In the 1947 Paris Peace Treaty, the Soviet Union and Romania reaffirmed each other's borders, recognizing Bessarabia, Northern Bukovina and the Hertsa region as territory of the respective Soviet republics.[1]
Throughout the early Cold War, the issue of Bessarabia remained largely dormant in Romania. In the 1950s, research on history and of Bessarabia was a banned subject in Romania, as the Romanian Workers' Party tried to emphasise the links between the Romanians and Russians, the annexation being considered just a proof of Soviet Union's internationalism.[2]
Starting with the 1960s, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej and Nicolae Ceaușescu practiced a policy of distancing from the Soviet Union, but the debate over Bessarabia was discussed only in scholarship fields such as historiography and linguistics, not at a political level.[3]
As the Romania–Soviet Union relations reached an all-time low in the mid-1960s, Soviet scholars published historical papers on the "Struggle of Unification of Bessarabia with the Soviet motherland" (Artiom Lazarev) and the "Development of the Moldovan language" (Nicolae Corlățeanu).[4] On the other side, the Romanian Academy published some notes by Karl Marx which talk about the "injustice" of the 1812 annexation of Bessarabia and Ceaușescu in a 1965 speech quoted a letter by Friedrich Engels in which he criticized the Russian annexation, while in another 1966 speech, he denounced the pre-World War II calls of the Romanian Communist Party for the Soviet annexation of Bessarabia and Bukovina.[5]
The issue was brought to light whenever the relationships with the Soviets were waning, but never became a serious subject of high-level negotiations in itself. As late as November 1989, as Soviet support decreased, Ceaușescu brought up the Bessarabian question once again during the 14th Congress of the Romanian Communist Party, where he denounced the Soviet invasion[6] and demanded the condemnation and annulment of all agreements concluded during the Second World War with Nazi Germany (implicitly the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact), but without any modification of the borders of the European states.[7]