Tatarbunary Uprising
타타르부나리 봉기
A pro-Soviet armed rising in and around Tatarbunary in Romanian-ruled southern Bessarabia on 15–18 September 1924. Part of a Comintern plan for revolt in Romania, it was led by a revolutionary committee under Andrei Klyushnikov (Nenin), which proclaimed a “Moldavian Soviet Republic” as part of the Ukrainian SSR, and was crushed by the Romanian Third Army Corps within three days. The “Trial of the 500” that followed drew international attention.
In depth
After Romania rejected the Soviet proposal of a plebiscite in Bessarabia at the Vienna talks of March–April 1924, the Comintern Executive told the communist parties on 20 July that “the Russian proletariat is threatened with war from Romania”. On 8 August a meeting chaired by Vasil Kolarov, secretary of the Balkan Communist Federation, drew up a plan for risings in five zones of Romania by mid-September, counting on peasant resentment of the 1921 land reform and on the famine caused in southern Bessarabia by the drought of summer 1924. On the ground, a Soviet-controlled party committee led from May 1922 by two Comintern agents, Klyushnikov and Nicolai Shishman, had set up revolutionary committees and armed detachments in 25 villages and two towns of Cahul, Ismail and Cetatea Albă counties and stockpiled arms. When leaders were arrested after a raid on Nikolaievca on 11 September, Nenin brought the plan forward. On the night of 15–16 September armed groups seized Tatarbunary town hall and proclaimed the republic; the rebels, 4,000–6,000 strong, were mainly Ukrainians and Russians, with little support from the Romanian, Bulgarian and German populations.
Romanian troops stormed Tatarbunary after shelling it on 18 September (Russian Wikipedia gives the 19th and alleges chemical shells), with the Danube Fleet joining the suppression, and Klyushnikov was killed while fleeing. English Wikipedia reports 1,600 arrested and 3,000 dead, Russian Wikipedia more than 3,000 dead. In the “Trial of the 500”, held for 103 days from 24 August to 2 December 1925, 489 were prosecuted, 287 tried and 85 convicted; only nine defendants and none of the convicted were Romanians. Romain Rolland, Theodore Dreiser and Albert Einstein, among others, spoke for the defendants, and Henri Barbusse attended the trial and wrote The Hangmen, which helped earn Romania the name of a “minorities’ prison”. The Romanian authorities, the non-communist socialist Ilie Moscovici and the American scholar Clark saw a communist raid engineered from without; van Meurs judges its timing between the failed Vienna talks and the proclamation of the Moldavian ASSR too precise for the Kremlin not to have been involved, while Ukrainian and Russian authors stress economic crisis, famine and harsh administration.