On June 26, 1940, at 22:00, Viacheslav Molotov, People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs of the USSR, presented to the Plenipotentiary Minister of Romania in Moscow, Gheorghe Davidescu, an ultimatum requesting Romania to "return" Bessarabia until June 28 and " transfer of the northern part of Bukovina to the Soviet Union.
The representative of Romania was invited to the headquarters of the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, where, without any explanation, the final note addressed to Romania was handed to him.
During the afternoon of June 27, the Royal House in Bucharest made public, first by radio, the following announcement:
1. Today, at 12.30, under the High Presidency of M. S. Regelui (Carol II - n. N.) Took place the meeting of the Crown Council at the Royal Palace in Bucharest.
2. The Council deliberated on the note given last night, June 26, at 10 pm, by the USSR government to our Minister in Moscow, by which the Soviet government demanded the surrender of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, demanding the Romanian government's response on June 27, 1940.
3. The Council, wishing to maintain peaceful relations with the USSR, approved the Romanian government's decision to ask the Soviet government to set a place and date for the meeting of the delegations of both governments to discuss the Soviet Note.
The response of the USSR government to the proposal of the Romanian government is awaited.
The second Soviet ultimatum on June 27 called for the evacuation of the Romanian administration and army from Bessarabia and northern Bukovina in four days. The next day, the Romanian government led by Gheorghe Tătărescu was forced to submit to Soviet conditions.
The decision to accept the ultimatum was taken in the Crown Council on the night of June 27-28, 1940. The result of the vote is recorded in the diary of King Carol II: 6 votes to reject the ultimatum: Ștefan Ciobanu, Silviu Dragomir, Victor Iamandi, Nicolae Iorga, Traian Pop, Ernest Urdăreanu, 20 votes for accepting the ultimatum: Petre Andrei, Constantin Anghelescu, Constantin Argetoianu, Ernest Ballif, Aurelian Bentoiu, Mircea Cancicov, Ioan Christu, Mitiță Constantinescu, Mihail Ghelmegeanu, Ion Gigurtu, Constantin C. Giurescu, Nicolae Hortolomei, Ioan Ilcuș (Minister of War), Ion Macovei, Gheorghe Mironescu, Radu Portocală, Mihai Ralea, Victor Slăvescu, Gheorghe Tătărescu (Prime Minister), Florea Țenescu (Chief of the General Staff of the Army) and one abstention: Victor Antonescu.
The two Crown Councils held on June 27 occasioned a confrontation between the partisans of defense at all costs of the national territory ("We fight, curse us if we do not fight", exclaimed dramatically Nicolae Iorga) and those who considered that the war was In progress, it was more important to ensure the continuity of the state, which was endangered - they believed - if Romania had engaged in a military conflict with the USSR. At the first Council (meeting at 12 o'clock) the votes were distributed as follows: 11 votes against the acceptance of the ultimatum, 10 for, 5 for discussions and one reserved (Gh. Tătărescu); at the second Council (held at 9 pm), the distribution changed: 19 for the acceptance of the ultimatum, 6 against and one (Victor Antonescu) "expectation".
The answer given by the Romanian government, which declared itself ready to discuss the Soviet demands, was considered unsatisfactory in Moscow, so the new final note demanded the evacuation of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina within four days. On June 28, at 11 o'clock, Gh. Davidescu told Molotov: in the Soviet response. "
The occupation of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina by the Red Army was accompanied by the abusive occupation of Herta, which was neither part of Bessarabia nor of Bukovina but was an integral part of the Old Kingdom. (Note that the Soviet map, attached to the first final note, was drawn to a scale of 1/1800000 so that in the field the feature of a sharp red pencil was 10 km).
The Romanian government instructed Gh. Davidescu "to make every effort to obtain from the Soviet government the waiver of any claims to the territory as part of the Old Kingdom." His efforts as well as those of his successor, Grigore Gafencu, were without result. Some small corrections were obtained on the occasion of fixing the demarcation line ", records the historian Florin Constantiniu in the volume" A sincere history of the Romanian people ". (Univers Enciclopedic Publishing House, Bucharest, 1997).
The source: Diplomatic Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (mac.ro)
The historian Neagu Djuvara has a categorical attitude towards the decision of the government in Bucharest at that time: “There is a principle from which we were not allowed to deviate: do not give up a piece of land without firing a gun. This has been, in my opinion, the biggest political mistake I have made in the last 50 years. We were supposed to fight the Russians in 1940, even if it only lasted eight days. Because, after we ceded Bessarabia and northern Bukovina to the Russians, we had to cede northern Transylvania as well. The Germans punched the masses en masse, and we ceded half of Transylvania to the Hungarians (the Vienna Dictate) and the Bulgarian Quadrilateral, so we lost a third of our teeth in a few months without firing a gun! I repeat my conviction: we had to fight, first because we had to fight; then because judging by the a posteriori, we can estimate that, in the hypothesis in which we would have defended ourselves, the consequences would have been less catastrophic for the country ”. (A short history of Romanians told to young people, Neagu Djuvara, Humanitas Publishing House, 2002).
Out of a population of 3,776,000 inhabitants in the disputed territories, 2,078,000 were ethnic Romanians. More than 200,000 people of all ethnicities took refuge in Romania in the few days following the Soviet ultimatum.
On June 29, 1940, the newspaper "Romania" writes:
"It simply came to our notice then. Don't spare us. The note given by the USSR government put us in front of a harsh reality, which our nation does not experience for the first time. The determined will to keep us out of the bloody tragedies of the world demands relentless customs. We know from past experience that in such hours we are left alone in the face of destiny. And we also know from this experience that often, by overcoming yourself, you overcome the times (…). No questions, no alarms, no deceptions, no vanity will erase the bitter bitterness on our lips. But the silent strength in you will redeem this bitter of today, the confidence of tomorrow. It is the burden beyond the graves of our sleeping princes, who knew how to defeat the brutality of the times with the weapons of the time, making a weapon of time ”.
According to the documents, 32,423 people were to be picked up, of which 6,250 were arrested and the remaining 26,173 deported. The men were picked up by a team of two or three armed soldiers who were told to be ready to leave in a quarter of an hour.
An year later, on the night of June 12-13, 1941, the sinister operation of deporting Romanians considered collaborators of parties and organizations that were seen as opponents of Soviet policies began. The main organizer of the sinister deportation proceedings was Georgian Sergo Goglidze, an apparition of Lavrenti Beria, who had been appointed by him a plenipotentiary of the Council of People's Commissars in Moldova and who will later investigate the so-called "Doctors' Conspiracy".
The deportees were allowed to take 10 kg of luggage from each person, then they were loaded into trucks or carts and taken to the train station. Here the families were separated, the heads of families on one side, the young people over 18 on the other, and the women with small children and the elderly in another convoy being then loaded into freight cars, without receiving water and food. On the wagons the Soviets wrote: “Train with Romanian workers who fled from Romania, under the yoke of the boyars, to come to the Soviet paradise. Get them in the way with flowers! or Volunteer Emigrants ”.
The road to the destination lasted two or three weeks, in extremely difficult conditions, without drinking water and with minimal food, which is why many of the people on the trains died, the corpses being thrown on the road, in the middle of the field. When they arrived in Siberia or Kazakhstan, the deportees were assigned to work in industrial enterprises or in sovkhozes, receiving a minimum ration of food.
The source: dosaresecrete.ro
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