Estonia, Latvia & Lithuania DeporteesPrint Page

Trees commemorates the people of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania who were deported from their homeland by Soviet oppression.

In Estonia, as well as in other territories annexed by the Soviet Union in 1939 and 1940, the first large-scale deportation of ordinary citizens was carried out by the local operational headquarters of the NKGB. On June 14, 1941, and the following two days, 9,254 and 10,861 people, mostly urban residents, of them over 5,000 women and over 2,500 children under 16, 439 Jews (more than 10% of the Estonian Jewish population) were deported, mostly to Kirov Oblast, Novosibirsk Oblast or prisons. Three hundred were shot. Only 4,331 persons have ever returned to Estonia. 11,102 people were to be deported from Estonia according to the order of June 13, but some managed to escape. Identical deportations were carried out in Latvia and Lithuania  at the same time.

Operation Priboi ("Coastal Surf") was the code name for the Soviet mass deportation from the Baltic states on March 25–28, 1949, called March deportation by Baltic historians. Some 90,000 Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians, labeled as enemies of the people, were deported to inhospitable areas of the Soviet Union. It was one of the most complex deportation operations engineered by the Soviets in the Cold war era.

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