Bessarabians were deported by the Soviet power because they were Romanians and to erase any connection with Romanian traditions and culture, Moldova’s ambassador to Bucharest Victor Chirila said on Monday at the Senate at the opening of the Childhood in the Gulag photo-documentary exhibition.

The exhibition presents, in archival images and documents, the life of Bessarabian children deported in 1941, 1949 and 1951 and sentenced to famine, Russification, indoctrination and forced separation from their families, as a result of the repressive policies of the totalitarian-communist regime in the Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic.

„Let us not forget these tragedies that Romanians in Bessarabia went through. There were three waves of deportations with Romanians from Bessarabia, primarily only because they were Romanians, because they were part of the Romanian cultural, economic and political elite, because they had prosperous households. They were the target of these deportations, but so were their children. More than a third of those deported were children, coerced to forced labour in the Siberian taiga, agriculture in Kazakhstan, and Soviet factories and plants. They were subjected to Russification in Soviet schools to shave off any memory ties with the people from which they were torn. In the end, they did not succeed, because their parents kept alive the memory of the land they came from and transmitted our Romanian values to them, reading them from the Bible in Romanian,” Victor Chirila said.

He warned that these facts can be repeated because in the last two years, during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, 20,000 children were deported (only 400 recovered) to the Far East and other cities in the Russian Federation to „erase any trace of their Ukrainian identity”, similar to the children deported from Bessarabia in 1941, 1949 and 1951.

According to Moldova’s ambassador, citing official sources, 60,000 people were deported in the three waves, of whom more than a third were children.

„We must do everything possible so that Russia, Russia after Putin, to condemn, recognize and take responsibility for these atrocities, including by granting compensation to these families, as other states that were guilty of atrocities during World War II did,” Chirila added.

The Childhood in the Gulag”- exhibition brings together about 180 photo-documentary images, accompanied by memoirs and archival documents capitalized from the collections of the National Museum of History of Moldova, Museum of Edinet County, Museum of History and Ethnography in Soroca, Pro Memoria Institute and family archives of victims of totalitarian-communist regime.

The Childhood in the Gulag photo-documentary exhibition was organized with the support of The Development Cooperation and Democracy Promotion Programme of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Lithuania.

The event was organized by the Embassy of the Republic of Moldova in Bucharest, in collaboration with the Romanian Senate, the National Museum of History of Moldova, the Museum of Victims of Deportations and Political Repressions.

AGERPRES