A word about Vadim Pirogan – a true patriot, writer and political prisoner

A few days ago, on 28 June, Vadim Pirogan, a true patriot, celebrated his birthday. God gave me the opportunity to know this special man. I met him in 2003 when I was working in an NGO for veterans of the Dniester war. This wise man with a difficult life, like many of my comrades, treated me with respect and understanding. On 16 January 2007, Vadim Pirogan entered the world of the righteous.

I have posted a picture from the summer of 2006. Vadim Pirogan and I are at the National Army Museum for an activity on missing persons in armed conflicts. I remember Mr. Pirogan’s inspiring speech about missing civilians from the days of the 1991-1992 war on the left bank of the Dnieper.

Half a year later, in January 2007, Vadim Pirogan died. I regret that I was not able to attend his funeral. From the sixth floor of the emergency hospital where I was admitted, I could see the crowd at the entrance to the Writers’ Union building who had come to bid farewell to the founder of the Museum of the Memory of the Nation in Chișinău (4 Costache Negruzzi Street).

I confess that in 2008, together with leaders of non-governmental organisations, I signed a petition to the Chișinău City Council (the president was Mr. Mihai Ghimu) to name one of the streets in Chisinau after Vadim Pirogan. Unfortunately, our appeal was not considered. We do not know what obstacle the municipal dignitaries had, we were treated with silence. Strangely, in the Soviet Union the authorities at all levels were obliged to respond to any petition within 15 days. I ask myself: did this man deserve to be eternalised in Chisinau by naming a street after Vadim Pirigan? I think so.

Vadim Pirogan was born in 1921 in the town of Bălți, the son of Ștefan Pirogan, an honest and upright man who was the mayor of the town from 1923 to 1934. Ștefan Pirogan’s wicker house in Pământeni, Bălți was the home of important people: Constantin Stere, Pan Halippa, Anton Crihan, Moș Ion Codreanu, Ion Pelivan, Emanuil Cateli, Costache Leanca, former members of the National Parliament until 1940, now forgotten. Stefan Pirogan, although a leftist, was arrested on 13 June 1941 and died of hunger, cold and disease at the age of 52 in the Soviet camp of Ivdeli in the Ural Mountains. Vadim studied at the city’s “Ion Creangă” gymnasium, where he had colleagues Eugen Coșeriu, Valeriu Gafencu, Ovidiu Creangă, Valentin Mândâcanu. On 25 June 1941, at the age of 17, the young Vadim Pirogan was picked up in the street by Soviet secretaries and sent to the Taișet-Bratsk camp in Siberia for five years without trial, accused of espionage. Of the 1300 Romanian Bessarabians imprisoned there, only about 150 survived.

In 1946 he returned to Bălți, enrolled at the Pedagogical Institute, but, again persecuted by the N.K.V.D., he left the Moldavian SSR and settled in Lvov. In 1947, as a student at the Institute of Forest Engineers in Lvov, he was expelled from the city after three months as a former political prisoner. Thanks to another Romanian who had settled in Lvov, Alexandru Medvețchi, a medical doctor, he obtained a new residence visa in Lvov, where he worked as a driver for 20 years. He was rehabilitated in 1958. In 1968, at the age of 44, he graduated from the Polytechnic Institute and worked in the Lvov bus park as a mechanical engineer, then as chief engineer. In 1970 he moved to the Laz bus factory, where he was the head of the bus department for 17 years. In the 1970s he suffered a heart attack and wrote his first memoirs in hospital. In 1984 he retired and travelled by car to Vladivostok – 14,000 km – to visit the places where he had suffered.

After humiliation and injustice, Vadim Pirogan stood up and died standing up. In 1989 he returned to Moldavia, to Chisinau, and took part in the movement to liberate the country from the Soviet yoke. At the age of 72, he published his first book, and after 80, he promptly and resolutely engaged in Internet communication. In 1993 he published his trilogy “With Your Mind, My Bessarabia”, sponsored by a great Romanian patriot, Sergiu Grossu from Paris, in which he describes the tragedy of the Romanians in Bessarabia under Soviet occupation. The last book, “Calvary”, Vadim Pirogan printed himself with a pension of 15 USD, in 100 copies on poor quality paper. He is the author of five books, including “Times and People. Destine românești”, written with Boris Movilă, a former schoolmate.

In 2002, he founded the “Museum of the Memory of the Nation” in Chișinău, at Negruzzi 4, with materials about the tragedy of the Romanians in Bessarabia. Here you can find documents, testimonies about Soviet crimes in the USSR, Romania and other countries. Sergiu Grossu was the first person to understand the importance of this museum and to support it financially. Vadim Ștefan Pirogan was the president and founder of the Association of Former Political Prisoners and Veterans of the Romanian Army of the Republic of Moldova, elected in 1998 after the death of the Basarabian Romanian patriot Dumitru Crihan, son of Anton Crihan, one of the founders of the Association. He was vice-president of the association “Pro Bessarabia and Bucovina”, member of the Writers’ Union of the Republic of Moldavia.

In May 2002, he wrote a letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin on behalf of those oppressed by the Soviets between 1940 and 1988. Even after the authorities of the former Soviet Union condemned the genocide and the political prisoners and deportees were rehabilitated, they were not given any of their own or their parents’ property (houses, land or other possessions). Pirogan calls for “a Christian solution to the historical injustice and the payment of compensation for all that was taken from us by force and for our work during the deportation and in the camps for years of torment and suffering”. “Today, as in the past, – writes Vadim Pirogan, – democratic Germany has for many years recognised the crimes committed by the totalitarian Hitler regime and has asked for forgiveness from the oppressed peoples, and now it is paying out large rewards worth billions to those who were exterminated and to those unfortunate people who remained alive who were in German camps or worked in its factories, plants and estates. Vadim Pirogan was puzzled and outraged by the reply from the Russian authorities, which showed that the Russian Federation had nothing to do with the USSR and that the message from the former Bessarabian prisoner had been sent to the wrong address. How so? When it came to the petty interests or assets of the former USSR abroad, the Kremlin did not hesitate to claim that it was the successor to the former Soviet empire.

Writer and political prisoner Vadim Pirogan died in Chișinău on 16 January 2007 at the age of 86. He was due to attend the launch in Chisinau of a book entitled “Romanians East of the Bug” by another Romanian victim of communism, Anton Golopentia. Pirogan had been married to his wife Veronica for 58 years and they had three children. Until his last day, he fought tirelessly for the realisation of a dream: the unification of Bessarabia with Romania. Those who knew him believe that Mr. Vadim Pirogan “had a vocation that sometimes exceeded his physical strength, was stronger than the instinct of self-preservation and was an illustration of the idea that every human being is part of God’s plan”.

(Andrei Covrig, Col. (r.) – istoria.md)