Igor Cașu, Political Repressions in the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic after 1956: Towards a Typology Based on KGB files

Abstract The study is based on first hand accounts from the archive of the former KGB of the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic. This data has been disclosed recently in the framework of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Totalitarian Communist Regimes in the Republic of Moldova, created in mid January 2010 (the author was the vice-chairman). According to the new disclosed data, one can see that political repressions did not stop in 1953 when Stalin died, but continued until the mid 1980s during Gorbachev’s Perestroika. The aim of the article is to present separate cases from each post Stalinist decade and try to sketch a typology based on various motivations for repression on the part of the regime, and resistance from the unconscious and conscious critics of the Soviet Communist regime. The basic typology the author formulates implied the existence of two distinct groups of ‘enemies’ of the regime: the first one, called dissenters, being the persons that criticized the regime not straightforwardly as an illegal or unjust political system, but rather protesting against certain elements of it, be they nationality policy, ethnic discrimination or living conditions; the second category of critics of the regimes were called dissidents, defined as persons formulating a more or less coherent protest against the regime and implying a rather conscious stance, more than a spontaneous one compared to the first category. Keywords: KGB, Communism, political repressions, one party rule, party-state,totalitarianism, Stalinism, post Stalinism, nationalism