The transfer of Bessarabia's Black Sea and Danube frontage to Ukraine insured its control by a stable Soviet republic. This transfer, along with the division of Bessarabia, was also designed to discourage future Romanian claims and irredentism. Under early Soviet rule, deportations of locals to the northern Urals, to Siberia, and Kazakhstan occurred regularly throughout the Stalinist period, with the largest ones on 12–13 June 1941, and 5–6 July 1949, accounting for 19,000 and 35,000 deportees respectively (from MSSR alone). In 1940–1941, ca. 90,000 inhabitants of the annexed territories were subject to political persecutions, such as arrests, deportations, or executions. By participating in the 1941 Axis invasion of the Soviet Union, pro-German Romania seized the lost territories of Bessarabia, Northern Bukovina, as well as those of the former MASSR, and established its administration there. In occupied Transnistria, Romanian forces, working with the Germans, deported ca. 147,000 Jews from the territories of Bessarabia and Bukovina, of whom over 90,000 perished in ghettoes and concentration camps. By April 1944, successful offensives of the Soviet Army occupied northern Moldavia and Transnistria, and by the end of August 1944 the entire territory was under Soviet control, with Soviet Army units entering Kishinev on 24 August 1944. The Paris peace treaty signed in February 1947 fixed the Romanian-Soviet border to the one established in June 1940. The territory remained part of the Soviet Union after World War II as the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic. Soviet Union created the universal educational system, brought high-tech industry and science. Most of these industries were built in Transnistria and around large cities, while in the rest of the republic agriculture was developed. By the late Soviet period, the urban intelligentsia and government officials were dominated mostly by ethnic Moldovans, while Russians and Ukrainians made up most of the technical and engineering specialists. The conditions imposed during the reestablishment of Soviet rule became the basis of deep resentment toward Soviet authorities, manifested in numerous resistance movements to Soviet rule. In 1946, as a result of a severe drought and excessive delivery quota obligations and requisitions imposed by the Soviet government, the southwestern part of the USSR suffered from a major famine resulting in a minimum of 115,000 deaths among the peasants. During Leonid Brezhnev's 1950–1952 tenure as the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Moldavia (CPM), he was ruthless comparing to his predecessor Nicolae Coval in putting down numerous resistance groups, and issuing harsh sentences.