June deportation

The June deportation of 1941 (Estonian: juuniküüditamine, Latvian: jūnija deportācijas, Lithuanian: birželio trėmimai) was a mass deportation of tens of thousands of people during World War II from Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, present-day western Belarus and western Ukraine, and present-day Moldova – territories which had been occupied by the Soviet Union in 1939–1940 – into the interior of the Soviet Union.

[4] The NKVD and Red Army units carried out the arrests, often in collaboration with the Soviet police and local Communist Party members.

[9] In June 1940 the three independent Baltic countries were occupied by the Soviet Red army and new pro-Soviet puppet governments were installed.

[10] Mass deportation campaigns began almost immediately and included Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova.

[2] The goal of the deportations was to remove political opponents of the Soviet government, not to strengthen security in preparation for the German attack.

[14][16] 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.

Women and children were resettled in forced settlements[13] in Omsk and Novosibirsk Oblasts, Krasnoyarsk, Tajikistan, Altai Krais, and Kazakhstan.

[31] 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.

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.