The final head of Soviet Moldavia's Communist Party
He called the 1991 banning of the Communist Party “an illegitimate act.”
Grigore Eremei was a Moldavian party and state official whose career reached its decisive moment at the end of the Soviet system. As First Secretary of the Communist Party of Moldavia in 1991, he occupied the republic's leading party post while the Union was breaking apart and Moldova moved toward independence. After the party was dissolved, he continued in public life as a Moldovan diplomat and parliamentarian, linking a Soviet political career to the institutions of the independent republic.
Also known as: Grigory Isidorovich Eremei · Grigori Yeremei
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1952Began working as a village secondary-school librarian
- 1954–1956Served in the Soviet Army
- 1966–1970First Secretary of the Kotovsk district party committee
- 1970–1980Deputy and First Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Moldavian SSR
- 1980–1990Chairman of the Moldavian republican council of trade unions
- 1989–1991People's Deputy of the USSR
- 1991First Secretary of the Communist Party of Moldavia and member of the CPSU Politburo
- 1994–1998Moldovan Ambassador to Romania
The Soviet Politburo
- Full member 1991.04–1991.08
served until the party ban of 1991.11
Related historical events
Federal Politics as a USSR People's Deputy
Eremei's career also ran through the all-union legislature: in the 1989 elections he became a USSR People's Deputy from the Briceni national-territorial constituency No. 264 in the Moldavian SSR, and he sat on the Council of Nationalities' commission on the social and economic development of union and autonomous republics, autonomous regions and okrugs. The Council of Nationalities was the chamber organized around the union republics and national-territorial units, and that commission dealt with social and economic disparities among them. He held this mandate in 1989-1991, so after he returned to the republican party leadership in February 1991 central and republican politics overlapped for him.
His mandate fell in the period when jurisdiction between the center and the republics was most contested. The 17 March 1991 referendum on preserving the Union went ahead over the objections of several republics: their supreme bodies obstructed it and, as in Moldavia, no central republican referendum commission was set up. Where polling did occur, it was organized locally by authorities that backed the Union or on the territory of Soviet military units; in Moldavia that meant Transnistria and Gagauzia, which declared their own republics, and the Defense Ministry units stationed in Chisinau. The figures reported from those areas, with turnout and support for preserving the USSR near the top of the range, describe those localities rather than the republic as a whole, and the parallel contest between the Moldavian leadership and the center over sovereignty was the setting in which Eremei took over the party in February 1991.
One notable strand of his all-union work was an attempt to raise Moldavia's particular grievances inside a central body. Together with the writer Ion Druță he served on the commission that was to condemn the Soviet-German non-aggression pact, and he pressed its chairman, Aleksandr Yakovlev, to address not only the pact but also the Soviet ultimatum to Romania, in letters asking for both to be condemned. In the final report Moldova was not named as an affected country, and the episode was later cited in Moldovan historical argument. These were the terms on which a Moldavian party leader worked inside all-union institutions in 1991: using the federal mandate to press claims that the republican and central leaderships disputed.