Bessarabia, formerly a Romanian province, part of the Russian Empire for one hundred and six years, was reunited with Romania in 1918, but became a Soviet territory in 1940, as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
It was re-liberated by Romanian forces in 1941, but then re-annexed by the Soviet Union in 1944, becoming the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic. It became a centre for experiments by the CPSU and NKVD: deportations, extermination of the elites, collectivisation of the villages, forced industrialisation, Russification of culture and public life, alteration of mentalities.
Photographs and texts illustrating these atrocities are displayed on the walls, atrocities that occurred in each of the sixteen republics of the Soviet empire before its collapse in 1991.
The material was provided to the Sighet Memorial by Professor Anatol Petrencu of Kishinev University and Dr. Elena Postică, deputy manager of the History National Museum of the Republic of Moldova.
