The pact contained a secret protocol, revealed only after Germany's defeat in 1945, according to which the states of Northern and Eastern Europe were divided into German and Soviet spheres of influence.

[5] On 26 June 1940, four days after the end of the battle of France, the Soviet Union issued an ultimatum to the Romanian Kingdom, demanding the latter cede Bessarabia and Bukovina.

Northern and southern parts of the territories occupied by the Soviet Union in June 1940 (the current Chernivtsi Oblast and Budjak), which were more heterogeneous ethnically, were transferred to the Ukrainian SSR, although their population also included 337,000 Moldavians.

[11] In the summer of 1941, Romania joined Hitler's Axis in the invasion of the Soviet Union, recovering Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, as well as occupying the territory to the east of the Dniester it dubbed "Transnistria".

The Soviet authorities targeted several socio-economic groups due to their economic situation, political views, or ties to the former regime.

According to a report by the Presidential Commission for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania, no less than 86,604 people were arrested and deported in 1940 and 1941 alone, comparable to the estimative number of 90,000 repressed put forward by Russian historians.

For instance, in just two days, from 6 to 7 July 1949, over 11,342 Moldavian families were deported by the order of the Minister of State Security, Iosif Mordovets under a plan named "Operation South".

[13] The number of the ethnic Bessarabia Germans also decreased from over 81,000 in 1930 to under 4,000 in 1959 due to voluntary wartime migration (90,000 were transferred in 1940 to German-occupied Poland)[16] and forced removal as collaborators after the war.

According to Charles King, there is no evidence that it was provoked by Soviet requisitioning of large amounts of agricultural products and directed towards the largest ethnic group living in the countryside, the Moldavians.

[13] With the regime of Nikita Khrushchev replacing that of Joseph Stalin, the survivors of Gulag camps and of the deportees were gradually allowed to return to the Moldavian SSR.

The political thaw ended the unchecked power of the NKVD–MGB, and the command economy gave rise to development in the areas such as education, technology and science, health care, and industry.

In December 1971, following an informative note from Ion Stănescu, the President of the Council of State Security of the Romanian Socialist Republic, to Yuri Andropov, the chief of KGB, three of the leaders of the National Patriotic Front, Alexandru Usatiuc-Bulgăr, Gheorghe Ghimpu and Valeriu Graur, as well as a fourth person, Alexandru Șoltoianu, the leader of a similar clandestine movement in Northern Bukovina, were arrested and later sentenced to long prison terms.

In 1971, the Soviet Council of Ministers adopted a decision "About the measures for further development of Kishinev city" that secured more than one billion roubles of investment from the USSR budget.

Subsequent decisions directed enormous wealth and brought highly qualified specialists from all over the USSR to develop the Soviet republic.

Although Brezhnev and other CPM first secretaries were largely successful in suppressing Moldavian nationalism, Mikhail Gorbachev's administration facilitated the revival of the movement in the region.

His policies of glasnost and perestroika created conditions in which national feelings could be openly expressed and in which the Soviet republics could consider reforms independently from the central government.

In 1990, when it became clear that Moldavia was eventually going to secede, a group of nationalist pro-Soviet activists in Gagauzia and Transnistria proclaimed themselves as separate from the Moldavian SSR in order to remain within the USSR.

[19] Starting in the 1960s, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej and Nicolae Ceaușescu began a policy of distancing from the Soviet Union, but the debate over Bessarabia was discussed only in scholarship fields such as historiography and linguistics, not at a political level.

At one of his meetings in Bucharest, Bodiul said that "the good relationship was initiated by Ceaușescu's visit to Soviet Moldavia, which led to the expansion of contacts and exchanges in all fields.

As late as November 1989, as Russian support decreased, Ceaușescu brought up the Bessarabian question once again and denounced the Soviet invasion during the 14th Congress of the Romanian Communist Party.

Until the 1978 Constitution of the Moldavian SSR (15 April 1978), the republic had four cities directly subordinated to the republican government: Chișinău, Bălți, Bender, and Tiraspol.

In the aftermath of World War II, many Russians and Ukrainians, along with a smaller number of other ethnic groups, migrated from the rest of the USSR to Moldavia in order to help rebuild the heavily war-damaged economy.

[35] According to a 2017 survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, nostalgia for the USSR is common with 70% of Moldovans stating that the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 was a bad thing for their country.

[36] In the region of Gagauzia, the main street of Etulia is named after Vladimir Lenin and a statue of Karl Marx is still preserved in front of the village hall.