Festivals on 7 November 1989 commemorating the October Revolution and 10 November celebrating the Soviet police force offered excellent opportunities for oppositionists to challenge authorities in highly visible settings and disrupt events of premiere importance to the Soviet regime.

During the former event, protesters interrupted a military parade involving troops of the Chișinău Garrison on Victory Square (now Great National Assembly Square), which forced the military to cancel the mobile column planned that day.

This unrest sealed the fate of the increasingly weak First Secretary of the Communist Party of Moldavia.

On November 10, the minister of Internal Affairs Vladimir Voronin was hiding in the building of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, while defending the Ministry of Internal Affairs was entrusted to General Zhukov.

[4] At the end of a year that had seen Semion Grossu and his organization pummeled from both the national revivalist right and the "ultrarevolutionary" internationalist left, Moscow replaced the First Secretary with Petru Lucinschi in a snap Central Committee plenum on November 16, 1989.