Video attention, pictures that are hard to follow for those who regret communism: what the faces of young and adult today look like when they enter the cattle wagons with which the Communists have deported their grandparents to Siberia
The exhibition “State terror in Soviet Moldova”
A recent inscription survey conducted in Romania shows that 66% of citizens believe that communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was a good leader. They are “catastrophic percentages that mythologize life in communism,” the specialists explained.
- Coincidence makes, in Chisinau, people can see, in the center of the city, two of the animal wagons from which the Communists deported Moldovans to Siberia, whether they were Romanians, Jews, Tatars, Roma and other ethnicities.
- Hotnews filmed the times when today's women and men discover how they were treated in the communist regime their ancestors. The faces of these people, then and those now, mirror what words cannot express.
The exhibition “State terror in Soviet Moldova”, dedicated to the 1949 Stalinist deportations, settled in July 2025, right in the middle of Chisinau.
Two wagons were brought in which, 76 years ago, the Communists transported over 35,000 Bessarabians to Siberia and Kazakstan.
The Russian Federation Embassy protested
In 2023, when the exhibition was brought to the center of Chisinau for the first time, the Embassy of the Russian Federation in the Republic of Moldova was declared revolted by its organization. In a press release, the embassy mentioned that the message of the actions is the intentional incitement to hatred towards Russia and everything that is Russian. In reply, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and European Integration in Chisinau then asked the Russian authorities to refrain from interference in the internal affairs of the Republic of Moldova, “including in church issues and related to our history”
On the steps of the Chisinau Parliament
On Sunday, July 20, during the exhibition, the documentary film “Siberia from Bones” gathered hundreds of visitors, in the square of the Parliament in Chisinau, near the exhibition. The film was directed by Leontina Vatamanu, whose mother, Elena, was among the deported Moldovans.
The heroes of the film spoke about how they were awakened, threatened with weapons, humiliated, hit, pushed into trucks and then in cattle wagons, as they lived in Siberia and how, returning to their villages after Stalin's death, they mentioned anything.
The film's projection was outdoors.
Night of 5 to 6 July 1949
76 years ago, on the night of July 5 to 6, 1949, the Soviet regime organized the largest mass deportation action on the current territory of the Republic of Moldova. In wagons similar to those located these days in the Great National Assembly Square, 35,796 people were forced, of which 11,889 were children.
This year, the exhibition can be visited daily, between 09:00 and 21:00. Also, within the exhibition there will be projections of films and shows dedicated to the memory of the victims of deportations.
The exhibition can be visited until July 27.
