Destitute on both sides of the Dniestr

destitute refugees – In the night of 23 February 1932, dozens of people tried to cross the icy Dniestr from Soviet Ukraine into northeast Romania to escape famine. Soviet border guards opened fire and grenades killed 40 of the 62 would-be refugees. A brief surge of international o

Under cover of darkness on the night of 23 February 1932, dozens of people moved slowly towards the eastern bank of the Dniestr River, hoping to cross unnoticed from Soviet Ukraine into northeast Romania. They were fleeing a deadly famine, the result of brutal Soviet collectivization.

A Romanian report says Soviet border guards spotted the group crossing the icy river by foot around 11 p.m. and opened fire with their machine guns. Then they threw a couple of grenades. Forty of the 62 would-be refugees were killed.

Romanian border guards recorded that the survivors who managed to cross—ethnic Moldovans and Ukrainians from a border village of Nezavertailovca—sustained firearm wounds. Some of the people rescued by the Romanian frontier police died just days later.

In a report to the Romanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs on 23 April 1932. General Ion Rășcanu tried to explain what drove people to risk the river in the first place. He wrote that the peasants had been stripped by the Soviets of their agricultural produce and their property in general. unwilling to join in the created collectives. They were willing to flee to Romania, facing death that awaited them at every step.

That desperation wasn’t new. Illegal migration from the Soviet Union to Romania had been ongoing since the Soviets forced peasants to work on collective farms in 1929. The Romanians had been constantly apprehending refugees on the border. Yet the meanings of those arrivals were never stable. Some Romanian officials approached the newcomers as victims deserving help. Others treated them with suspicion, believing many were Soviet spies trying to infiltrate Romania and spread Bolshevik propaganda. That uncertainty left border guards generally eager to turn refugees back into Soviet hands.

This time, the Soviet response was so brutal that even people who only a month earlier had argued for mass expulsion of refugees were forced to look again.

Romanian officials had always held a complicated view of the refugees. Border guards and policemen were quick to stress their humanitarian duty to care for people persecuted by the Soviets. A significant number of the refugees were ethnic Moldavians—considered. by Romanian bureaucrats in the Ministry of Interior. part of the Romanian nation—which helped shape sympathy at the administrative level.

At the same time. Romanian state activity was shaped by an ongoing struggle with Soviet intelligence services that worked to undermine Romanian authorities. Soviet propaganda painted Romania as anti-communist, aligning the country with anyone opposed to the Bolsheviks. In the middle of that. nationalist solidarity and distrust offered refugees a narrow space to argue for their right to remain in Romania—even if their chances were “stacked against them” from the outset.

The outcry sparked by the shootings reached beyond Romania. Inside the country, it culminated in a speech by Prime Minister Nicolae Iorga on 25 March 1932. Iorga urged diplomats in Geneva and elsewhere to request a special response from the League of Nations. even while recognizing it was unlikely the Soviets would respond to a country that was not a member of the League at the time. He also made the few uncontroversial acts of his own political career count: the speech was one of the few moments associated with a man widely described as highly unpopular and divisive. Iorga even contributed money from his own pocket for food and shelter for refugees who had crossed the Dniester.

Western Europe briefly leaned in too. In March 1932, Western European countries began dispatching correspondents to the Dniestr. Le Journal, a major Parisian newspaper, sent its legal correspondent, Géo London, to Tighina—now Bender. The city. London’s French colleagues wrote. “separated not only Russia and Romania but also the civilization of Stalin and the civilization of old Europe.”.

London. the son of an East Prussian Jew. was described by his colleagues as an eternal sceptic who treated antisemitism in the French far right with casual irony. In Dniestr reporting, his tone was different. His reports from the river carried a soberer eye and a surprising compassion: he chronicled malnourished peasants arriving daily in Romania without any money. along with Romanians willing to treat refugees with sympathy yet unable to provide relief in a country on its third year of global economic crisis.

Between 21 and 31 March 1932, Géo London produced ten reports published in a Le Journal special section titled “Le Journal en Dniester.”

For a short stretch, campaigning and politics moved in the same direction.

After the nascent Ukrainian People’s Republic was defeated by the Bolsheviks in 1921. Romania became a place of asylum to a large number of exiled soldiers and officers. From there. they could establish ties to political leaders who had left Ukraine through Poland and then moved on to Paris. forming a government-in-exile. Ukrainian émigré politicians in France tried to push European attention toward Soviet atrocities. Their efforts often failed. including attempts to ride interest sparked by a 1930 League of Nations inquiry into allegations that Liberian officials had sold indigenous people as slaves to Spanish plantation owners—a story that was meant to draw attention to the Soviet Gulag system. This time, however, the Dniester shootings gave them what they had been seeking.

On 20 March 1932. Oleksandr Shulhyn—one of the leaders of the Ukrainian community in Paris—attended a meeting in Brussels as head of the Paris-based Ukrainian Committee of supporters of the League of Nations. He brought two topics: the issue of the neocolonial relationship between Russia and Ukraine within the USSR. and the shootings on the Dniester. The first subject didn’t land with the group. The second did.

A Romanian delegate and member of parliament told the meeting that the mass shooting might provide more conclusive evidence on what was happening in the USSR than any kind of statistical data. Shulhyn leaned on emotion. He graphically described corpses on the Dniester being eaten by wild birds and urged a swift response from the League of Nations Union. calling on the Secretariat of the League of Nations and the Nansen International Office for Refugees to take care of Soviet refugees entering Romania.

At the center of that Brussels exchange was a question Lord Willoughby Dickinson asked—a Liberal Party politician from London and deputy head of the British delegation to the meeting. He wanted to know who the refugees were. When the Romanian representative and Shulhyn initially answered that they were Moldavians and Ukrainians. Dickinson pressed further: “Yes. but what country were they subjects of?”.

The Ukrainian representatives responded unequivocally that all refugees shot at the border were Soviet citizens. Shulhyn later said Dickinson was shocked by the news and requested action immediately: a telegram would be sent to the Secretariate of the League of Nations and to the Nansen Office.

Back in London. the British delegates relayed the information to the Executive Committee of the London-based League of Nations Union. emphasizing that all those shot while crossing the border were Soviet citizens. But the end of their communiqué carried doubt. casting uncertainty over whether the information had been checked: “You will of course realise that our Minister is not in a position to check the accuracy of these events”.

Even with that mistrust, the meeting reshaped money. The redistribution of funds inside the Nansen Office followed. Both Ukrainian and Moldovan/Romanian émigré organizations in Romania began receiving loans of thousands of Swiss francs.

In reports from the first half of 1932. the Nansen Office said the Governing Body made a grant of CHF 8. 000 to enable an experimental settlement of Soviet refugees who had crossed the Dniester. Most funding, however, came not as grants but as long-term credit. The Ukrainian Relief Committee—created by Ukrainian anti-communist émigrés in Romania—received a loan of CHF 10,000 to assist refugees.

The sum wasn’t huge. Yet the earlier situation had been worse: after a year of campaigning. the Ukrainian relief committee had only had enough money to take care of eight people. In that context. the loan became formidable assistance. a reflection of the attention western European public life had given the story.

The attention didn’t last.

By the summer of 1932. large sections of Western European society were absorbed by a third year of global economic crisis. and domestic issues pushed the Dniester tragedy to the margins. Ukrainian émigrés struggled to find money even to cover their basic needs. let alone help desperate people crossing into Bessarabia. The timing made the shift feel cruelly ironic: interest in Ukraine faded as the Soviets began confiscating harvest from peasants en masse. The Holodomor began when the French and British public sphere largely stopped paying attention to the plight of Ukrainian peasants.

Over 1932, attitudes toward the famine and persecutions in the Soviet Union split along political lines. Ukrainian-French historian and author Iryna Dmytrychyn said the issue of famine in Ukraine was treated according to political affiliations: ignored or questioned in communist or leftist press. highlighted in anti-communist or right-wing newspapers.

Across Britain and France. disappointment with how the global economic crisis was handled pulled some intellectuals and elites toward competing extremist outlooks in the early 1930s: one that saw the future in the novel Italian fascist projects of the corporative state. the other enthralled by promises of Stalin’s Five-Year Plans.

Right-wing movements used anti-communist sentiment to mobilize support. In April 1932. Octav-George Lecca—a Romanian historian and former member of the Romanian parliament—gave a lecture to Moscou Attaque!. a conference circle connected to the Belgian anti-communist league. It was described as a small group of liberal and increasingly antisemitic Belgian and French WWI veterans. Lecca urged that signing any non-aggression pacts with the Soviets would be harmful and dangerous. and in his lecture he called the Le Dniester sanglant. the bloody Dniester.

Within a couple of years, that circle shifted sharply to the right. It became an advocate for the nationalist side in the Spanish Civil War, raising funds and even travelling to Spain to fight for Francoist cause.

Le Journal—the same newspaper that had documented the Dniester refugees so extensively—moved further right during the 1930s. In 1937. it published an interview with Adolph Hitler with an introduction praising the “great efforts of the National-Socialist regime to maintain social order and peace.” As the decade approached its end. positions radicalized both on the right and on the left.

By then, the famine itself was being repurposed.

German historians Guido Hausmann and Tanja Penter point to how the Nazi party heavily utilized the Holodomor during its political campaign in Germany in 1933. On 2 March. Adolf Hitler used the famine to criticize Marxism in a speech: “Millions of people are starving in a land that could become the breadbasket of the whole world”. His rise to power changed Europe’s diplomatic landscape, adding new pressure to interstate relations that were already tense.

The Third Reich’s antisemitic policies and its initial wave of brutality against political opposition also drove another wave of emigration. Jews, social democrats, communists and Catholic politicians fled Germany. League of Nations mechanisms had to make ad-hoc arrangements to accommodate these new refugees.

As those groups moved into European view, Soviet-focused refugee issues fell off the radar. Even less relief was available for refugees arriving from beyond the Dniestr in much larger numbers.

German revisionism and repression made the Soviet Union easier, politically, to tolerate. Central European countries such as Poland and Romania tested the waters as early as 1932. seeking negotiation of a non-agreement pact with the Soviets. In 1933, the USSR showed interest in joining the League of Nations. Compared to the nascent Third Reich. centrist politicians began to see the Soviets either as a lesser evil or as a model for dealing with mass unemployment and economic stagnation.

In that environment, rhetoric that didn’t praise Soviet achievements—or at least condemn Bolshevik actions—could be read as playing into Hitler’s hands.

Romania’s political shift came through foreign policy. Newly appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs Nicolae Titulescu pushed for a more Soviet-friendly approach. He was an Anglophile and a staunch supporter of the League of Nations. where he served two consecutive terms as Chairman of the Assembly. His aim was to ease tensions with the Soviet Union by proposing a non-aggression pact and recognition of Romanian hegemony over Bessarabia. Titulescu’s policy did not work out as intended. but it did result in mutual recognition between Romania and the USSR and the establishment of direct diplomatic ties.

In France, a different figure helped legitimize the Soviet Union among left-leaning sections of society: Edouard Herriot. A member of the Parti Radical. mayor of Lyon and two-times prime minister. Herriot visited the Soviet Union from August to September 1933. His itinerary included Biliaivka. a town located 12 km from the Soviet-Romanian border. where at least 200 people had died of starvation during the winter of 1932-1933. Many residents had crossed the Dniester in desperation, and Romanian border guards had noted them.

By 1933, Herriot did not find starving people. Instead, he saw an “exemplary collective farm” with well-fed peasants—an elaborate charade staged by the Soviet secret police. Soviet officials used the performance to make a point: the famine in Ukraine was nothing more than a Hitlerite ploy to discredit the Soviet Union. described as a proponent of a strong League of Nations capable of holding the Nazis back.

Ukrainian politician and writer Milena Rudnycka, referencing Sovietophile French writer Romain Rollan, described how the famine narrative was reframed from 1933 onwards. Rollan wrote, “I don’t want to hear that. My duty is to combat a closer and greater evil. I fight Hitlerism.”

Awareness of the Soviet-induced famine in Ukraine and the further persecution of people fleeing starvation moved from international outrage to suppressed knowledge in less than two years. The Soviet false narrative of collectivization productivity became one of several convenient projections enabling renewed political affiliation with the Soviet Union. Those genuinely hurt by Soviet policies were disregarded in the name of combating a different threat—one that felt closer to home.

One atrocity overshadowed another. Hitler became enemy number one. In that forced transition, the extreme suffering of a people at the hands of Stalin was disregarded, leaving refugees destitute and silenced on both sides of the Dniestr River.

Dniestr Dniestr River Holodomor Soviet collectivization Romania border League of Nations Nansen Office Géo London Nicolae Iorga Ion Rășcanu Oleksandr Shulhyn Lord Willoughby Dickinson Edouard Herriot Nicolae Titulescu Maxim Litvinov Biliaivka Bender Nezavertailovca Ukrainian Relief Committee Soviet secret police