Never Again
The memory of those who were taken away in the dark of the night
There are no monsters in the world, and no saints. Katherine Arden
Today marks yet another anniversary of yet another heinous crime against humanity by the Soviet regime. 75 years ago today, on March 25th 1949, the Soviet occupation regime began operation «Прибой,» deporting in the middle of the night at gunpoint over 100,000 people from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Many of the young and the very old died on the way to the Gulag camps. A great number perished while serving their sentence.
A few came back, physically and mentally in pieces.
One of many tragedies of the Soviet regime that cannot and should not be forgotten or forgiven.
Every single person who was deported to Gulag, was also labeled as "enemies of the people. Over 70% of the deportees were either women or children under the age of 16.
Soviet propaganda presented the event as a "dekulakization" campaign intended to facilitate collectivization, the same campaign that almost two decades earlier resulted in artificially starving millions of Ukrainians during the Holodomor. Unofficially, I am sure, the goal was to eliminate all remaining support for the Forest Brotherhood.
The deportation achieved it’s goals, by the end of 1949, 93% and 80% of farms were collectivized in Latvia and Estonia respectively. In Lithuania, progress was slower and t another large deportation, Operation Osen’, took place in late 1951. Although, the deportations were a one-way ticket, with no way to return, during the Khrushchev Thaw years, some of the deportees were gradually released and some of them were able to manage to return home, though many of their descendants still live in Siberian towns and villages to this day. My first cousin twice removed, provided I am doing this right as it was my grandfather’s cousin, was one of the people who was deported from Riga as a child and returned in the late 50s.
He was one of the very few.
The reported mortality rate during the deportation process was around 15%. For example, from a train that left Võru on March 29 and arrived to Makaryevo station in Svirsk on April 22, according to an MVD report from 30 May, 45 Estonian deportees died en route and 62 were removed due to medical conditions, most of them died later. Additionally, due to the harsh conditions and the failure of Soviet regime to provide even the most basic living conditions, during the first few years of “exile,” thousands more died in camps. It is estimated that between 34 % and 40% of all of those deported from Latvia died within the first three years.
If this is not an ethnic cleansing, what is?
Collectivization in the Baltic states was introduced in early 1947, however, the progress was slow. Despite new heavy taxes on private farmers and intense propaganda, only about 3% of farms in Lithuania and Estonia joined the collectives by the end of 1948. Borrowing from the experiences of the early 1930s, kulaks were named as the primary obstacle and became targets of repressions.
On 18 January 1949, leaders of all three Baltic republics were called to meet with Stalin who announced the decision to carry out the deportations. On 29 January, the top secret decision No. 390-138 ss was adopted, approving the deportation of kulaks, nationalists, bandits, their supporters and families from Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.
The decision specified deportee quotas for each republic:
8,500 families or 25,500 people from Lithuania,
13,000 families or 39,000 people from Latvia,
7,500 families or 22,500 people from Estonia.
Lists of kulaks to be deported were to be compiled by each republic and approved by each republic's Council of Ministers. It also listed responsibilities of each Soviet ministry: the Ministry of State Security (MGB) was responsible for gathering the deportees and transporting them to the designated railway stations; the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) was responsible for the transportation to the forced settlements, provision of employment at the destination, and continued surveillance and administration; Ministry of Finance was to allocate sufficient funds (5.60 rubles per person per day of travel); Ministry of Communications was to provide the railway stock cars; Ministries of Trade and Health were to provide food and health care enroute to the destination. The ministries were given just two months for preparations.
The success of the operation depended it being kept secret to prevent mass panic, attempts to escape, as well as any potential retaliations by the Forest Brotherhood. To accomplish deportation of mostly women and children, the Soviet regime amassed 50,000 troops and about 25,000 volunteers from the communist party cadre. Think about this, they needed almost 1:1 ratio for women and children!!!
Of course, due to the extremely rushed nature of the operation, there was a severe lack of time to properly investigate people's activities during the German occupation, and unsurprisingly, there were multiple contradictory cases where pro-Soviet partisans were deported but Nazi collaborators were not. In addition to the confusion attributed to poor planning, deportees often blamed local informants or MGB officer who they believed acted out of revenge or greed. Overall, the files on deportees were often incomplete or incorrect; from April to June, retrospective corrections were made – new files were added for people deported but not on deportee lists and files of those who escaped deportations were removed. Yet, for example, Estonian MGB approved summary certificates for 9,407 families (3,824 kulaks and 5,583 nationalists and bandits) which was 1,907 families above the original quota.
To fully grasp the immense scale of the Operation «Прибой,» the following were prepared:
4,437 freight railway cars
8,422 military trucks
5,010 civilian trucks
The deportations began on early morning of March 25th, five days behind the schedule. A deportation of each family was carried out by a small nine-to-ten men teams, which included three MGB agents, two soldiers and four or five local Communist Party activists who were armed by the MGB. Recruitment of the local activists was the last step. Since the need was to assemble a large force in a very short time, they used plethora of excuses, such as discussions on spring grain sowing or Soviet cinema viewing to call meetings where activists were directly taken to the deportations.
Official instructions allotted up to 1,500 kilograms (3,300 lb) of personal possessions per family, but many were given so little time that they barely were able to pack the most basic necessities, leaving their entire lives behind. The party activists stayed in the household taking inventory of the confiscated property while soldiers escorted the deportees to the train stations. I am sure you can imagine the scale of plunder and pillaging that accompanied the deportations.
The loading stations needed special supervision and security to prevent escapes therefore these were away from towns to prevent the gathering of deportee family members, friends, or onlookers. MVD also recruited informants from among the deportees and placed people categorized as flight risk under heavier guard. The train cars, on average, fit 35 people and their baggage which meant about half square meter or less than 5.5 square feet of space per person The last train left Lithuania in the evening of 30 March.
The deportation was a shock to Estonian and Latvian societies. The rate of collectivization went from 8% to 64% from 20 March to 20 April in Estonia and from 11% to more than 50% from 12 March to 9 April in Latvia. By the end of 1949, 80% Estonian and 93% Latvian farms were collectivized.
Deportees lived in barracks, farm sheds, or mud huts. Bread was allotted based on workdays, not headcount.
By 31 December 1950, 4,123 or 4.5% of the deportees died, including 2,080 children.
There was another, even more sinister reason for the operation «Прибой.» While most of Europe experienced the birth of nationalism and national identity during the 18th and 19th centuries, culminating with Bismarck’s iron willed unification of Germany, Russia remained the same provincial agrarian and completely lacking national identity country. If you would’ve asked a random citizen of the Romanov’s empire or even a random Bolshevik during the 1920s, rarely would they tell you that they were “Russian,” rather they would tell you that they are “Тульскикй” (from Tula) or “Тверской” (from Tver’) or “Псковской” (from Pskov).” Among many accomplishments of Stalin’s career, one stands nearly overlooked - he created Russian national identity and Russian nationalism along with it.
It is not by accident that both Khrushchev’s Thaw and Gorbachev’s Perestroika were clearly an informal if not always official symbolic break with the cult of state power, but not necessarily the cult of the Dear Leader, that was integral to the Russian imperial tradition. By contrast, Stalin’s symbolic revival of the elements of the tradition of state power through the experience of World War II that culminated in the rise of Soviet Union as a world power required a “usable past” that can serve as a real foundation for the “invention of tradition” and historical precedent. All of this is to say that Stalin, whether intentionally or not, forged the Russian national identity.
Before Stalin’s rise to power, Lenin firmly believed that nationalism of the dominant nations was suspicious on account of its chauvinist nature, whereas the nationalism of the oppressed nations was deserving of support as long as it did not infringe upon the still higher interests of the international proletariat. He viewed Russian chauvinism and intrinsic racism as an extension of the global imperialism. Nonetheless, by the late 1920s, this policy of “indigenization” resulted in a more ethnically diverse communist party leadership and the creation of national republican elites with an interest in advancing the cause of local constituencies, even if within the ideological boundaries set by the party.
Noobatchylar, a bilingual book in Turkmen and Russian, portrayed the different responsibilities of students in a Turkmen “Experimental and Exemplary Kindergarten.”
In a reflection of structures in the adult world, each Soviet kindergarten student is responsible for monitoring the state of the classroom and classmates’ behavior. Some children are responsible for inspecting the personal hygiene of their fellow students, while others feed the class pets, water the class plants, or serve breakfast. At the end of the day, all the class monitors report on the performance of their peers. Although all the children wear traditional Turkmen garb, they are united with other Soviet children by their commitment to order and cleanliness, and their devotion to Lenin, whose childhood portrait is displayed in their dining room.
Евреискии колкхоз (Jewish Collective Farm), for example, shows a new collective farm peopled by former Jewish craftsmen who have abandoned their obsolete lifestyles for a new beginning on the land.
In the absence of a separate communist party organization for the Russian Federation (RSFSR), the overlap between Russian and federal institutions was a clear recognition of the fact that Russia was the center of the new Soviet Union. The use of Russian as the official lingua franca of communication was testimony to the fact that Russians were the main ethnic glue of the new Soviet regime. The language used to display the sheer pride derived from the fact that Soviet Union was the first to establish socialism often led to formulation of historical facts in terms strikingly reminiscent of Slavophile or Pan-Slavic messianism.
As Stalin explained to the Twelfth Congress of the Communist Party in April of 1923:
We are told we must not offend the non-Russian nationalities. That is perfectly true; I agree that we must not offend them. But to evolve out of this a new theory to the effect that the Great Russian proletariat must be placed in a position of inequality in relation to the formerly oppressed nations is absurd. What was merely a figure of speech in Comrade Lenin’s well-known article, Bukharin has converted into a regular slogan. Nevertheless, it is clear that the political basis of the dictatorship of the proletariat is primarily and chiefly in the central, industrial regions, and not the border regions which are peasant countries. If we exaggerate the importance of peasant countries to the detriment of the proletarian districts, it may result in a crack in the proletarian dictatorship. That is dangerous, comrades.
While he is speaking of industrial proletariat and agrarian peasants on the surface, he is really speaking of Russians and all other ethnic minorities, respectively. Since the culture of the “Holy Russia of icons and roaches,” as Trotsky had explained, presented the main obstacle to the elevation of the Russian people to a higher, Soviet, and “truly national” level of existence, the peasant culture was objectively unredeemable. The dehumanization of the peasantry and of everything reminiscent “old tsarist Russia,” reached its apogee in the writings of Maxim Gorky, who took on the thankless task of helping the regime forge a new Soviet ideal. Gorky’s attack on old Russia was a clear justification for Stalin’s class war against the bourgeois and the peasantry. But Gorky’s almost hysterical hatred for traditional Russia went far beyond the “objective needs of the moment,” in his desire to eliminate all vestiges of Russian backwardness Gorky was motivated by an all too obvious ressentiment.
Stalin became a Bolshevik through his identification with Russian nationalism in order to appreciate that he was indeed an “eastern Bolshevik” rather than a “western Menshevik.” This self-identification created a sharp contrast with the rest of the Bolshevik leadership, most of whom were Western in cultural and social terms. This is indeed why Stalin was virtually alone when he raised the possibility that Soviet Russia could become the country “that will lay the road to socialism” before October 1917.
In his letter to the poet Demyan Bedny in December 1930, Stalin wrote (emphasis is mine):
The whole world now admits that the center of the revolutionary movement has shifted from Western Europe to the USSR as the center of the liberation struggle of the working people throughout the world. The revolutionaries of all countries look with hope to the USSR as the center of the liberation struggle of the working people throughout the world and recognize it as their only Motherland. In all countries the revolutionary workers unanimously applaud the Soviet working class, and first and foremost the Russian working class, the vanguard of the Soviet workers, as their recognized leader that is carrying out the most revolutionary and active policy ever dreamed of by the proletarians of other countries. The leaders of the revolutionary workers of all countries are eagerly studying the highly instructive history of Russia’s working class, its past and the past of Russia, knowing that besides reactionary Russia there existed also revolutionary Russia, the Russia of the Radishchevs and Chernyshevskiys, the Zhelyabovs and Ulyanovs, the Khalturins, and Alexeyevs. All this fills (cannot but fill!) the hearts of the Russian workers with a feeling of revolutionary national pride that can move mountains and perform miracles.
A couple of months later, in a speech to the leaders of Soviet industry, Stalin spelled out the rest:
One feature of the history of old Russia was the continual beatings she suffered for falling behind, for her backwardness. She was beaten by the Mongol khans. She was beaten by the Turkish beys. She was beaten by the Swedish feudal lords. She was beaten by the Polish and Lithuanian gentry. She was beaten by the British and French capitalists. She was beaten by the Japanese barons. All beat her—for her backwardness: for military backwardness, for cultural backwardness, for political backwardness, for industrial backwardness, for agricultural backwardness. Such is the law o f the exploiters—to beat the backward and the weak. It is the jungle law of capitalism. That is why we must no longer lag behind. In the past we had no fatherland, nor could we have had one. But now that we have overthrown capitalism and power is in the hands of the working class, we have a fatherland and we will uphold its independence.
This was a perfect blend of inspiring nationalist fervor while simultaneously igniting the expression of historical slight and victimization, which are foundational to a nationalist movement. Stalin’s speech was not just an appeal to “Russian nationalism,” he suggesting to his audience nothing less than the creation of a new Russian national identity. To people outside of Russia, it likely seemed shocking and incomprehensible that Stalin’s popularity was growing. Yet it is an entirely natural consequence of the policy advanced and sponsored by the state of historical amnesia and the literal rewriting of history. Even events that were never the subject of ideological or factual debate were suddenly contested, and as historical knowledge failed to be passed down, a new mythology, fueled by the immense state propaganda, was taking shape.
This is exactly what transpired in 1934 when the word родина (Motherland) made its seemingly dramatic reappearance in the cultural discourse. The resurrection of the Russian “national form,” complete with Pushkin, army ranks, school uniforms, and traditional family values—was a sign that the last socially and culturally significant and politically threatening vestiges of old Russia had been eliminated.
Between 1926 and 1939 the number of ethnic Russians outside of the Russian Federation increased from 5.1 million to 9.3 million, whereas their relative proportion in the total Soviet population outside the Russian Federation grew from 8.6% to 14.9% per cent. Russian migration to Kazakhstan and the other Central Asian republics resulted in nearly 2 million ethnic Russians moving to new homes on the outskirts of the empire.
After 1938, linguistic Russification became an increasingly important factor: the number of references to the “great” Russian people (великий русский народ), its special role in the “gathering” of the Soviet nations in the propaganda and history textbooks of the late 1930s came to its peak during World War II.
Stalin sought to present himself as a Russian national leader. In this respect, it was incredibly telling that in his first speech after the Nazi invasion, Stalin addressed people as “brothers and sisters” and “my dear friends,” thus evoking powerful metaphors of family and kinship, and infusing, for the first time, his officially cultivated prewar image of “Stalin, our father.”
The ethos of solidarity and brotherhood in service to the Motherland, the idea of “Mother Russia” combined with the cult of Stalin as the infallible wartime leader, culminated in the new Soviet national anthem which placed Great Russians at the head of the Soviet family of nations. In a tragic twist, the incredibly costly victory in the war provided emotional resonance to the notion of the Motherland, essentially tying the fate of the Russian people to the cause of the Soviet state and its undisputed leader, as exemplified in the famous war cry “За родину, за Сталина!” (For the Motherland, for Stalin!).
In a short speech to participants in the Victory Parade, delivered on June 25, 1945, Stalin proposed to drink to the health of those simple people “who are regarded as ‘cogs’ in our great state mechanism, and without whom all of us—Marshals and commanders of the fronts and armies—to put it a bit crudely—are not worth a damn.” It was thanks to the effort of “tens of millions of such modest people,” people “without ranks and titles,” said Stalin, that “our great state mechanism in all branches of science, the economy, and military art” is functioning on a daily basis.
Few words could have revealed the character of Stalin’s Russian nationalism better than this reference to tens of millions of people as “cogs in our great state mechanism.”
On February 15th, 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin falsely claimed that a Ukrainian “genocide” of Russian-speakers was happening in the eastern Donbass region of Ukraine. He repeated that lie in his speech announcing the “special military operation” on February 24th as Russian troops invaded Ukraine. For Putin the invasion of Ukraine is a righteous cause that is absolutely necessary for the dignity of the Russian civilization, which he sees as being genetically and historically superior to other Eastern European identities. The idea of protecting Russian-speakers in Eurasia has been a key part of Putin’s “Русский Мир” worldview and 21st-century Russian identity. Under the rubric of Русский Мир (Russian World), Putin’s government promotes the idea that Russia is not a mere nation-state but a civilization-state that has an important role to play in world history.
Starting back in 2012, Putin began to refer to a distinct Russian civilizational identity which included ethnic Russians and Russian-speakers in former Soviet republics that extend beyond Russia’s national borders. In 2020, Putin appeared on state television and said that Russia’s unique civilizational identity needed to be protected via genetics and technological sophistication. He positioned contemporary Russia as a global bastion of traditional Christian family values. Neo-fascist ‘philosopher’ Alexander Dugin, at times an advisor to Putin, in his ‘foundational’ book, Foundations of Geopolitics argues that the world order is shaped by competition between Sea Powers (Atlanticists), such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and the EU countries, and Land Powers (Eurasianists), such as Russia. The invasion of Ukraine, then, was the most important part of this civilizational battle between the sea-faring Atlanticists and the land power Eurasianists.
For Putin, the collapse of the Soviet Union was an ideological issue, he holds no torch for communism itself, but it spiritual one because it distanced Russian-speakers from their Motherland. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 created the world’s largest diaspora, with “25 million ethnic Russians living outside the borders of their nominal homeland,” according to the Pew Research Center. For an ethnonationalist ideologue such as Putin, this separation of Russophones from their Motherland presents an existential threat to the survival of the great Russian civilization.
For the last 20 years, Putin has worked hard to bring in what he views as Russophone “compatriots” who happen to reside outside of the Russian Federation: occasionally he used the concept of Russkiy Mir to justify the 2008 invasion of Georgia and the 2014 annexation of Crimea.
In this worldview, Ukraine plays a critical role. It is the cornerstone of Russian civilization and culture, making him the rightful descendants of Kievan Rus, the first Eastern Slavic Orthodox state. In a recent speech, Putin explained, “Since time immemorial, the people living in the southwest of what has historically been Russian land have called themselves Russians and Orthodox Christians. This was the case before the 17th century, when a portion of this territory rejoined the Russian state, and after.”
For the Putin, without a Russophone Ukraine, there is no Russian World. This is exactly how he aligned Russian Orthodox Church with his war rhetoric. Since the moment the notion of Russian World was brought out, the meaning of the worldview gradually shifted from strictly geopolitical in nature to a fully developed notion of a sacral land, where Putin and by extension Russia is a defender of traditional Christian values against the onslaught of Western liberal indecency and the rise Eastern (read Muslim) extremism. Patriarch Kirill has framed the conflict as a metaphysical struggle, positioning Russia as a spiritual and holy nation in opposition to the sinful and devilish West. He has linked the war to a cosmic battle of good versus evil, elevating Russia's role to a divine mission. His rhetoric often includes criticism of Western values, particularly LGBTQ+ rights, which is fully aligned with Putin’s agenda, painting them as antithetical to Russian spirituality and morality. By propagating the myth of protecting traditional values and Russian identity, the Church assists the Kremlin in ingraining the idea among the public that the war against Ukraine is justified.
The result is the rapidly rising influence of Orthodox Church in Russia. Recent Levada Center survey shows the growth of identification with Orthodox Church and a growing trust in religious institutions.
The shift toward ethnocentric Russian World view was most visible in terms of the “plight” of Russian-speaking minorities in the three Baltic states, especially as they moved to join EU and NATO. In the early days, while Russia adopted a strong rhetorical line on the alleged violations against Russian communities, Kremlin had little to no capacity to engage with, influence or support these groups. Instead, the Russian authorities sought to extend dual citizenship to Russians abroad, create organizations to mobilize Russians in neighboring countries, such as the Congress of Compatriots Living Abroad. These efforts were intended as a means to exert influence and to give substance to the claim of Russia having a special regional role on the basis of its responsibility to the diaspora.
When Putin triumphally returned to the presidency in 2012, he had quickly adopted a different and much more strident line on Russia’s foreign policy. Claims about Russia’s role in the historical lands of the Russian Empire were increasing interwoven with a narrative about resisting encroachment by NATO and the EU and restoring a dominant role for Russia in the region. The decision to annex Crimea and initiate a proxy war in Donbas was the turning point. The principal motivation articulated by Putin for the intervention was a mixture of claims of responding to violence against Russians in Ukraine, opposition to the rise of a Ukrainian national movement, and emotive appeals about regaining historical Russian territory. Putin’s speech following the formal joining of Crimea to Russia encapsulated the fusion of these various ideas, identifying Crimea as an ‘indivisible’ part of Russia through ethnolinguistic and imperial ties.
In the spring of 2021, Putin released a long essay on Ukraine that not only asserted the special regional role of Russia but aimed to undermine the whole idea of a Ukrainian nation and Ukrainian statehood. The immediate aim of Putin’s policies is Ukraine, but also Belarus, which is being incorporated into a Russian sphere of influence through the war. Putin’s agenda is, however, unlikely to stop here. Baltic states, Moldova, the South Caucasus and the states of Central Asia – notably Kazakhstan, and now in lieu of the Crocus City Hall terrorist attack, surely Tajikistan too, will all be vulnerable to Russian expansion if the war in Ukraine succeeds.
in 1920, according to official statistics, ethnic Russians made up 7.82% of the population of independent Latvia, 8.2% of the population of independent Estonia. The share of ethnic Russians in independent Lithuania was even smaller, about 2.5%.
In 1991, due to the forced deportations and influx of Russian migrants, the percentage of Russian population in the three Baltic states exceeded 30%.
Speaking earlier today, Prime Minister of Estonia Kaja Kallas said:
Today we honour the memory of the March deportation victims. 75 years ago, over 20,000 Estonians, including infants and the elderly, were taken from their homes and sent to Siberia in unimaginable conditions by the Soviet occupation regime.
My own family was also deported.
We remember each and every one who perished. We are thankful for those who returned.
Their stories must be told.
The world should never forget the atrocities committed by the Soviet regime in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
Russia’s cruelty has not changed over time.
Never Again.
Мильоны - вас. Нас - тьмы, и тьмы, и тьмы.
Попробуйте, сразитесь с нами!
Да, скифы - мы! Да, азиаты - мы,
С раскосыми и жадными очами!
Для вас - века, для нас - единый час.
Мы, как послушные холопы,
Держали щит меж двух враждебных рас
Монголов и Европы!
***
Россия - Сфинкс. Ликуя и скорбя,
И обливаясь черной кровью,
Она глядит, глядит, глядит в тебя
И с ненавистью, и с любовью!...
Алекса́ндр Бло́к
Sources and Bibliography
Vujačić, Veljko, Stalinism and Russian Nationalism: A Reconceptualization, 2007
Brandenberger, David, National Bolshevism. Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931–1956, 2002
Gorky, Maxim, “On the Good Life” (1929)
Simon, Gerhard, Nationalism and Policy Toward the Nationalities in the Soviet Union. From Totalitarian Dictatorship to Post-Stalinist Society, 1991
Tucker, Robert, Stalin in Power. The Revolution from Above, 1928–1941, 1992
Kolesnikov, Andrei, Russia’s History Wars: Why Is Stalin’s Popularity On the Rise?, 2022
Roberts, Flora, Soviet Policy on Nationalities, 1920-1930s, 2015
Brandenberger, David, [Introduction to] National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931-1956, 2014
Brandenberger, David, Stalin’s populism and the accidental creation of Russian National identity, 2009
Kuzio, Taras, Stalinism and Russian and Ukrainian national identities, 2017
Rees, E.A., Stalin and Russian Nationalism
Young, Benjamin R., Putin Has a Grimly Absolute Vision of the ‘Russian World’
Dubtsova, Natalia, From pulpit to propaganda machine: tracing the Russian Orthodox Church’s role in Putin’s war, 2024
Melvin, Neil, Nationalist and Imperial Thinking Define Putin’s Vision for Russia, 2022
Shamiev, Kirill, McGlynn, Jade, The Return of the Russian Ethnonationalism, 2023
Kolesnikov, Andrei, Blood and Iron: How Nationalist Imperialism Became Russia’s State Ideology