On 17 June, the Government approved the allocation of over 1.8 million lei to compensate people whose assets the communist regime had confiscated, according to the Government’s statement. It is a modest sum, for just six people, distributed through a few local councils. But behind this dry figure lies one of the state’s heaviest debts to its own citizens — and in Ungheni, it is measured in thousands of fates.
What the Government decided
The tranche approved now goes to six people — through the Bălți and Chișinău city councils and the district councils of Călărași, Dondușeni, Dubăsari and Râșcani. The Ungheni district is not on the list this time. For the whole of 2026, the budget provides 4.9 million lei for such compensation — a pace that, set against the real number of those entitled, says a great deal about how far the end of this reckoning is.
Who is entitled and how to claim
The mechanism has existed for over three decades, under the Law on the rehabilitation of victims of political repression, adopted in 1992. The right to restitution or compensation belongs both to living victims and to their heirs. Confiscated assets are returned in kind, and when this is no longer possible, compensation is paid, calculated at the market price at the time the claim is examined — with one important limit: land, forests and plantations are not returned.
Claims are filed with and examined by special commissions of the district or municipal councils, within up to six months, and payment is staggered over several years. The law also sets a figure that says everything about the distance between justice and a symbolic gesture: for each person killed or who died in the repression, the state pays the heirs compensation of 540 lei.
The memory of the Ungheni district
This is where the national story finds its local weight. Although the district is not in the current tranche, the trace of the repression is deep. In the fourth volume of the “Book of Memory” — the official catalogue of the victims of communist totalitarianism — the section devoted to the Ungheni district gathers thousands of names; by the newsroom’s count, around 2,900 named records from more than 60 localities.
The documents show both major waves of terror. In 1941, the villages’ elites were taken: in Cornești, families of merchants and a member of the National Christian Party; in Unțești, two former mayors, who later died in camps in the Urals. In 1949, in “Operation South” — the largest wave, when more than 11,000 families were deported across Bessarabia — the families declared “kulaks” were taken, such as those from Cetireni, sent to the Tyumen region. These are the names of householders, of people with land and a shop, erased overnight from their villages.
The question that remains
It is precisely against this background that the national figure of “six people” takes on another meaning. The real question is not how much was confiscated, but how many of the thousands entitled in the district — or of their heirs — ever claimed what is due to them. The direct survivors of 1949 are now over 80; most claims come from heirs, many of them gone abroad or unaware of the procedure. And compensation at “current market price” rarely covers a whole lost household. How many cases the Ungheni district has had and how many have been completed are data we will request from the district council and the specialised commission at the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
They never asked for revenge, but they asked for truth. And it is our duty to give them this truth — through recognition, through education, through keeping their memory alive.
Maia Sandu, President of the Republic of Moldova, at the commemoration of 6 July 2025
The national fact and the sum come from the Government’s statement; the legal framework, from the text of Law no. 1225/1992. The national historical figures (the waves of 1941, 1949 and 1951) vary between sources and are presented as such. The number of names for the Ungheni district comes from the newsroom’s count of the records in the fourth volume of the “Book of Memory” and is an estimate, not an official figure. There is no official per-district breakdown of the deportees, nor public data on the number of compensation claims from the Ungheni district; we will request them from the responsible institutions.