The perils of sociological research. Transnistrian Romanians reflected in the sociological survey conducted by Anton Golopenția and in the files of Soviet repression

During the Second World War, the Central Institute of Statistics in Bucharest carried out a series of surveys in the territories of the Soviet Union under military administration between 1941 and 1944. The survey was coordinated by sociologist Anton Golopenția, director of the Research Office of the Central Institute of Statistics, with the aim of identifying the ethnic Romanians in the Soviet Union. The team led by Anton Golopenția produced a sociological monograph of the village of Valea Hoțului in the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (RASSM), which remained in manuscript until 2006. These studies lack references to Soviet repressions against the local population before the outbreak of the war, so we will try to establish what Romanian researchers actually have learned about these repressions in comparison with the data from Soviet archives that have been made public so far.