Nikita Salogor
Immediately promoted to Junior Secretary of the PCM, he was co-opted on its Politburo in early 1941, and took part in a workforce recruitment drive, which is described by historian Ion Varta as connected to the deportation of native Romanians.
Cultivating national communism and posthumously labelled a Moldovenist, Salogor advanced an irredentist project, hoping to increase the Moldavian SSR by incorporating the whole of Romanian Moldavia, as well as the Budjak and Bukovina (Greater Moldova).
[1][4] Though described in official records as a poor peasant with only a secondary education,[5][6] it remains attested that the Salogor family had "unhealthy" social origins according to Soviet class definitions, and for this reason Nikita cut off all links with his relatives.
[1] From 1924, areas near Konstantinovka were absorbed by the Moldavian ASSR, set up for Romanians and Moldovans in the Ukrainian SSR; most of present-day Moldova, or historical Bessarabia, was at the time united with Romania.
[22] An earlier report by the Presidential Commission for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania noted that such interpretations are "exaggerated", as a significant part of the workers voluntarily enrolled due to prevailing poverty and astute Soviet propaganda.
According to Varta, this ensured that "the whole population [...] soon learned the truth about the infernal conditions in which inductees were put to work, a matter which later pushed Romanian Bessarabians to resist the policies enforced by Soviet occupation authorities".
[24] In July 1941, when Salogor had joined the PCM Politburo,[25] Nazi Germany began its attack on the Soviet Union; in Bessarabia, this also involved Romanian troops, who managed to annex the region.
[32] However, he could not fully persuade his Soviet overseers, who merely recognized him as an ad interim party leader; his powerful rivals included Nikita Khrushchev, who regarded the PCM as an annex of the Ukrainian Communists.
[33] On 24 June 1942, Salogor received from Colonel Abayev a plan to organize partisan units in Bessarabia—described by historian Anton Moraru as "groups of terrorists and diversionists".
[35] As the Soviets reestablished their presence in Ukrainian lands, Salogor called on Nikolai Mikhailovich Frolov to take up command over partisan units in Bessarabia.
[36] Some Moldavian-designated multinational groups were established by September, when they participated in an attack on Shepetivka railway station in Reichskommissariat Ukraine, and reportedly killed some 2,000 Germans.
Mikhail Markeyev, chief of the NKVD in the Soroca government, reported to Salogor that this operation was carried out in an abusive manner, which could only engender "severe criticism" against the returning Soviets.
[40] Salogor repeated that point in letters he sent to General Ivan Susaykov of the 2nd Ukrainian Front, detailing the Red Army's systematic looting in Bessarabia.
When Susaykov ignored him, Salogor turned to Georgy Malenkov of the Orgburo, informing him that such abuse "create[d] a favorable terrain for the emergence of illegal anti-Soviet activities.
"[41] He argued at the time that a movement against Red Army requisitioning, which sparked a riot at Ochiul Alb, was being encouraged by clandestine far-right groups, namely the National Christian Party and the Iron Guard.
As a result, he was tasked with reissuing Moldova Socialistă daily, which had been previously managed from Moscow by a panel of journalists (variously including Emilian Bucov, Bogdan Istru, and Sorin Toma).
[46] He himself accused the previous Romanian administration of having destroyed the Moldavian Bessarabian patrimony, including 6 million books—this claim is rejected as manipulative by librarian Maria Vieru-Ișaev.
This activity is described by historians Ion Xenofontov and Lidia Prisac as the root of anti-Romanian "indoctrination", creating the "necessary political conditions to disseminate 'Moldovenist' propaganda throughout society, as a means of [its] ethno-national eradication.
[55] When members of a student group in Vadul lui Vodă came to be labeled as fascists, and objected to the charges, Salogor took their reply as proof that they were a solid organization of anti-communists.
His direct contribution was an introductory letter, which argued for the stately unity of "Moldovans" and the economic importance of the Budjak, while other parts of the document repeated proposals first made by PCM-affiliated academics in 1943.
[64] This notion is partly backed by historian Ruslan Șevcenco, who argues that Moldavian Ukrainians in the PCM's leadership made sure to ignore Salogor's proposal.
[65] While Coval remained "cowardly and egotistical" when it came to reporting on the Moldavian famine of 1946,[66] Salogor documented its impact in his letters to Anastas Mikoyan, the Minister of Foreign Trade.
Though such texts proposed massive reductions in the grain quotas that the Moldavian SSR owed to Moscow, Cașu notes that they most likely played no part in Salogor's downfall.
During the interval, some politicians still made oblique references to Western Moldavia as an irredenta, leaving the cause of Ukrainian territories to be embraced by dissidents such as Alexandru Usatiuc-Bulgăr.
[76] Having fallen severely ill by 1980, Salogor pleaded with the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, asking to receive its nomenklatura privileges, including a larger pension.
