The June 14 deportation as part of the Stalinist regime’s mass repression / Article

The so-called deportation in June 1941 was one of the largest acts of forced relocation by the Stalinist regime, both in terms of the number of deportees and the area covered. It affected all the territories captured by the Soviet Union at the beginning of World War II. The deportations in June include deportations from Western Ukraine on 22 May 1941; they were followed by deportations from Moldova on the night of 12 to 13 June, deportations from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania on 14 June and, finally, deportations from the western regions of Belarus on the night of 19 to 20 June.

Data on the total number of deportees vary from source to source, but it is most often mentioned that the number of deportees from Estonia has exceeded 10,000, from Latvia – 15,000, from Lithuania – 18,000, from Moldova – 30,000, from Ukraine – 11,000 and from Belarus. – 20 000. So a total of about 107 000 people. It can be added that about 276,000 Poles had already been deported from the part of Ukraine and Belarus deprived of Poland in the previous year – 1940, while this was the first mass repression for Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Moldova.

It may seem paradoxical, but historians have still not been able to find a documented decision by the Soviet authorities to carry out the June deportations.

As a result, the information about the groups of society targeted by these deportations tends to differ. The most important categories of deportees are members of anti-Soviet parties and organizations (any non-communist organization could be considered “anti-Soviet”); former gendarmes, police and prison officers, nobles, wholesalers, manufacturers, senior civil servants and army officers, officers and volunteers of the Russian Civil War, as well as family members of all the categories listed; there is also a relatively small number of criminals, but some sources mention several other groups of people, such as people with extensive foreign connections, such as Esperantists, philatelists, and radio amateurs. According to the original plan, the so-called “heads of families” whose activities were the subject of the deportation were to be imprisoned in special detention camps and their families to be sent to settlements in the largest court in the Asian part of the Soviet Union. The correctional camps, commonly known as the GULAG, were initially intended to send only criminals, but later all the other detainees arrived, possibly changing plans as a result of hostilities that began a week after their deportation.

The June deportation campaign is very much part of the repressive policy pursued by the Stalinist regime since the early 1930s.

Both the social status and the deportation of more than 2,500,000 kulaks in the first half of the 1930s, as well as their ethnicity, served as an argument for these repressions in the “Great Terror” actions against non-Latvians living in the Soviet Union, including Latvians in the second half of the 1930s. . Sometimes the motive for the so-called “border cleansing” could be seen in these repressions – ethnic minorities living in border areas in potential conflict zones seemed particularly dangerous to the Soviet regime. The conflict between the Soviet Union and Germany, which was already clearly unfolding at the time, is being called in this connection. However, it must be assumed that the most important motive in the deportations of June 1941 was another desire of the Stalinist regime to Sovietize the newly acquired territories, destroying the structure and relations of society that had existed in them until then. Therefore, the main target of the deportations was the elite of society – those who were most likely to resist the new way of life.

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