Every year, around 14th June, Baltic communities all over the world commemorate the mass-deportations from their homelands by USSR occupying forces, to the Siberian gulags during and after WWII.

In June 1940 Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were occupied by Soviet Russia. One year later, on the fatal night of 14 June 1941, at least 60,000 people from those three countries were deported at a single stroke to the remote Siberian regions of the former USSR. Some 27.000 Lithuanians were arrested and deported during the week of 14 and 20 June 1941, before the Soviet-German war broke out 22 June 1941.

The deportations of 14 June 1941 were acts of macabre political violence never before experienced by the Baltic people. The vivid memory of that day has remained indelible in the minds of Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians.

The fate of the Baltic States was decided by the so-called Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 between Nazi Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (see below article). A secret protocol to this treaty assigned Finland, Estonia, Latvia and eastern Poland to the Soviet orbit.

In June 1940 a Soviet ultimatum demanded new Baltic governments "able and willing to secure the honest application of the Soviet-Baltic mutual assistance treaty". The following days Soviet forces occupied the whole region.

People of all social strata and nationality were deported, and it is hard to speculate about the general principle underlying these deportations. The victims were generally those regarded as 'socially harmful or undesirable.' For several months preceding the deportations, the NKVD (later renamed to KGB) employees were engaged in composing the lists of people to be deported. Later, it became clear that these lists were composed haphazardly and were based on apparently unconfirmed denunciations.

The deportation process often started with an NKVD truck approaching the house where the target family lived. Two of the three NKVD men in the truck entered the house and told the victims to pack up. Some people got twenty minutes to pack, others, an entire day. The manner was rude, the soldiers did not give any consideration to age or illness. There were cases when persons to be deported were carried into the truck on a stretcher. Then the load of deportees was taken to cattle wagons which were already waiting for them on a side track of the railway station.

The Soviet culture of violence exploded when Nazi troops crossed into Lithuania 22 June 1941. As Soviet authorities fled, some local communist officials summarily executed prisoners whom they could not take along. In turn Lithuanians rose in revolt and attacked the retreating Red Army.

Urged on by Nazi propaganda that identified Jews with communism, some joined the Nazi authorities and turned on the Jewish population of the republic. During WWII, an estimated 90-95 percent of Lithuania’s some 250.000 Jews were killed.

When the Red Army returned to Lithuania in 1944, it found a different mood and even a different population than it had faced in 1940. In the cities, the historic Jewish communities barely existed; many urban Lithuanians had fled to seek refuge in the West as “Displaced Persons.”

In the countryside, partisan groups offered fierce armed resistance to Soviet rule, through a guerilla war referred to as the longest and bloodiest in modern European history, killing more than 20.000 Lithuanians and 70.000 Soviet soldiers during the period 1944-1953.