#Exhibit of the Month

One of the great technical achievements that revolutionized the idea of time and space, opening a new era in the history of communication, is telegraphy. It is based on the transmission of electrical signals through a cable over long distances, allowing people to communicate instantly. The telegraph spread very quickly and a network of wires stretched around the world.

In 1837, the American painter and physicist Samuel Morse invented the first electromagnetic device for telegraphy, patented in 1840. To send messages by wire, Morse developed in 1838 a simple code of dots and dashes, which represented the letters of the alphabet, known as "Morse code ".

Both Morse code and the telegraph machine were improved over time, with the telegraph becoming the most widespread system of communication and information transmission for more than a century, until the advent of the Internet. The telegraph system consisted of a series of stations repeaters along the transmission line route. Each station had an operator who received and transmitted messages by telegraph. The Morse machine transmitted about 25 words per minute, which were recorded in code on a paper tape. The operator in charge of transmitting the message would decode it and write it on paper using a special typewriter.

In Bessarabia, the telegraph entered in 1860: on April 8, the Bender telegraph station began its activity, and on April 24, the one in Chisinau, following the construction of the first Odesa-Chisinau-Leova telegraph line. Currently, telegraph services have been discontinued. The only ones who still use coded communication are radio amateurs.

The Morse telegraph machine shown comes from the Osinoostrovsky electrotechnical plant, Soviet Union, and dates back to 1934. The exhibit was restored by Mihail Culașco.

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Exhibitions

“Testimonies from the Gulag: Memory of the victims of the totalitarian communist regime”

July 6 - 25, 2022

The establishment of the Soviet occupation regime on the territories of the left bank of the Prut had dramatic consequences, which are still felt in the society of the Republic of Moldova. The repressive policies and violent Sovietization began with the adoption of three decisions, between August 26 and November 4, 1940, on the recruitment of 59,500 people, mostly from rural areas, as a workforce for the coal and metallurgical industries of the USSR.

On June 12-13, 1941, in the 6 Bessarabian counties, incorporated in the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic, 4,507 people were arrested and 13,885 ones were deported.

The second wave of deportations took place on July 5-6, 1949, based on a top-secret decision by the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party; during this wave 35,796 people, including 11,889 children, were deported to Siberia and Northern Kazakhstan.

On the night of March 31 to April 1, 1951, a third wave of deportations followed, this time on religious grounds. At that time, 2,617 people (including 842 children), the members of religious organizations considered illegal and anti-Soviet, were repressed.

The grain requisitioning policy, established by the decrees of the Council of People's Commissars of the Moldavian SSR and the Central Committee of the Communist Party (of Bolsheviks) of Moldavia of April 9, 1945, obliged peasants to hand over grain to the state according to imposed quotas; non-compliance with these decisions provided for the punishment of the peasants according to art. 58 and 58-1 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR. As a result of the Soviet state's cruel policy of requisition grain from peasants, there was the Famine phenomenon of 1946-1947. The number of people who starved to death between December 1946 and August 1947 ranged from 115,000 to 250,000, to which were added another 350,000 victims of malnutrition; At least 39 cases of cannibalism were recorded during the famine.

The photo-documentary exhibition "Testimonies from the Gulag: Memory of the victims of the totalitarian-communist regime" presents evidences of victims and survivors of political repressions and mass deportations from Moldavian SSR selected from the collections of the National Museum of History of Moldova and documents studied within the framework of the State program "Recovery and historical development of the memory of the victims of the totalitarian-communist regime in the Moldavian SSR in the periods 1940-1941, 1944-1953".

The exhibition is a tribute to the memory of the victims of the totalitarian-communist regime in the USSR.

The exhibition was developed within the Project "Memory culture for societies in the process of democratic transformation: promoting good practices between Lithuania and the Republic of Moldova", with the support of the Program for the Promotion of Democracy and Cooperation for Development of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Lithuania.