He received a suspended sentence for theft, was stripped of his remaining property, and then reduced to supporting his wife and eight children as a day laborer.
[1] He married and established his own farm in 1904, interrupting his agricultural life to perform his service in the Imperial Russian Army, at Chișinău (1905–1909); he was again called under arms during World War I, serving for its entire duration with the Romanian Front.
He had by then sold or distributed his property—holding on to just eight hectares of farmland and twelve sheep—, but was regarded as a speculator, and continued to pay a large share of his income in punitive taxes.
During the latter event Sârbu was recorded by MASSR officials as almost a kulak, but opted to enter Corjova's collective farm, possibly for fear of deportation to Siberia.
[10] Sârbu himself reported that the OGPU had confiscated and sold his house in March 1933, leaving the family to bunk into a room in Corjova, rented to them by Dumitru Halippa.
[11] The NKVD intervened in April 1935, ordering that Isidor and his brother Simion (who had returned from a Gulag), along with three other men, be resettled away from the Romanian border.
Isidor and Tatiana moved inland to Pervomaisk, leaving their children in the care of relatives from the Dubăsari area; upon arrival, Sârbu was rewarded with his first Soviet passport.
The following year saw the disestablishment of Soviet rule, with Operation Barbarossa—as a participant in this attack, Romania gained control of both Bessarabia and the former MASSR, establishing the semi-autonomous Transnistria Governorate.
During the Soviet withdrawal, Sârbu narrowly avoided being apprehended and executed by the NKVD: though his name was on the kill-list, he hid with his father-in-law, Toader Negrea, until the Romanian Army entered Corjova.
Ahead of this defeat, Sârbu and his daughter Domnica took refuge in Romania; Tatiana and the couple's other children opted to stay in Corjova.
Voronin began his political career with the Communist Party of Moldavia in the 1960s, when he reportedly abjured the Sârbus;[1] according to Ion Costaș, of the Democratic Forum of Romanians in Moldova, it still remains unexplained "how someone with this biographical record could be promoted within the Soviet Union".
[23] His successor as president, Mihai Ghimpu, ordered the dossiers of Soviet political prisoners to be declassified in 2010, which allowed public access to Sârbu's biographical records.
[Voronin] claimed that his grandfather wished to make his return to Corjova in 1945, but that he had been labeled a traitor by the Soviets, and only in that context did he prefer to stay in Romania.