news agency Infotag

STAVILA REVEALS MUCH MORE VICTIMS OF SOVIET OCCUPATION OF MOLDOVA

Veaceslav Stavila, a member of the Commission for Assessment and Condemnation of the Totalitarian Communist Regime in Moldova, maintains the number of victims of the “Soviet occupation of Moldova” is substantially greater than what used to be announced and believed before.   

Stavila said at a news conference in Infotag today that many Soviet historians and researchers used to underrate the actual number of the Stalinist regime’s victims, so “the precise number of the famine and deportation suffers is unknown… But the total number of Moldovans shot down and deported from the republic during the Soviet regime period exceeds 300 thousand”.    

He said, “Historian Mihai Gribincea wrote in 1990 that nearly 150 thousand Moldovans died in that famine. But the real figure was much higher”. According to his calculations, the 1946-1947 famine alone took a toll of 173 thousand human lives. 

Stavila has counted over 72 thousand people, who were deported away from Moldova, and approximately the same number of those who perished during the Second World War.   

He said the burial places of nearly one-third of those killed during the war are unknown “because the Red Army command used to place soldiers from Moldova in the first ranks of troops in the offensive”.   

“Nearly 200 thousand Moldovans were illicitly mobilized to the war. But it is noteworthy that ethic Bulgarians and Gagauzes were not mobilized for the war – a mystery remaining unsolved even now”, Stavila said.   

According to his calculations, nearly 70 thousand residents of Moldova and Baltic States collaborated with the Soviet KGB [the acronym for the Russian-language Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti – Committee for State Security] and wrote covert reports on those citizens, who did not share communist ideas or showed signs of discontent.   

“To finally get rid of our soviet heritage, all living citizens, particularly civil servants, must stand up and state publicly whether they collaborated with the KGB or not. Personally I did not”, stated Veaceslav Stavila.