The National History Museum of Moldova in partnership with the Bucharest City Museum, Lietuvos ambasada Moldovoje / Embassy of Lithuania in Moldova and the Embassy of the Republic of Moldova in Romania, organizes at the Suțu Palace (Bd. Ion C. Brătianu no. 2) from May 22 to June 30, 2024, the photo-documentary exhibition "Testimonies from the Gulag: the memory of the victims of the totalitarian-communist regime". The opening of the exhibition, to which the public is invited to participate, will be on Wednesday, May 22, 2024, at 2 p.m.

The establishment of the Soviet occupation regime in the territories to the left of the Prut river had dramatic consequences, which are still felt in the society of the Republic of Moldova.

Forced Sovietization started with the adoption, between August 26 and November 4, 1940, of three decisions regarding the recruitment of 59,500 people, mainly from rural areas, as a workforce for the coal and steel industry in the USSR.

On June 12-13, 1941, in the six Bessarabian counties, forcibly incorporated into the USSR, 4,507 people were arrested and 13,885 people were deported. The second wave of deportations from the Moldavian SSR took place on July 5-6, 1949, based on a strictly secret decision of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, by which 35,796 people were deported to Siberia and Kazakhstan, of which 11,889 were children. On the night of March 31 to April 1, 1951, the third wave of Stalinist deportations followed in the Moldavian SSR, this time on confessional grounds, subjecting to repression 2,617 people, including 842 children, members of religious organizations considered illegal and anti-Soviet.

Likewise, with the establishment of the Soviet occupation, the grain requisition policy was implemented in Bessarabia based on the decisions of the Council of People's Commissars of the Moldavian SSR and the CC of the PC(b) of the Moldavian SSR of April 9, 1945, by which the peasants were obliged to deliver state grain quotas, and non-compliance with these decisions was punished according to art. 58 and art. 58-1 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR. As a result of the criminal actions of the Soviet state to requisition grain from peasants in the Moldavian SSR, between December 1946 and August 1947, about 200,000 people died of starvation; adding to these another 350,000 victims affected by malnutrition and dozens of recorded cases of cannibalism.

The photo-documentary exhibition "Testimonies from the Gulag: the memory of the victims of the totalitarian-communist regime" presents the narratives of victims and survivors of political repressions and mass deportations during the Soviet era. The images and documents exhibited from the funds of the National Museum of History of Moldova and those capitalized within the State Program "Recovery and historical capitalization of the memory of the victims of the totalitarian-communist regime in the Moldavian SSR during the years 1940-1941, 1944-1953" present to the general public the horrors of the Soviet totalitarian regime and the memory of this tragic period in today's society.

The exhibition was developed within the project "Culture of memory for societies in the process of democratic transformation: promotion of best practices between Lithuania and the Republic of Moldova", supported by the Program "The Development Cooperation and Democracy Promotion Program" of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Lithuania in Republic of Moldova.

Curator: Dr. Ludmila D. Cojocaru

*The term GULAG was taken from the Russian language with the original meaning General Directorate of Labor Camps on the territory of the USSR, which expanded its meaning after 1989 by the emblematic designation of the detention space in any form, including deportations, prisons, forced residence regime , restricting the right to choose a job and livelihood, etc.