no native equivalent. Then in February 1932, communists in the MASSR received a directive from the Communist Party of Ukraine to switch Moldovan writing to the Latin alphabet. This was part of the massive Latinization campaign of minority languages in the USSR, based on the theory of Soviet linguist Nikolai Marr postulating the convergence to a single world language, expected to be a means of communication in the future classless society (Communism). This directive was passively sabotaged by the "autochthonist" majority, until Stanislav Kosior (General Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party) and several MASSR communists visited Joseph Stalin — who reportedly insisted on faster Latinization with the ultimate goal of the convergence of Moldavian and Romanian cultures, hinting at the possibility of a future reunion of Moldova and Romania within the Soviet state. Nevertheless, resistance to Romanization among communist activists persisted, and after 1933, a number of prominent "autochthonists" were repressed, their books destroyed, and their neologisms banned. After the infamous February–March (1937) Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union plenum, which escalated the Great Purge, both "Romanizators" and "autochthonists" were declared "imperialist spies": "autochthonists", because they sabotaged the Latinization, and "Romanizators", because they were "agents of boyar Romania" ("Боярская Румыния"), i.e., anti-Soviet. In February 1938, Moldovan communists issued a declaration transferring Moldovan writing to the Cyrillic alphabet once again, which in August 1939 was made into a law of the Moldavian ASSR, and after 1940, of the Moldavian SSR. The motivation given was that the Latinization was used by "bourgeois-nationalist elements" to "distance the Moldavian populace from the Ukrainian and Russian ones, with the ultimate goal of the separation of Soviet Moldavia from the USSR". Moldovans in Soviet Moldova In June 1940 Bessarabia was occupied by the Soviet Union. Most of Bessarabia and about half of the MASSR were merged into a newly created Moldavian SSR, which became the fifteenth union republic of the USSR. A year later, in June 1941, Romania attacked the Soviet Union as part of Operation Barbarossa and retook Bessarabia (see Operation München). Between 1941 and 1944, Romania also occupied the territory between the Dniester and Bug rivers (historic Transnistria). By August 1944 the Soviets had taken back all the territories they lost in 1941, which remained in the Soviet Union until the latter's dissolution in 1991. During the first years of Soviet occupation, the term "Romanian language" was forbidden. The official