A week ago, the Estonian parliament announced that it is preparing a law to authorise the use of military force against commercial vessels suspected of attempting to damage undersea cables or other critical infrastructure, following several incidents in recent months for which the Estonian government has blamed Russia. In March, the three Baltic states and Poland agreed to withdraw from the Ottawa Treaty, which bans anti-personnel mines, opening up the possibility of their use along the Russian border.
Of course, geography is a determining factor in these decisions, but there is a historical factor, especially the turbulent history of the 20th century, which has left scars that are difficult to heal and, in some cases, are still open.
Thus, for the Baltic states, the years of Soviet occupation are still very much present in their political reality, even more so since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, and also in their demography, where the massive arrival of Soviet citizens, as a replacement for all those Baltic citizens who were deported, has generated very large minorities. The truth is that if anything characterized the Soviet regime, it was the deportations and displacements of ethnic groups from a given region to Siberia or other inhospitable areas of what was then the Soviet Union. The Baltics suffered in what became known as the “March Deportations.”
On March 25th, the Baltic countries commemorated the 76th anniversary of the March deportations with various events. In Latvia, President Edgars Rinkēvicš, along with the country’s various authorities, participated in a tribute to the deportees:
Today we are talking about the events of that time. But today is also the time when many people feel that there are disturbing things happening in the world, they see that the world is again trying to divide itself into spheres of influence, they see that evil is advancing and cannot be stopped so easily.
In Estonia, lit candles were placed around the country at an event organized by the Estonian Institute for Human Rights. “As Estonians, we know what it means to live under foreign rule, to lose loved ones and one’s homeland,” the institute said in its appeal. Finally, in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius, a memorial service was held on March 26th at the monument “In Memory of the Victims of the Soviet Occupation”.
In March 1949, the Soviets began Operation Pribói (Operation Wave), a series of mass deportations in the three Baltic states; in all, more than 90,000 “enemies of the people” in Soviet parlance, i.e., kulaks (landowners), nationalists, bandits, sympathizers of the aforementioned, and their respective families, were deported to Siberia. About 70% of these dangerous troublemakers were women and children under the age of 16. The decision was made by Stalin in January, after he had summoned the three leaders of the Baltic socialist republics to Moscow and determined the quotas of deportees. Lithuania was to deport 25,500 people (8,500 families), Latvia 39,000 (13,000 families), and Estonia 22,500 (7,500). In the case of Latvia, where 43,000 people were finally deported in 4 days, we are talking about 2.2% of the population at that time.
The reasons given by the Soviet regime were to put an end to the landlord peasants (kulaks) and to promote collectivization, and at the same time, put an end to the partisans of the Forest Brothers, who had the support of a large part of the population. The collectivization that began in 1947 was a resounding failure, and only 3% of farms were collectivized between 1947 and 1948. Everything changed after the deportations, and by the end of 1949, the number of collectivized farms was 93% in Latvia and 80% in Estonia.
Lithuania was more difficult to subdue, so the Soviets organized a new mass deportation known as Operation Osen (Operation Autumn). Collectivization was certainly one of the reasons, but the other major reason was “Russification”; the often coerced settlement of hundreds of thousands of Russians in the Baltic republics. The Museum of the Occupation of Latvia in Riga explains that the Nazis had a Germanization plan to settle 100,000 Germans in the Baltic country within 25 years. This plan never came to fruition, but in less than 10 years, there was a massive influx of Russians, so that before independence in 1989, they made up 34% of Latvia’s population—more than 900,000 people.
In order to carry out the operation, the Soviet authorities deployed additional military units, which were very efficient in detaining the families to be deported and taking them to the railway stations. The operation was carried out so quickly that in August 1949, 92 soldiers were decorated; 75 received the Order of the Red Banner and 17 others the Order of Patriotic War. From the stations, the journey in cattle cars took an average of two to three weeks, depending on the destination. Living conditions for the deportees were extremely harsh, although not as horrific as those in the GULAGs of the 1930s and World War II, and the mortality rate was less than 15%. By the end of 1950, 4.5% of the deportees had died, including 2,080 minors, but 903 children were born. One of them was the mother of Dovilė Šakalienė Šakalienė, today Lithuania’s Minister of Defense, whose family experience is crucial to her work. “The only effective diplomacy with Russia is when you have a gun on the table,” she said in a recent interview with Fox News.
The deportees were exiled for life, although with de-Stalinization, their sentences were commuted and gradually, some of them were able to return home, where of course they were subject to strict control. A well-known case is that of Jonas Kadžionis, a Lithuanian partisan of the Forest Brothers, who refused to ask for clemency and served his full 25-year sentence. He returned to Lithuania in 1978 but was “exiled” to the Kaliningrad region in 1983.
Today, the linguistic and ethnic divide persists and has worsened after Russia’s war on Ukraine. Despite one in every five marriages in Latvia today being ‘mixed’ (with one spouse being ethnic Latvian and the other from a different ethnic background, particularly ethnic Russian), there is no unity of worldviews or views on history.
Geography and history are everything. Without them, we cannot understand the political reality or the positions or alliances of countries. Is it possible to heal the wounds of history? Yes, but only if there is a true recognition of the facts of the past by all parties involved, and if the passage of time proves that this recognition is sincere. But this is not the world we live in; the open wounds of history are farther from being closed than ever.
