Alexandru Șoltoianu (24 August 1933[2][3] – 13 April 2022) was a Moldovan orientalist, activist and a political prisoner in the former Soviet Union.
Between 1969 and 1971, he was a founder of a clandestine National Patriotic Front of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, established by several young intellectuals in Chișinău, totaling over 100 members, vowing to fight for the establishment of a Moldavian Democratic Republic, its secession from the Soviet Union and union with Romania.
On 13 January 1972,[4] following an informative note from Ion Stănescu, the President of the Romanian Council of State Security, to Yuri Andropov, the chief of KGB, Șoltoianu as well as Alexandru Usatiuc-Bulgăr, Valeriu Graur, and Gheorghe Ghimpu were arrested and later sentenced to long prison terms.
He was incarcerated in a prison camp in Mordovia, 400 mi (640 km) southeast of Moscow, notorious for its Soviet Gulag.
Șoltoianu was released only in January 1986, and he returned to his apartment in Moscow, where he continued to live even after 1991, when Moldova became independent.