The head of state, Igor Dodon, dismissed historian and military man Vitalie Ciobanu as director of the Center for Military Culture and History in October. The decision comes in the context of the announcement made by the president to close the Soviet Occupation Museum operating within the Military Museum.
Present at the event dedicated to the 20th anniversary of the Union of Officers of the Republic of Moldova, led by his adviser Victor Gaiciuc, Dodon said he wants to make instead a “museum of normal, good, beautiful history”
A good museum must be built. The former one made a museum of which I do not know whose occupations. He must be shut down, if he hasn’t been. Already closed it? And let’s make a museum of normal history, good, beautiful, in which will be found the battle flag that Șoigu gave us, which was here on August 24, on the day of Moldova’s liberation.
said Igor Dodon
The new director of the Center was named colonel Alexandru Chirilenco. He told the press that the Soviet Occupation Museum is, in fact, not a museum, but “an exhibition in the Military Museum”.
“The exhibition continues to operate, its fate depends on the decision of the Minister of Defense and the Supreme Commander (Igor Dodon), to whom I submit.”
declared Chirilenco to deschide.md
According to political analyst Anatol Taranu, this dismissal is a “continuation of the offensive against the revision of the Soviet past, thus trying to turn things to Soviet values, to everything that represents the ideology of the Russian world.”
Whether or not he will succeed in his plan to the end depends only on that resistance force of the Moldovan society, that part of the society that does not want to go back in the past, that does not want the restoration of Sovietism and the entry of Moldova into the spiritual space of the russian world.
said Anatol Taranu for IPAH
Moreover, within the Presidency there is no department with specialists who would have the necessary competencies to offer assessments and make decisions in such areas of concept.
In 2015, at the initiative of Defense Minister Anatol Salaru, at the Center for Culture and Military History of the National Army, a museum was opened where evidence of Soviet occupation is displayed, in memory of the more than 1.5 million basarabians who have were deported and killed during the Soviet occupation, that is, 12.23% of the population of inter-war Bessarabia.