Communist Party of Moldavia


The Communist Party of Moldavia was the ruling and the sole legal political party in the Moldavian SSR, and one of the fifteen republic-level parties that formed the Communist Party of the Soviet Union until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. During World War II, it was the driving force of the Moldovan resistance against Axis occupation.
Perestroika period, that had seen the party increasingly pummeled, was also marked by November riots. The party leader Semion Grossu was replaced with Petru Lucinschi on November 16, 1989.
On 27 August 1991 Moldova declared Independence and the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic came to its end; soon after that, the Communist Party was banned along with all other communist organisations. On 7 September the Parliament of Moldova lifted the ban on communist activities.

First Secretaries

Aftermath

In 1993, former PCM members founded the Party of Communists of the Republic of Moldova, which became the largest party in Moldova since the 2001 elections, and the ruling party from 2001–2009. In 2011 a group of communists led by the executive secretary of the old Communist Party of Moldova, Igor Cucer, came to the public attention, claiming that they are the "real communists" and they want to revive the party formally; they also stated that the PCRM has become a pseudo-Communist and liberal-bourgeois party serving the interests of one of the county’s richest men, Oleg Voronin, son of president of Moldova from 2001 to 2009 and leader of the PCRM Vladimir Voronin. Cucer claimed then: "The PCRM's 8-year rule made the poor poorer and the rich richer".
The Commission for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in Moldova was created in 2010 to study and analyze the 1917–1991 period of the communist regime.