UNIVERSUL COPILĂRIEI ÎN GULAG: RECONSTITUIRI DIN MĂRTURIILE DE ISTORIE ORALĂ ALE MINORILOR DEPORTAȚI DIN RSS MOLDOVENEASCĂ ÎN PERIOADA 1940–1941, 1944–1953

Abstract

The Gulag childhood universe: restitutions of oral history testimonies by the children deported from Moldavian SSR during 1940–1941, 1944–1953. The article brings to the attention of academic community a series of case studies, relevant for the articulation of a new research topic on the totalitarian regime – the phenomenon of childhood in the Gulag. The case studies we will refer to below reveal the life histories whose course was sealed by the period of the Soviet occupation of Bessarabia, in the years 1940–1941 and 1941–1991. Ignoring this kind of testimony and,subsequently, not valuing the potential of historical document of these sources in knowing the past maintains to this day among the citizens of the Republic of Moldova ambiguous attitudes towards the totalitarian past: from post-totalitarian nostalgia to frustrations, silences and phobias. The history of the victims, told through the testimonies of oral history, can be found among hundreds of files manufactured by the Soviet repression structures, which are today in the funds of the state archives; but not even the most careful scrutiny of them can recover details of personal feelings. Behind the archive files it is impossible to glimpse information about the sufferings, hopes or survival strategies of those sentenced by the regime to forced deportation to the eastern regions of the empire, to forced labor in camps, schooling. The life experiences of children deported from regions entering the Soviet occupation, in accordance with the secret additional protocol of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, are the subject of new historical approaches, which try to reconstruct their particularities, including through the exercise of memory.