In June 1940, acting on the secret protocol of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Soviet Union issued an ultimatum forcing Romania to cede Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, which were incorporated into a new Moldavian SSR and parts of the Ukrainian SSR. Most of the region's ethnic German minority was resettled to Germany under a parallel agreement, while Soviet security services deported tens of thousands of others considered politically unreliable to Siberia and Central Asia. Romanian and German forces retook the territory in 1941, during which Romanian authorities deported tens of thousands of Jews to Transnistria, and the Red Army reoccupied and permanently annexed it in 1944, with further mass deportations following in 1949 and 1951 tied to collectivization. The territory forms the core of modern Moldova.
The Soviet Union annexed Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina from Romania in 1940 under the secret protocol of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, lost the territory to Romanian and German forces in 1941, and reoccupied and permanently annexed it in 1944, forming the Moldavian SSR.
The Romanian census of 1930 counted 2,864,402 in Bessarabia; with Northern Bukovina and the Hertsa region the annexed territory held roughly 3.7 million people in 1940, the figure used in Soviet and Romanian accounts alike. Deportations in 1941 and again in 1949, together with the famine of 1946-47, removed several hundred thousand more.
The range is R.J. Rummel's estimate of 18,000-57,000 deaths among the 200,000-300,000 people persecuted in Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina in 1940-41; it was made before the Soviet archives opened and has not been confirmed by them. Archive-based work by the Moldovan historian Igor Cașu documents the deportation operations precisely — 29,839 people in June 1941, 35,050 in July 1949, 2,617 in April 1951 — but not the mortality among deportees in Kazakhstan, Komi and Siberia, which is where most of the deaths occurred. The 1946-47 famine in the Moldavian SSR, which Cormac Ó Gráda puts at about 100,000 deaths, falls just outside this entry's window; Moldovan and Romanian scholarship attributes it to Soviet grain requisitioning, while Russian accounts emphasise drought.
Archive-based work by the Moldovan historian Igor Cașu records that 53,356 people from Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina were mobilised for labour across the USSR under threat of penal punishment, and that deportees were sent to 'special settlements' in Kazakhstan, the Komi ASSR, Krasnoyarsk Krai and Omsk and Novosibirsk oblasts.
Moldova, Russia, Germany