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Romania in 1940 with Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina highlighted in orange-red Soviet military parade in Chișinău on July 4, 1940. As Romania agreed to satisfy Soviet territorial demands, the second plan was immediately put into action, with the Red Army immediately moving into Bessarabia and north Bukovina on the morning of 28 June.
The deportations began after the Soviet occupation of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, which occurred in June 1940. According to a secret Soviet Ministry of Interior report dated December 1965, 46,000 people were deported from the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic for the period 1940−1953. [1]
In the 1979 Soviet census for the Moldavian SSR (including Transnistria, but without northern and southern Bessarabia, now both part of Ukraine): 63.9% identified themselves as Moldovans and 0.04% as Romanians. For the Soviet census of 1989 (conducted in the Moldavian SSR), 64.5% declared themselves as Moldovans and 0.06% Romanians.
In 1917, Bessarabia declared independence and united with Romania. However, in 1940, the Soviet Union occupied Bessarabia and also Northern Bukovina. Romania recaptured the regions in 1941 but the Soviet Union did the same again in 1944. Under Soviet rule, Bessarabia was split between the Ukrainian SSR and the new Moldavian SSR.
The Soviet Union, which did not recognize the sovereignty of Romania over Bessarabia since the union of 1918, issued an ultimatum on 28 June 1940 demanding the evacuation of the Romanian military and administration from the territory it contested as well as from the northern part of the Romanian province of Bukovina. [30]
Bukovina as divided in 1940: Soviet to the north, Romanian to the south. As a result of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact , the USSR demanded not only Bessarabia but also the northern half of Bukovina and Hertsa regions from Romania on 26 June 1940 (Bukovina bordered Eastern Galicia , which the USSR had annexed during the Invasion of Poland ).
During the Soviet occupation, the religious life in Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina underwent a persecution similar to the one in Russia between the two World Wars.In the first days of occupation, certain population groups welcomed the Soviet power and some of them joined the newly established Soviet nomenklatura, including NKVD, the Soviet political police.
In July, after a Soviet ultimatum, Romania agreed to give up Bessarabia and northern Bukovina (the Soviets also annexed the city of Hertsa, which was not stated in the ultimatum). Two-thirds of Bessarabia were combined with a small part of the Soviet Union to form the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic.