This mass deportation was organized following the guidelines set by the
NKVD[2] with the USSR Interior People's Commissar
Lavrentiy Beria as the senior executor.[3] The official name of the top secret operation was “Resolution On the Eviction of the Socially Foreign Elements from the Baltic Republics, Western Ukraine, Western Belarus and Moldova”.[4] The Soviet police, called "militsya", carried out the arrests with the collaboration of local Communist Party members.[5]
Background
The June deportations were part of a much larger history of depopulation.[6] The "Stalin deportations" from 1928-1953 targeted 13 different nationalities.[7]
The Baltic states were annexed into the Soviet Union in 1940, in an invasion that followed the signing of the
Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact with
Nazi Germany.[8] In June 1940 the Baltic states were forced to accept Soviet Rule and puppet regimes were installed.[9] Mass deportation campaigns began almost immediately and included the Baltic States, Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova.[10]
Planning for mass deportations began as far back as 1939.[15] The deportation took place from May 22 to June 20, 1941,[16] just before the
invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany, and involved close to a half million people being relocated to interior Soviet Union.[17] The goal of the deportations was to remove political opponents of the Soviet government, not to strengthen security in preparation for the German attack.[18] The NKVD framed the deportees as anti-Soviet, counter-revolutionaries, and criminal elements.[19][20] In fact in occupied
Poland, the fourth wave of mass deportations[21] and in
Ukraine, both intended to combat the "counter-revolutionary"
Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists.[20][22] The deportation program served three Soviet goals: to remove dissidents, to change composition of population through Russian migration, and to have cheap slave labor in
Gulag camps.[23] The operations began May 22 in Ukraine and Poland, June 12 and 13 in Moldova, June 14th in Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania, and June 19th and 20 in Belarus.[2]
The June deportation campaigns resulted in genocidal levels of depopulation.[24] The goal of depopulation was often reflected by
NKVD officials carrying out deportations. For example, in Lithuania, the Lutherans, wealthy, academics, and Nationalists were targeted. Lithuanian affairs commissioner Mikhail Suslov declared "There will be Lithuania - but without Lithuanians."[25][unreliable source?] The deportation took place a year after the
occupation and annexation of the Baltic states and
Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina[20]
The procedure for the deportations was approved by
Ivan Serov in the
Serov Instructions. People were deported without trials in whole families, which were then split.[21] In fact the instructions included paragraphs on how to "separate deportees from a head of a family."[26] Thousands of people were stuffed into cattle cars, usually 30-40 under unsanitary conditions leading to massive casualties, especially among elderly and children.[27] Men were generally imprisoned and most of them died in
Siberia in Gulag camps. Women and children were resettled in
forced settlements[18] in
Omsk and
Novosibirsk Oblasts,
Krasnoyarsk,
Tajikistan,
Altai Krais, and
Kazakhstan.[16] The mortality rate among the Estonian deportees was estimated at 60%.[18]
Following
Stalin's death in 1953
Khrushchev began a program of limited return.[7] In Lithuania, for example, 17,000 people returned by 1956 and 80,000 returned by 1970.[28] Many people deemed nationalist or of non-white ethnic descent were not allowed to return until the 1980s.[29] When survivors did return they faced discrimination and loss of property.[30]
Number of deportees
The number of deported people include:
Pre-war country
Number of deportees
To forced settlements[31] (from official
NKVD reports)
The Day of Remembrance began following the National Awakening movement in the 1980s.[38] On 14 June 1987, the human rights group
Helsinki-86 organized a flower laying ceremony at the Freedom Monument to commemorate the victims of the 1941 deportations.[38] In 1993 the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia (LOM) was founded which organized efforts around Remembrance Days.[37] In Estonia the Estonian Institute of Historical Memory leads vigils on June 14 and March 25.[30]
In media
The June deportation has been the subject of several Baltic films from the 2010s. The 2013 Lithuanian film The Excursionist dramatised the events through the depiction of a 10-year-old girl who escapes from her camp. Estonia's 2014 In the Crosswind is an essay film based on the memoirs of a woman who was deported to Siberia, and is told through staged
tableaux vivants filmed in black-and-white. Estonia's Ülo Pikkov also addressed the events in the animated short film Body Memory (Kehamälu) from 2012. Latvia's The Chronicles of Melanie was released in 2016 and is, just like In the Crosswind, based on the memoirs of a woman who experienced the deportation, but is told in a more conventional dramatic way.[39]
^Saueauk, Meelis (2015-12-21). ""Erikaader": nomenklatuur ja julgeolekuorganid Eesti NSV-s 1940–1953 [Abstract: "Special cadre": the nomenklatura system and the state security organs in the era of Stalinist rule in the Estonian SSR 1940–1953]". Ajalooline Ajakiri. The Estonian Historical Journal (4): 407. doi:10.12697/aa.2015.4.04. ISSN 2228-3897.
^Hiden, John; Salmon, Patrick (1994). The Baltic nations and Europe: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in the twentieth century (rev. ed.). London New York: Longman.
ISBN978-0-582-25650-7.
^Pohl, J.O. (2012). "Soviet apartheid: Stalin's ethnic deportations, special settlement restrictions, and the labor army: The case of the ethnic Germans in the USSR". Human Rights Review. 13 (2): 205–224.
doi:
10.1007/s12142-011-0215-x.
S2CID255519700.