Soviet deportations from Estonia
[1] The two largest waves of deportations occurred in June 1941 and March 1949 simultaneously in all three occupied Baltic countries: Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.
In addition, there were Soviet deportations from Estonia based on the victims' ethnicity (Germans in 1945 and Ingrian Finns in 1947–1950) and religion (Jehovah's Witnesses in 1951).
[2][3] People were deported to remote areas of the Soviet Union, predominantly to Siberia and northern Kazakhstan,[4] by means of railroad cattle cars.
[9][10] In Estonia, as well as in other territories annexed by the Soviet Union in 1939–40, the first large-scale deportation of ordinary citizens was carried out by the local operational headquarters of the NKGB of the Estonian SSR under Boris Kumm (chairman), Andres Murro, Aleksei Shkurin, Veniamin Gulst, and Rudolf James, according to the top secret joint decree No 1299-526ss Directive on the Deportation of the Socially Alien Element from the Baltic Republics, Western Ukraine, Western Belarus and Moldavia[11] by the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (bolsheviks) and the Council of People's Commissars of the Soviet Union of 14 May 1941.
A few weeks later, approximately 1,000 people were arrested on Saaremaa for deportation, but this was interrupted as Nazi Germany launched a large-scale invasion of the Soviet Union and a considerable number of the prisoners were freed by the advancing German forces.
In the early morning of 25 March 1949, the second major wave of deportation from the Baltic Republics, operation "Priboi", carried out by MGB began, which was planned to affect 30,000 in Estonia, including peasants.
Over 8,000 managed to escape, but 20,722 (7,500 families, over 2.5 percent of the Estonian population, half of them women, over 6,000 children under the age of 16, and 4,300 men) were sent to Siberia during three days.
The youngest deportee was one-day-old Virve Eliste from Hiiumaa island, who died a year later in Siberia; the oldest was 95-year-old Maria Raagel.
The last large-scale campaign of deportations from Estonia took place in 1951, when members of prohibited religious groups from the Baltic countries, Moldavia, Western Ukraine and Belarus were subject to forced resettlement.
[20] Outside the main waves, individuals and families were continually deported on smaller scale from the start of the first occupation in 1940 up to the Khrushchev Thaw of 1956.
[citation needed] Estonians' experience with the first year of Soviet occupation, which included the June deportation, led to two significant developments: Only in 1956, during Khrushchev Thaw, were some survived deportees allowed to return to Estonia.
The resolution underlines the millions of victims who were deported, imprisoned, tortured and murdered by totalitarian and authoritarian regimes during the 20th century in Europe.
