Isidor Sârbu, also known as Sîrbu (1887 – 1980), was a victim of dekulakization in the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (MASSR). Of Romanian heritage, Sârbu was born a citizen of the Russian Empire in Corjova, where he spent some fifty years of his life. Before the October Revolution, he had amassed a relatively large agricultural estate and was employing farmhands, leading him to be designated a kulak. Politically and socially marginalized by the MASSR, he sold most of his properties before the land collectivization of 1930. Sârbu was allowed to join the collective farm, and became one of its managers, but in 1933 lost his position and found himself arrested by the OGPU. He received a suspended sentence for theft, was stripped of his remaining property, and then reduced to supporting his wife and eight children as a day laborer.
In 1935, the NKVD engineered Sârbu's forced resettlement to Pervomaisk, separating him from his children. He was arrested after his clandestine return to Corjova, in 1936, and sentenced to a prison term in Tiraspol; in 1937, he broke the terms of his parole and was rearrested, along with his wife Tatiana. They returned to Corjova in 1940, shortly before Romania occupied the region. Narrowly escaping execution by the NKVD, Sârbu welcomed the Romanian-established Transnistria Governorate, which appointed him Mayor of Corjova. He fled to Romania in early 1944, leaving most of his family behind. Sârbu lived in his adoptive country at Brezoaele, becoming noted for his criticism of the Romanian communist regime. His descendants in modern-day Moldova include Vladimir Voronin, who became chairman of the Party of Communists and served terms as President of Moldova. His connections to Sârbu, first exposed publicly in the early 2010s, have remained a topic of controversy.
Biography
Isidor Sârbu, described in some sources as a "full-blooded Romanian" or "great Romanian", was born in 1887 in the village of Corjova, then part of the Russian Kherson Governorate—and on the Dniester-marked border with Bessarabia Governorate. According to records of his interrogation, he was from a peasant family that, at one point, comprised eleven individuals; he had five sisters and four brothers. He married and established his own farm in 1904, interrupting his agricultural life to perform his service in the Imperial Russian Army, at Chișinău (1905–1909); he was again called under arms during World War I, serving for its entire duration with the Romanian Front. By 1917, his farm stretched over 40 hectares, in addition to which he leased 10–15 hectares; he owned two houses, some ten cows, and 25 sheep, and employed three or four seasonal farmhands. He and his wife Tatiana Negrea had eight living children by 1933; the oldest was a daughter, Olga, born in 1915 or 1916.
Shortly after the war, Bessarabia united with Romania, leaving Corjova on Romania's border with what became in 1922 the Soviet Union; the MASSR was organized on that border territory in 1924. Little is recorded of Sârbu's life during the October Revolution and the Ukrainian Civil War, down to the New Economic Policy of the late 1920s. Branded a kulak by the MASSR government, he had no voting rights in Soviet elections, down to 1928, when he was enfranchised as a serednyak (middle-income peasant). He had by then sold or distributed his property—holding on to just eight hectares of farmland and twelve sheep—, but was regarded as a speculator, and continued to pay a large share of his income in punitive taxes. This period was followed by the collectivization of 1930. During the latter event Sârbu was recorded by MASSR officials as almost a kulak, but opted to enter Corjova's collective farm, possibly for fear of deportation to Siberia. He managed to earn the respect of his peers, being selected as one of the farm's administrators. Despite his efforts at integration, Sârbu targeted by the dekulakization campaign of 1932. Initially prosecuted for theft of collective property in August 1932 (he and one of his sons, Marcu, allegedly burned down some of the crops), he was excluded from the collective farm in February 1933; in April, the OGPU arrested Isidor and Tatiana Sârbu. A tribunal found the evidence against Isidor inconclusive, and he received a suspended sentence.