Soviet deportations from Estonia
Soviet deportations from Estonia were a series of mass deportations by the Soviet Union from Estonia in 1941 and 1945–1951.
The two largest waves of deportations occurred in June 1941 and March 1949 simultaneously in all three Baltic states. The deportations targeted various categories of anti-Soviet elements and "enemies of the people": nationalists, Forest Brothers, kulaks, and others. There were deportations based on nationality and religion. Estonians residing in the Leningrad Oblast had already been subjected to deportation since 1935.
People were deported to remote areas of the Soviet Union, predominantly to Siberia and northern Kazakhstan, by means of railroad cattle cars. Entire families, including children and the elderly, were deported without trial or prior announcement. Of March 1949 deportees, over 70% of people were women and children under the age of 16.
The Estonian Internal Security Service has brought to justice several past organizers of these events. The deportations have been repeatedly declared to constitute a crime against humanity by the Parliament of Estonia and acknowledged as such by the European Court of Human Rights.
June deportation of 1941
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, 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'" by the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party and the Council of People's Commissars of the Soviet Union of 14 May 1941. The deportation procedure was established by the Serov Instructions.The first repressions in Estonia affected Estonia's national elite. On 17 July 1940, Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces Johan Laidoner and his family, and on 30 July 1940, President Konstantin Päts and his family were deported to Penza and Ufa, respectively. In 1941 they were arrested. The country political and military leadership was deported almost entirely, including 10 of 11 ministers and 68 of 120 members of parliament.
On 14 June 1941, and the following two days, 9,254 to 10,861 people, mostly urban residents, of them over 5,000 women and over 2,500 children under 16, 439 Jews were deported, mostly to Kirov Oblast, Novosibirsk Oblast or prisons. Three hundred were shot.
Only 4,331 persons returned to Estonia. 11,102 people were to be deported from Estonia according to the order of 13 June but some managed to escape. Identical deportations were carried out in Latvia and Lithuania at the same time. 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 part of the prisoners were freed by the advancing German forces.
The first wave of deportation has always been well documented, as many witnesses were subsequently able to flee abroad during the Second World War. Deportations after 1944 were, however, much harder to document.
In July 1941 Estonia was conquered by Nazi Germany, who were forced out by advancing Soviet troops in 1944. As soon as the Soviets had returned the deportations resumed. In August 1945, 407 persons, most of them of German descent, were transferred from Estonia to Perm Oblast. 18 families were transferred to Tyumen Oblast in October, 37 families in November and other 37 families in December 1945 as "Traitors".
March deportation of 1949
During the collectivization period in the Baltic republics, on 29 January 1949, the Council of Ministers issued top secret decree No. 390–138ss, which obligated the Ministry for State Security to exile the kulaks and the people's enemies from the three Baltic Republics forever.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. Lieutenant General Pyotr Burmak, commander of the MGB Internal Troops, was in generally charge for the operation. In Estonia the deportations were coordinated by Boris Kumm, Minister of Security of the Estonian SSR, and Major General Ivan Yermolin, MGB representative to Estonia. Over 8,000 managed to escape, but 20,722 were sent to Siberia during three days. Slightly more than 10 percent were men of working age. The deported included disabled people, pregnant women, newborns and children separated from their parents. 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. Nine trainloads of people were directed to Novosibirsk Oblast, six to Krasnoyarsk Krai, two to Omsk Oblast, and two to Irkutsk Oblast.
Many perished, most have never returned home. This second wave of the large-scale deportations was aimed to facilitate collectivization, which was implemented with great difficulties in the Baltic republics. As a result, by the end of April 1949, half of the remaining individual farmers in Estonia had joined kolkhozes.
From 1948–50, a number of Ingrian Finns were also deported from Estonian SSR. 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.
Continuous deportation
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 when de-Stalinisation led Soviet Union to switch its tactic of terror from mass repressions to individual repressions. The Soviet deportations only stopped for three years in 1941–1944 when Estonia was occupied by Nazi Germany.Estonians' experience with the first year of Soviet occupation, which included the June deportation, led to two significant developments:
- It motivated a major wave of refugees leaving Estonia, mostly by ships over the Baltic Sea in late 1944, after the news about Nazi Germany's withdrawal became public. Some 70,000 people are known to have arrived in their destination; an unknown number perished due to the autumn storms and naval warfare.
- It incentivised many Estonians, who had previously been rather skeptical about joining German army to join the recently created foreign legions of Waffen-SS, to still try to keep Red Army off Estonian soil and thus, avoid a new Soviet occupation. The attempt failed. For an example of such an ethnic foreign legion, see 20th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS. Only in 1956, during Khrushchev Thaw, were some survived deportees allowed to return to Estonia.
Legal status
Soviet acknowledgment of Stalin's deportations
Stalin's deportation of peoples was criticized in closed section of Nikita Khrushchev's 1956 Report to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as "monstrous acts" and "rude violations of the basic Leninist principles of the nationality policy of the Soviet state."On 14 November 1989, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR accepted declaration "On the Recognition as Unlawful and Criminal The Repressive Acts Against Peoples Who Were Subjected to Forced Resettlement, and On Guaranteeing Their Rights", in which it condemned Stalin's deportation of peoples as the terrific felony, guaranteed that such violations of human rights won't be repeated and promised to restore the rights of repressed Soviet peoples.
Estonian trials and convictions
In 1995, after the re-establishment of Estonian independence, Riigikogu, the parliament of independent Estonia, declared the deportations officially a crime against humanity, and a few perpetrators of the 1949 deportations, former officers of MGB, stood trial and have been convicted under Article 61-1 § 1 of the Criminal Code since then. The BBC noted in April 2009 that Estonia's claims of genocide are not widely accepted.- Johannes Klaassepp, Vladimir Loginov and Vasily Beskov were sentenced to eight years' probation in 1999.
- On 30 July 1999, Mikhail Neverovsky was sentenced to four years in prison.
- On 10 October 2003, August Kolk and Pyotr Kisly were sentenced to eight years in prison with three years of probation. The cases were taken to the European Court of Human Rights, the defendants alleging the sentencing was contrary to the prohibition of retroactive application of criminal laws, but on 17 January 2006 the application was declared as "obviously baseless".
- On 30 October 2002, Yury Karpov received an eight-year suspended sentence. On 7 November 2006, Vladimir Kask was sentenced to eight years in prison with three years of probation. Arnold Meri was on trial for his part in the deportations but died in April 2009 before the end of the trial. Charges against Nikolai Zerebtsovi were dropped.
Russia's view
In March 2009, Memorial concluded that the deportations were a crime against humanity, but stopped short of declaring them genocide or war crimes. In the opinion of Memorial, interpretation of events in 1949 as genocide is not based upon international law and is unfounded.