June deportation

The June deportation (Estonian: juuniküüditamine, Latvian: jūnija deportācijas, Lithuanian: birželio trėmimai) was a mass deportation by the Soviet Union of tens of thousands of people from the territories occupied in 1940–1941: Baltic states, occupied Poland (mostly present-day West Belarus and western Ukraine), and Moldavia.

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This mass deportation was organized following the guidelines set by the NKVD and KGB, with the USSR Interior People's Commissar Lavrentiy Beria as the senior executor. 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” The Soviet police, called "militsya", carried out the arrests with the collaboration of local Communist Party members.[1]

The deportations

The deportation took place from May 22 to June 20, 1941,[2] just before the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany. However, the goal of the deportations was to remove political opponents of the Soviet government, not to strengthen security in preparation for the German attack.[3]

The deportation took place a year after the occupation and annexation of the Baltic states and Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina and targeted "anti-Soviet elements" – former politicians, policemen, wealthy industrialists and landowners, etc.[4] In occupied Poland, it was the fourth wave of mass deportations[5] and was intended to combat the "counter-revolutionary" Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists.[4]

The procedure for the deportations was approved by Ivan Serov in the so-called Serov Instructions. People were deported without trials in whole families.[5] Men were generally imprisoned and most of them died in Siberian prison camps (see Gulag); women and children were resettled in forced settlements[3] in Omsk and Novosibirsk Oblasts, Krasnoyarsk and Altai Krais, and Kazakhstan.[2] The mortality rate among the Estonian deportees was estimated at 60%.[3]

Apart from deportations and resettlement, around 40 mass killings took place in Lithuania in the week between June 22 and 27. For instance, 230 Lithuanian prisoners and civilians were killed at the Pravieniškės concentration camp, while 15 prisoners were executed in the prison of Minsk. Moreover, between 70 and 80 Lithuanian political prisoners were killed by the NKVD in the Rainiai forest, following the disorders of the June Uprising.[6]

Number of deportees

The number of deported people include:

Pre-war
country		 Number of deportees
To forced settlements[7]
(from official NKVD reports)		To prison camps and
forced settlements		Exaggerated
Estonia5,97810,000 to 11,000[3]
Latvia9,546[8]15,000[8]
Lithuania10,18717,500[9]
Poland11,329 (Western Ukraine)
22,353 (Western Belarus)
24,412 (Western Belarus)[10]		200,000 to 300,000[7][5]
Romaniaa24,360300,000[11]
a Moldavia as well as Chernivtsi Oblast and Izmail Oblast of the Ukraine

In media

The June deportation has been the subject of several Baltic films from the 2010s. The 2013 Lithuanian film The Excursionist (Ekskursante) dramatised the events through the depiction of a 10-year-old girl who escapes from her camp. Estonia's 2014 In the Crosswind (Risttuules) 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 (Melānijas hronika) 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.[12]

See also

References
  1. "Lithuania". Lithuania | Communist Crimes. Retrieved 2020-08-13.
  2. Bloxham, Donald; Moses, A. Dirk (2010). The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies. Oxford University Press. p. 403. ISBN 9780199232116.
  3. Rahi-Tamm, Aigi; Kahar, Andres (2009). "The deportation Operation "Priboi" in 1949" (PDF). In Hiio, Toomas; Maripuu, Meelis; Paavle, Indrek (eds.). Estonia Since 1944: Report of the Estonian International Commission for the Investigation of Crimes Against Humanity. Tallinn: Estonian International Commission for the Investigation of Crimes Against Humanity. p. 310. ISBN 978-9949183005.
  4. Lovell, Stephen (2011). The Shadow of War: Russia and the USSR, 1941 to the present. John Wiley & Sons. p. 218. ISBN 9781444351590.
  5. Lane, Thomas (2004). Victims of Stalin and Hitler: The Exodus of Poles and Balts to Britain. Palgrave Macmillan. p. 79. ISBN 978-1-349-51584-4.
  6. "Lithuania". Communist Crimes.
  7. Statiev, Alexander (2010). The Soviet Counterinsurgency in the Western Borderlands. Cambridge University Press. pp. 167–168, 184. ISBN 9780521768337.
  8. Õispuu, Leo (2014). Name list of persons deported from Estonia 1945-1953 (PDF). R8/3. Estonian Repressed Persons Records Bureau. p. 16. ISBN 978-9985-9914-6-6.
  9. Stravinskienė, Vitalija (2012). "Lietuvos lenkų trėmimai: 1941–1952 m." Istorija. Mokslo darbai (in Lithuanian). 87. ISSN 2029-7181.
  10. Hryciuk, Grzegorz (2007). "Victims 1939–1941: The Soviet Repressions in Eastern Poland". In Barkan, Elazar; Cole, Elizabeth A.; Struve, Kai (eds.). Shared History, Divided Memory: Jews and Others in Soviet-occupied Poland, 1939-1941. Leipziger Universitätsverlag. p. 193. ISBN 9783865832405.
  11. Brezianu, Andrei; Spânu, Vlad (2010). The A to Z of Moldova. Scarecrow Press. p. 117. ISBN 9780810872110.
  12. Priimägi, Tristan (2016-11-29). "The Chronicles of Melanie: The dear deported". Cineuropa. Retrieved 2017-02-05.


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