10,000 Unity-Minded Romanians Stream Into Soviet Moldavia

About 10,000 Romanians, many waving flags and chanting “Unite, unite with the country,” poured across a bridge into Soviet Moldavia to mark the 50th anniversary of Moscow’s annexation of the republic.

Smaller groups from Kishinev, the capital of Soviet Moldavia, and other areas crossed into Romania to visit relatives.

The Romanians surged across a bridge at Albita into the Soviet republic despite attempts by border guards to stop them.

Several Romanian army helicopters flew over the frontier surveying the tens of thousands of people who crossed at Albita and at other points along the border.

Romanian and Soviet border guards watched the exuberant Romanians, who crossed without passports or visas. No incidents were reported before the crowds returned home.

The Soviet Union occupied Bessarabia, then a part of Romania, in June, 1940, and annexed it as the Soviet republic of Moldavia.

“You cannot stop these people. They have the same blood in their veins,” said a Soviet border official. He was pushed aside by hundreds of Romanians who stormed past a red line marking the border in the middle of the bridge.

Romanians and Moldavians were seen swapping addresses, books and records and heatedly discussing the possibility of reunification.

“This celebration does not do any good for the U.S.S.R., but it does to us because we want to live with our families from the other side in democracy,” said 24-year old Elena Matarkova.

The Popular Front of Moldavia and other official and independent cultural organizations have been growing on both sides of the frontier.

On May 6, tens of thousands of Romanians streamed across eight bridges on the Prut River into Moldavia, many of them for their first visit to the republic in half a century.

Last year, Moldavia restored its language’s Latin script, which is virtually identical with the Romanian script. The Soviet Union had imposed the use of the Russian Cyrillic alphabet.

On Saturday, Moldavia’s Parliament followed the Baltic republics and Russia in approving a declaration of sovereignty, declaring that its laws supersede those of the Soviet Union.

Addressing the crowd on the bridge, Ion Hadarcan, president of the Popular Front of Moldavia, said Sunday that the declaration of sovereignty has turned Moldavia “into a free nation again.”