SUMMARY:

Sergei Digol explores public memory of Soviet deportations from the left-bank Moldova (Transdnistria) in 1949. This breakaway part of today’s Moldova was part of the Soviet Union in the interwar period with the status of an autonomous republic within the Ukrainian SSR. During the Soviet period, historians were mostly preoccupied in deportations from the right-bank Moldova (Bessarabia), which was seen as a necessary tool for the construction and consolidation of Soviet power in the region. Post-Soviet historians also treat the deportations of 1949 in the context of the Stalinist regime’s drive to collectivize agriculture in the newly acquired territories. Historians who insist on the independence of Moldovan history and those who see Moldovan history as part of a common Romanian history are in agreement on the reasons for the deportations. According to Digol, part of the reason for the deportations should be sought in the desire to transform the ethnic composition of the population during the World War II and the perceived danger that the “bourgeois-nationalist kulaks” posed to the re-establishment of Soviet power. Correspondingly, the 1949 deportations from left-bank Moldova represented an ethnic and social cleansing of the population. The industrialization of left-bank Moldova (Pridnestrov’e or Transistria) and the ensuing migration into the region largely erased significant public memory of the deportations, whereas memory of the 1949 deportations remains strong in the right-bank. The current political division of Moldova largely precludes the “return” of broad public memory of the 1949 deportations.