ON THIS DAY · 14 JUNE 1941

Baltic June deportations

14 Jun 1941 — A week before the German invasion, the NKVD deported more than 40,000 people from the annexed Baltic states in a single operation. Men were separated and sent to camps; women, children and the elderly were sent to settlements in Siberia and Kazakhstan.

The moment in context

The shift from promoting nations to deporting them began on the borders, where nationality and foreign policy met. Soviet planners worried that minorities with homelands abroad, such as Poles, Germans, Finns and Koreans, could serve an enemy in war. In 1936 tens of thousands of Poles and Germans were moved from Ukraine’s western border zone to Kazakhstan. In August 1937 a decree ordered the removal of all Koreans from the Far East, where Japan threatened from Manchuria, and in September and October about 172,000 people were loaded onto trains for Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, as the longest arrow on the map shows. The “national operations” of the Great Terror, the mass arrests and shootings of 1937–38, targeted minorities suspected of spying for a foreign state, and the Polish operation alone shot about 111,000 people. A whole people could now be treated as guilty by association, and that logic drove every deportation that followed.

From Stalin’s ethnic deportations, chapter 7 of The Soviet Union under Stalin, 1924–1953 (1944).

The place: Baltic June deportations — map and full story →

The atlas that shows it

The Soviet Union under Stalin, 1924–1953

12 CHAPTERS · AN INTERACTIVE SITUATION MAP