 Before Soviet archives were made accessible, R. J. Rummel had estimated between 1940 and 1941, 200,000 to 300,000 Romanian Bessarabians were persecuted, conscripted into forced labor camps, or deported with the entire family, of whom 18,000 to 57,000 were supposedly killed.After the installation of the Soviet administration, the religious life in Bessarabia and northern Bukovina underwent a persecution similar to the one in Russia between the two World Wars.In the first days of occupation, certain population groups welcomed the Soviet power and some of them joined the newly established Soviet "nomenklatura", including NKVD, the Soviet political police.