 His place of birth was Konstantinovka village, which was then part of Kherson Governorate, Russian Empire (and is now in Mykolaiv Oblast, Ukraine).From 1924, areas near Konstantinovka were absorbed by the Moldavian ASSR, set up for Romanians and Moldovans in the Ukrainian SSR; most of present-day Moldova, or historical Bessarabia, was at the time united with Romania.Historian Lilia Crudu argues that Salogor, like his colleague Nicolae Coval, became a "Moldovan" or "Moldavian" only as a byword for his geographic origins in that area, where he also received his communist training; she notes that Salogor was not a native speaker of Romanian (or "Moldovan").