Seventy Years since the Baltic Deportations of 14 June 1941

Today is the 70th anniversary of the first mass deportations of people from the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia to Siberia and other distant areas of the USSR by the occupying Soviet authorities. This forced resettlement of tens of thousands of innocent men, women, and children led to predictable human suffering and mass mortality. I do not have time to write an extensive post about this crime today. But, I have written about this deportation in the past and the following links will take you to some of those pieces. Five years ago for the 65th anniversary I wrote a short summary of the deportations which you can find here. The following day I posted a short piece on the personal experience of a single Estonian woman who had survived the deportations and exile which you can find here.  Finally, for those that are interested here is an attempt to quantify the number of people to die as a result of the deportations. The deportations represented an attempt to violently remove the leading strata of the Baltic states in order to eliminate  resistance to Soviet colonial rule. As I noted earlier, Soviet rule over the Baltic states represented a classical colonial occupation complete with economic exploitation, foreign settlement, and armed resistance.