On February 19, 1951, Abakumov delivered to Stalin a secret notice which listed the planned numbers of deported "Jehovists" from Ukraine, Belorussia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Moldova, with 1675 persons (670 families) listed for the latter. On March 3, the USSR Council of Ministers issued the corresponding decree, followed by an order of the Ministry of State Security of February 6. On March 24, the Council of Ministers of the Moldavian SSR issued the decree on the confiscation and selling of the property of the deportees. Operation North started at 4:00 am on April 1, 1951.  Read more..

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article "Soviet_deportations_from_Bessarabia_and_Northern_Bukovina#1951", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0.

Only one year after the annexation of Bessarabia (a region that included the current Republic of Moldova) and northern Bukovina by the Soviet troops, to the detriment of Romania, a first wave of mass deportation of Romanian and Moldovan began in the night of June 12 to 13, 1941. This annexation was the result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact signed in 1939 between Hitler's Germany and the USSR which then divided Europe into "spheres of influence". The Post of Moldova had already issued a stamp in 2011 to commemorate the 70th anniversary of this first wave of deportations (30,000 people) and then in 2014 to commemorate the 65th anniversary of a second wave of mass deportation (over 40,000 people deported on 5 and 6 July 1949). Read more..