One of the darkest, most terrible episodes in WWII. And yes, the Soviets (aka Russia) went unpunished.
In the photos: Konstantin Päts as President of Estonia, and in a Soviet prison camp. He would die in the camp in 1956.
14 June 2023 — On the 14th of June we commemorate the “Victims of the Mass Deportations”. From 1940 to 1951 over 500,000 people from Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were deported from their homes to Siberia due to the terror of a totalitarian Soviet regime.
Driven by an intention to deprive the Baltic nations of their political elite and national identity, the Soviet regime started mass deportation from the countries on the 14th of June 1941. They were deported from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Most belonged to the elites: military, politicians, businessman, the cultural elite. The aim was to deprive these nations of their identity.
Transferred to Siberia in animal carriages, the men were separated from women and sent to labor camps, where around half of them died by executions or by insufferable living conditions. Meanwhile, the women and children were exploited in state-owned farms.
Johan Vaabel writing at the time recalled:
“My family and I were taken from Mulgimaa (southern Estonia) on June 14, 1941. We were sent to the village of Kosotyapka in Tomsk Oblast, Russia. Everything in the camp was organized in such a way that you could only live for six months. I somehow survived”.
History teaches that unpunished crimes inevitably repeat on a larger scale. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, at least 2.8 million Ukrainian citizens have been were deported to the Russian Federation since the invasion of Crimea in 2014. This number is not final, and some sources provide much higher figures – 4.7 million people, 260-700,000 of whom are children. According to Russian officials, 738,000 Ukrainian children were forcibly deported, but Ukrainian sources say only 19,505 of them have been identified.
This is why so many have said that Russia must be inexorably held accountable for its past and present atrocities. If the world fails to bring Kremlin to justice today, tomorrow another nation may repeat the fate of the deported Ukrainians and tragic story of their Baltic predecessors. History keeps repeating until it bears the full consequences.
And so the “legal successor” to the Soviet Union was never made to pay any compensation or any retribution for this. But then the international community for many years was just too busy accommodating to the manipulations of a petroleum mafia state. And so impunity merely begets even more abuses.
So how can we ever expect a country to change and desist from genocidal criminal atrocities when historically it has never been held to account for them? I am very cynical about the possibility of war crime trials and reparations over the current war. The *civilised world* seems content to tolerate this barbarism. And history has shown Russia does this systematically to every nation it attacks.
And to be historically clear, actually the first mass cleaning operation, called “Polish Action”, started in 1937. Everything that could help to keep values common to Poles (language, religion, culture) were banned. Two autonomous districts in Ukraine and Belarus were liquidated and almost all people belonging to local authorities were executed. Record show that over 100,000 people were killed, and some 30,000 were deported. This “action” was a kind of a playground for Soviet authorities, to practice how to deal with other minorities.
The second wave of Poles’ persecution was conducted after September 1939, when Poland was divided between the Soviet Union and Germany. 350,000 Poles were deported, 150,000 of this number who died in the Soviet Union.
And the Soviet authorities went on killing people of other nationalities: Belarusians, Finns, Hungarians, Ukrainians. All used as slave laborers in Russia.
There are many books written about this period yet many stories still not told. Since I started this Holocaust/genocide series, people have emailed me 100s of stories. Anne Applebaum’s book “Gulag, A History” provides 100s of interesting facts and some stories about this entire period. As she notes, we will never know the names of all families which disappeared in Siberia.