“They were dying from a mouth.” Maia Sandu: We commemorate the death of 123,000 people due to the famine caused by the Stalinist regime

The President of the Republic of Moldova, Maia Sandu, announced on Facebook on Saturday that every third Saturday of April, we commemorate a great tragedy in the history of our country – the famine caused by the Stalinist regime in the years 1946-1947†, in which, in just 9 months, over 123 thousand people were killed in the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic.

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„«They were dying from a mouth… The village was big, about 7000, but few remained. People were falling, dying on the spot. They buried the deceased in large pits – 10, 100, I don’t know who, I don’t know who… There were only corpses on the streets. Dumitru Fanaru, c. Sadâc, r. Comrat, from the Book of Hunger, Larisa Turea)

Every third Saturday of April, we commemorate a great tragedy in the history of our country – the famine caused by the Stalinist regime in 1946-1947.

According to historians, between December 1946 and August 1947, i.e. in just 9 months, over 123 thousand people were killed by starvation in the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic. Another 400 thousand were seriously affected by malnutrition, and in the following years many of them lost their lives. The south of the country was the most affected by the tragedy. Some Găgăuze villages would have lost up to half of their inhabitants. Almost 450 people died of hunger every day in Moldova, whether they called themselves Moldovans, Romanians, Russians, Gagauz, Jews, Roma or Bulgarians.

The Soviet power forbade people to talk about the famine. Generation after generation, the survivors were forced to mourn their losses in silence. In memory of our grandparents and great-grandparents, in front of our parents, we owe it to us not to forget this tragedy, to talk about it, about those responsible for this crime and to commemorate the innocent victims.

We bow with gratitude to our citizens from both banks of the Dniester, regardless of their ethnicity, who went through those sacrifices, but survived with their heads held high, they resisted And they gave life to new generations. We owe them our lives from now on, in the Republic of Moldova. It is a painful past for all of us, those who have inherited this earth, a past from which we must learn in order to make a good future together, a future in which our country no longer goes through such sufferings,” Maia Sandu’s message shows.

Editor: Alexandru Costea