duckzilla wrote:To me, it's just much more complicated with Russia and Stalinism. The perpetrators as much as the victims had varying origins, histories and ethnic backgrounds. Stalin himself wasn't an actual Russian, but from Georgia. It is not a simple "the Germans tried to kill all Jews in Europe". Even things like the brutal dissolution of kulaks as a class in the dekulakization, where hundreds of thousands were starved and mass executed, are difficult to assess. Russia itself seems to have been much more of a victim of its own totalitarian government than Germany was.
Timeline:
- 26 June 1940 - The USSR gave Romania an ultimatum to cede Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina or face war.
- Traitorous king Carol II gives up without a fight and agrees to such conditions. He later fled the country.
- August 2, 1940 - The Moldavian Soviet Republic is constituted as part of the USSR, which included most of Bessarabia. Bukovina and Hertsa, the other territories taken by the USSR from Romania were glued to the Ukrainian soviet republic.
- Between late 1940 and 1951, Stalin starts a policy of deporting many locals (including Romanians) to forced labour camps. Stalin's regime labelled them kulaks and, by any subjective criteria they found convenient (such as owning too much land), declared them enemies of the soviet order. They were deported to forced labour camps or killed.
https://www.rri.ro/en_gb/the_genocide_o ... na-2547072
The Romanians in Bukovina who refused the Soviet occupation or to be deported to Siberia chose to seek refuge in Romania. The Soviet regime however was not one to respect the will of the people, particularly when it came to freedom of movement. So, as a first step, they closed down the border, to show their determination. At the beginning of 1941, the NKVD spread rumors according to which the regime would allow civilian population free and safe passage into Romania. On April 1, a group of approximately 3,000 Romanians from villages on the valley of Siret River made their way towards the border, planning to cross the border into Romania. 3 kilometers from the borders, the Soviet border police warned the convoy to halt. The people ignored the warning and the military opened fire, killing an unknown number of innocent civilians. The survivors were hunted down and killed with the bayonets. After the massacre, the wounded and the dead were buried in mass graves, men, women and children. The few who were arrested were questioned, tortured and shot. Soviet archives speak of 20 victims, while separate estimates claim that as many as 2,000 people were killed.