of the territory of MSSR was on the right bank of the river Dniester, and 10% on the left bank. Smaller northern and southern parts of the territories occupied by the Soviet Union in June 1940(the current Chernivtsi Oblast and Budjak), which were more heterogeneous ethnically, were transferred to the Ukrainian SSR, although their population also included 337,000 Moldovans. As such, the strategically important Black Sea coast and Danube frontage were given to the Ukrainian SSR, considered more reliable than the Moldavian SSR, which could have been claimed by Romania.
In the summer of 1941, Romania joined Hitler's Axis in the invasion of the Soviet Union with the declared goal to recover Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. By the end of World War II the Soviet Union re-conquered the same territory, and reconstituted the Moldavian SSR.
Stalinist period: repressions and deportations
Many Bessarabians who fled to Romania before the advancing Red Army were eventually caught by the Soviet security forces; a high percentage of these were shot or deported blamed as collaborators of Romania and Nazi Germany.
The Soviet authorities targeted several socio-economic groups due to their economic situation, political views, or ties to the former regime. They were deported to or resettled in Siberia and northern Kazakhstan; some were imprisoned or executed. According to the Tismaneanu Report, in 1940-1941 alone, no less than 86,604 people were arrested and deported, while modern Russian historians put forward an estimative number of 90,000 for the same period. NKVD/MGB also struck at anti-Soviet groups, which were most active in 1944-1952.
A de-kulakisation campaign was directed towards the rich Moldavian peasant families, which were deported to Kazakhstan and Siberia. For instance, in just two days, July 6 and July 7, 1949, over 11,342 Moldavian families were deported by the order of the Minister of State Security, I. L. Mordovets under a plan named "Operation South".
Other deportation campaigns were directed towards the ethnic Germans (whose number decreased from over 81,000 in 1930 to under 4,000 in 1959 due to voluntary wartime migration and forced removal as collaborators after the war) and religious minorities (700 families, especially Jehovah's Witnesses were deported to Siberia in April 1951 under the plan "Operation North").
Stalinist period: collectivisation
The collectivisation was implemented between 1949 and 1950, although earlier attempts were made since 1946. During this time, a large-scale famine occurred: some sources give a minimum of 115,000 peasants who died of famine and related diseases between December 1946 and August 1947, others put the figure at 216,000, in addition to 350,000 fell sick because of it, but survived. According to Charles King, there is ample evidence that it was caused by the Soviets and directed towards the largest ethnic group living in the countryside, the Moldovans. The main cause was the Soviet requisitioning of large amounts of agricultural products, but it was also favoured by a draught, the disruption by the war and the collectivisation.
Thaw: 1956-1964
With the regime of Nikita Khrushchev replacing that of Joseph Stalin, the survivors of Gulag camps and of the deportees were gradually allowed to return to Moldova. The political thaw ended the unchecked power of the NKVD/MGB, and the centrally planned economy gave rise to development in the areas such as education, technology and science, health care, and industry (except in the fields that were considered politically sensitive, such as genetics or history).
Stagnation: 1964-1985
In the 1970s and 1980s Moldova received substantial investment from the budget of the USSR to develop industrial, scientific facilities, as well as housing. In 1971, the Council of Ministers of the USSR adopted a decision "About the measures for further development of Kishinev city" that secured more than one billion rubles of investment from the USSR budget Subsequent decisions that directed enormous wealth and brought highly qualified specialists from all over the USSR to develop Moldova. Such an allocation of USSR assets was partially influenced by the fact that Leonid Brezhnev, the effective ruler of the USSR from 1964 to 1982, was the Communist Party First Secretary in the Moldavian SSR in 1950-1952. These alocations stopped in 1991 with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, when Moldova became independent.
Perestroika and the road to the independence: 1985-1991
Although Brezhnev and other CPM first secretaries were largely successful in suppressing Moldovan nationalism, Mikhail S. Gorbachev's administration facilitated the revival of the movement in the region. His policies of glasnost and perestroika created conditions in which national feelings could be openly expressed and in which the Soviet republics could consider reforms independently from the central government.
The MSSR's drive towards independence from the USSR was marked by civil strife as conservative activists in the east (especially in Tiraspol), as well as communist party activists in Chisinau worked to keep the MSSR within the Soviet Union. The main success of the national movement in 1988-1989 was the adoption on August 31, 1989 by the Supreme Soviet of the Moldavian SSR of the Moldavian language as official, declaration in the preambule of a Moldavian-Romanian linguistic unity, and the return of the language to the pre-Soviet Latin alphabet. In 1990, when it became clear that Moldova was eventually going to secede, a group of pro-USSR activists in Transnistria proclaimed a Pridnestrovian Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic with its capital in Tiraspol, which, after the dissolution of the USSR, was renamed into the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic.
Independence
On May 23 1991, the Moldovan parliament changed the name of the republic from "Moldavian SSR" to "Republic of Moldova". Moldova then seceded from the USSR and became a sovereign, independent country on August 27, 1991, after the failed coup in the Soviet Union. Independence was quickly followed by civil war in the east of the country (Transnistria), where the central government in Chisinau battled with separatists, who were supported by pro-Soviet forces and by different forces from Russia. The conflict left the breakaway regime (Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic) in control of Transnistria.
Relationship with Communist Romania
Throughout the Cold War, the issue of Bessarabia was forgotten by the West, but not in Romania. However, in the 1950s Romania, research on history and of Bessarabia was a banned subject, as the Romanian Communist Party tried to emphasise the links between the Romanians and Russians, the annexation being considered just a proof of Soviet Union's internationalism.
Starting with the 1960s, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej and Nicolae Ceausescu began a policy of distancing from the Soviet Union, but the debate over Bessarabia was discussed only in scholarship fields such as historiography and linguistics, not at a political level.
As the Soviet-Romanian relations reached an all-time low in the mid-1960s, Soviet scholars published historical papers on the "Struggle of Unification of Bessarabia with the Soviet motherland" (Artiom Lazarev) and the "Development of the Moldovan language" (Nicolae Corlateanu). On the other side, the Romanian Academy published some notes by Karl Marx which talk about the unjustice of the 1812 annexation of Bessarabia and Nicolae Ceausescu in a 1965 speech quoted a letter by Friedrich Engels in which he criticized the Russian annexation, while in another 1966 speech, he denounced the pre-WWII calls of the Romanian Communist Party for the Soviet annexation of Bessarabia and Bukovina.
The issue was however brought whenever the relationships with the Soviets were waning, never being a serious subject of high-level negotiations in itself. As late as November 1989, as Russian support decreased, Ceausescu brought the Bessarabian question and denounced the Soviet invasion during the 14th Congress of the Romanian Communist Party.
Organization and leadership
Communist Party
The Moldavian Communist Party was a component of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The Communist Party was the sole legal political organization. It had suppreme power in the land, as all state and public organizations were its ubordinates.
Ethnic composition of the Moldavian Communist Party
| year\official ethnic group | Moldavians | Ukrainians | Russians | Jews | | 1925 | 6.3% | 31.6% | 41.6% | 15.7% | | 1940 | 17.5% | 52.5% | 11.3% | 15.9% | | 1989 | 47.8% | 20.7% | 22.2% | 2.5% | |
First Secretaries of the Moldavian Communist Party
| name | period | place of birth | | P.G. Borodin | 1941-1942 | Ukraine | | Nikita L. Salogor | 1942-1946 | Ukraine | | Nikita G. Koval | 1946 - July 1950 | Moldova (Transnistria) | | Leonid Ilych Brezhnev | July 1950 - October 1952 | Ukraine | | D.S. Gladki | October 1952 - 1954 | Ukraine | | Z.T. Serdiuk | 1954 - May 1961 | Ukraine | | Ivan I. Bodiul | May 1961 - December 1980 | Ukraine | | Simeon Grossu | December 1980 - November 1989 | Ukraine (South of Bessarabia) | | Petru C. Lucinschi | November 1989 - February 1991 | Moldova (Bessarabia) | | Grigore I. Eremei | February-August 1991 | Moldova (Bessarabia) | |
Administrative subdivision
Until the 1978 Constitution of the Moldavian SSR (15 April 1978), the republic had four cities directly subordinated to the republican government: Chisinau, Balti, Bender, and Tiraspol. By the new constitution, the following cities were added to this category: Orhei, Rîbnita, Soroca, and Ungheni.
The former 4 cities, and 40 raions were the first-tier administrative units of the land.
Economy
Agriculture
Although it was the most densely populated republic of the USSR, the Moldavian SSR was meant to be a rural country specialized in agriculture. Kyrgyzstan was the only Soviet Republic to hold a larger percentage of rural population.
While holding just 0.2% of the Soviet territory, it accounted for 10% of the canned food production, 4.2% of its vegetables, 12.3% of its fruits and 8.2% of its wine production.
Industry
At the same time, most of the Moldovan industry was built in Transnistria. While accounting for roughly 15% of the population of Moldavian SSR, Transnistria was responsible for 40% of its GDP and for 90% of electricity production.
Major factories included the Rîbnita steel mill, Dubasari and Moldavskaia power station and the factories near Tiraspol, producing refrigerators, clothing and alcohol.
Society
Ideology
The political elite of the Moldavian SSR was one of the most loyal among the Soviet Republic.
Some towns and villages were renamed after various Communist leaders.
Culture
The little nationalism which existed in the Moldavian elite manifested itself in poems and articles in literary journals, before their authors being purged in campaigns against "anti-Soviet feelings" and "local nationalism" organized by Bodiul and Grossu.
The official stance of the Soviet government was that Moldavian culture was distinct from Romanian culture, but they had a more coherent policy than the previous one from the Moldavian ASSR. There were no more attempts in creating a Moldavian language that is different from Romanian, the literary Romanian written with the Cyrillic alphabet being accepted as the linguistic standard for Moldova, the only difference being in some technical terms borrowed from Russian.
Moldavians were encouraged to adopt the Russian language, which was required for any leadership job (Russian was intended to be the language of interethnic communication in the Soviet Union). In the early years, political and academic positions were given to members of non-Moldavian ethnic groups (only 14% of the Moldavian SSR's political leaders were ethnic Moldavians in 1946), although this changed as time went on.
Literary critics stressed the Russian influence on Moldavian literature and ignored the parts shared with Romanian literature.
Demographics
Evolution of the population and the ethnic composition of Moldavian SSR, 1940-1989
| ethnic group | 1941 | 1959 | 1970 | 1979 | 1989 | | Moldavians | 1,620,800 | 68.8% | 1,886,566 | 65.4% | 2,303,916 | 64.6% | 2,525,687 | 63.9% | 2,794,749 | 64.5% | | Romanians | - | - | 1,663 | 0.06% | 1,581 | | 1,657 | | 2,477 | 0.06% | | Ukrainians | 261 200 | 11.1% | 420,820 | 14.6% | 506,560 | 14.2% | 560,679 | 14.2% | 600,366 | 13.8% | | Russians | 158,100 | 6.7% | 292,930 | 10.2% | 414,444 | 11.6% | 505,730 | 12.8% | 562,069 | 13.0% | | Jews | - | - | 95,107 | 3.2% | 98,072 | 2.7% | 80,127 | 2.0% | 65,672 | 1.5% | | Gagauz | 115,700 | 4.9% | 95,856 | 3.3% | 124,902 | 3.5% | 138,000 | 3.5% | 153,458 | 3.5% | | Bulgarians | 177,700 | 7.5% | 61,652 | 2.1% | 73,776 | 2.1% | 80,665 | 2.0% | 88,419 | 2.0% | | Gypsy | - | - | 7,265 | 0.2% | 9,235 | 0.2% | 10,666 | 0.3% | 11,571 | 0.3% | | others | 23,200 | 1.0% | 22,618 | 0.8% | 43,768 | 1.1% | 48,202 | 1.2% | 56,579 | 1.3% | | Total | 2,356,700 | 2,884,477 | 3,568,873 | 3,949,756 | 4,335,360 |
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Note: "-" means the official census data does not identify that group in that year, i.e. counts it within other groups, not that the group is not present.
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