The Republic of Moldova is today marking 82 years since the occupation of Bessarabia by the Soviet Union on June 28, 1940. Back then, the Soviet troops annexed Bessarabia, northern Bukovina and Herța land, regions with a majority Romanian-speaking population, following an ultimatum to Bucharest. Radio Chişinău recalls that the annexation led to the establishment of a totalitarian communist regime, which meant forced collectivization, the replacement of the Latin alphabet with the Cyrillic one and Russification, political oppression and deportations. Tens of thousands of people were deported to Kazakhstan and Siberia, many of them dying on the way to or in the USSR camps. Historian Ion Varta said that under the Soviet regime forcefully established on the left bank of the Prut River, ‘about 400,000 people were victims of organized famine’, ‘626,000 people were subject to forced labor’, and between 120,000 and 130,000 people were deported. „It was a true genocide,” the historian concluded. The territories annexed in 1940 now belong to the former Soviet republics of Moldova and Ukraine, that gained their independence from Moscow in August 1991, after the failure of the neo-Bolshevik coup against the last Soviet leader, the reformer Mikhail Gorbachev.
