Yet another example of ethnic cleansing by the victorious powers of WWII:
Operation Priboi (Russian: Операция «Прибой» – "Operation 'Coastal Surf'") was the code name for the Soviet mass deportation from the Baltic states on 25–28 March 1949. The action is also known as the March deportation (Estonian: Märtsiküüditamine; Latvian: Marta deportācijas; Russian: Мартовская депортация) by Baltic historians. More than 90,000 Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians, labeled as "enemies of the people", were deported to forced settlements in inhospitable areas of the Soviet Union. Over 70% of the deportees were either women or children under the age of 16.[1]
Portrayed as a "dekulakization" campaign, the operation was intended to facilitate collectivisation and to eliminate the support base for the armed resistance of the Forest Brothers against the illegal Soviet occupation.[2] The deportation fulfilled its purposes: by the end of 1949, 93% and 80% of the farms were collectivized in Latvia and Estonia. In Lithuania, the progress was slower and the Soviets organized another large deportation known as Operation Osen in late 1951. The deportations were for "eternity" with no way to return.
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Based on the Martens Clause and the principles of the Nuremberg Charter,[8] the European Court of Human Rights has held that the March deportation constituted a crime against humanity.[9]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_PriboiI wonder if the "Holocaust" narrative is simply borrowing its stories from things like this:
Compilation of deportee lists
Special MGB representatives were dispatched to various local offices of MGB to form operative staff that would select the deportees and compile a file on each family.
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Deployment of additional troops
Due to the immense scale of the Operation Priboi, which spanned three Soviet republics, considerable resources were needed. MGB needed to assemble personnel, transport vehicles, and communication equipment all the while keeping the operation secret. MGB also needed to draw up plans for where the operative groups to be deployed and how the deportees to be transported to the railway stations.[12]
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An additional 5,025 submachine guns and 1,900 rifles were brought in to ensure that the operatives were sufficiently armed. Telecommunications was a vital component to ensure smooth running of the operation, thus the MGB commandeered all civilian telephone exchanges for the duration and brought in an extra 2,210 MGB communications personnel.[15] 4,437 freight railway cars were delivered. A total of 8,422 trucks were organised. 5,010 civilian trucks were commandeered and the remaining vehicles were military origin, including 1,202 imported from the Leningrad Military District, 210 from the Byelorussian Military District and 700 from Internal Troops.[15] These additional vehicles were stationed just outside the border of the Baltic Republics in advance so as not to raise suspicion and sent in at the start of the operation.[2]
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Assembly of operative teams
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A deportation of a family was carried out by a small nine–ten-man operative team, which included three USSR MGB agents ("troika"), two republican Destruction Battalion soldiers and four or five local Communist Party activists who were armed by the MGB.[15] ... Care was taken to ensure that the operative team included at least one member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union or Komsomol to act as an ideological supervisors of the team.[13]
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Round up of families
On average, each operative team was assigned three to four specific families they needed to deport.[13] After locating the assigned farm, the team was to search the premises, identify all residents, and complete their files.
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As the people had already experienced mass deportations, they knew the signs (such as arrival of fresh troops and vehicles) and attempted to hide.[18] Therefore, the Soviets set up ambushes, tracked down and interrogated relatives, carried out mass identity documents checks, etc. Against regulations, MGB operatives would deliver children without parents to the train stations hoping that the parents would voluntarily show up.[13] Not all fugitives were caught by such measures and later, in Lithuania, smaller actions and deportations were organized to locate those that escaped the first Operation Priboi in March.[18]
Here we go again, those railroad cars that Holocaust propaganda tells us supposedly made Germany ruthless and evil--even though all Allied nations used them in post-WWII ethnic cleansings...
Railway transportation
Once loaded onto the trains, the deportees became the responsibility of the MVD.[12] The loading stations needed special supervision and security to prevent escapes therefore they were, if possible, 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.[12] The train cars were mostly standard 20-ton freight cars (Russian: Нормальный товарный вагон) with no amenities. The cars, on average, fit 35 people and their baggage which means about 0.5 square metres (5.4 sq ft) of space per person.[19]
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On average, the train ride lasted about two weeks, but could take almost a month.
This ethnic cleansing was demographically targeted in such a way to have maximum impact on the non-Russian ethnic groups being cleansed. I've never heard anyone allege that the 'Holocaust' was so precisely targeted!
Some 72% of deportees were women and children under the age of 16.[2] Kruglov, the USSR Interior Minister, reported to Stalin on May 18 that 2,850 were "decrepit solitary old people", 1,785 children without parents to support them, and 146 disabled.[12] About 15% of the deportees were over the age of 60.[12] There were people of very old age; for example, a 95-year-old woman was deported from Švenčionys District, Lithuania.[23]
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The deportees were exiled "for eternity" and no right of return to their home,[3] with the penalty of twenty years of hard labour for attempted escapes. 138 new commandantures were set up to monitor the deportees, censor their mail, and prevent escapes.[12] Deportees were not permitted to leave their designated area and were required to report to the local MVD commandant once a month, failure of which was a punishable offense. The deportees were generally given jobs in kolkhozes and sovkhozes, with a small handful employed in forestry and manufacturing.[15] Living conditions varied greatly by destination, but there was housing shortage almost everywhere. Deportees lived in barracks, farm sheds, mud huts, or became tenants of locals.[12]
Soviet deportations from Lithuania were a series of 35[1] mass deportations carried out in Lithuania, a country that was occupied as a constituent socialist republic of the Soviet Union, in 1941 and 1945–1952. At least 130,000 people, 70% of them women and children,[2] were forcibly transported to labor camps and other forced settlements in remote parts of the Soviet Union, particularly in the Irkutsk Oblast and Krasnoyarsk Krai.[3] Among the deportees were about 4,500 Poles.[4] These deportations do not include Lithuanian partisans or political prisoners (approximately 150,000 people) deported to Gulags (prison camps).[5]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_deportations_from_LithuaniaFFS, the Soviets began this ethnic cleansing before WWII even began (and only months after the Soviets annexed the Baltic states):
The first mass deportation was carefully planned by the Soviets. Already in late summer 1940, high-ranking Soviet officials began hinting at planned mass arrests and deportations.[12] NKVD began registering and tracking all "anti-Soviet elements", i.e. people who were judged to be harboring anti-Soviet attitudes solely based on their social standing, political affiliations, religious beliefs, etc. In particular, it targeted policemen, members of the Lithuanian Nationalist Union, Lithuanian Riflemen's Union, various Catholic organizations. In total, NKVD estimated that it needed to register 320,000 people or about 15% of the Lithuanian population,[13] which with family members constituted about half of the population.[14] In preparation for the deportation, NKVD drafted lists of people that would be deported during the first campaign, identified their incriminating background, traced their family members, and located their current residence. The list was fluid and kept changing. For example, a report dated May 13, 1941 identified 19,610 people that should be arrested and deported to prison camps and 2,954 people (mostly family members of those arrested) that should be deported to work camps.[15] A month later, the numbers changed to 8,598 arrested and 13,654 deported family members clearly indicating a policy of eliminating entire anti-Soviet families.[16]
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Ivan Serov issued instructions, known as Serov Instructions, detailing how the deportees should be detained and transported to the trains. The instructions emphasized that the deportations should be carried out as stealthily as possible to minimize panic and resistance. Each four-member executive group was given the task of deporting two families.[18]
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By 1944, Nazi Germany was retreating along the Eastern Front and Soviet forces reached the territory of Lithuania by mid-1944. In October 1944, Soviet officials, including Sergei Kruglov who had experience deporting the Chechen and Ingush people, began circulating ideas about deporting families of "bandits" – men who avoided conscription into the Red Army and joined the Lithuanian partisans.[26]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serov_InstructionsOperation Vesna began in 1948 and Operation Priboi (the 1st Wiki article in this post) began in 1949.
That wasn't enough, so the Soviets engaged in another major ethnic cleansing operation in 1951:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_OsenThe 1941 ethnic cleansing operation also has its own Wikipedia article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_deportationWow, look at that, religion and cattle cars, two of the things that are considered uniquely evil in the Holocaust narrative:
Soviet deportations from Estonia were a series of mass deportations by the Soviet Union from Estonia in 1941 and 1945–1951.[1] The two largest waves of deportations occurred in June 1941 and March 1949 simultaneously in all three Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania). The deportations targeted primarily women, children and the elderly calling them 'anti-Soviet elements'. In addition there were deportations based on ethnicity (Germans in 1945 and Ingrian Finns in 1947–1950) and religion (Jehovah's Witnesses in 1951).[1] Estonians residing in the Leningrad Oblast had already been subjected to deportation since 1935.[2][3]
People were deported to remote areas of the Soviet Union, predominantly to Siberia and northern Kazakhstan,[4] 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.[5]
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On 27 July 1950, diplomats-in-exile of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania appealed to the United States to support a United Nations investigation of "genocidal mass deportations" they said were being carried out in their countries by the Soviet Union.[28]
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Russia's view
The Russian Federation, the only legal successor state to the Soviet Union, has never recognized the deportations as a crime and has not paid any compensation.[15][39]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_deportations_from_EstoniaThe Soviets were even ethnically cleansing people who had ancestry from the Baltic states before the USSR annexed the states!
The Latvian Operation (Russian: «Латышская операция», Latvian: „Latviešu operācija”) was a national operation of the NKVD against ethnic Latvians, Latvian nationals and persons otherwise affiliated with Latvia and/or Latvians in the Soviet Union from 1937 to 1938 during the period of the Great Purge.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latvian_Operation_of_the_NKVDhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_deportations_from_LatviaIt's curious that even with the strong anti-Soviet sentiment that has dominated the US and its allied nations, the history curriculum doesn't include any of the barbarity of the USSR that far exceeds the ruthlessness which Germany allegedly displayed.
Even after writing other posts in this thread, I'm still learning about new crimes:
Mass operations of the People's Comissariate of Internal Affairs (NKVD)[1] were carried out during the Great Purge and targeted specific categories of people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_operations_of_the_NKVDhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_Operation_of_the_NKVDhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_Operation_of_the_NKVDhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_Operation_of_the_NKVDhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_Operation_of_the_NKVD(Against ethnic Germans):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NKVD_Order_No._00439https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_the_Chechens_and_Ingushhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_the_Kalmykshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_deportations_from_Bessarabia_and_Northern_Bukovinahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_settlements_in_the_Soviet_UnionAgain, we are told that NS Germany allegedly exterminating entire villages in occupied territory is something that made them uniquely evil. Yet the Soviets did such things to their own citizens:
The Khaibakh massacre was the mass murder of the Chechen civilian population of the aul (village) Khaibakh, in the mountainous part of Chechnya, by Soviet forces during the deportations of 1944 on 27 February 1944.[1][2][3][4]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khaibakh_massacreEver wonder why Russians had such a stranglehold on Crimea?
The deportation of the Crimean Tatars or the Sürgünlik ("exile") was the ethnic cleansing and cultural genocide[c 1] of at least 191,044[c 2] Crimean Tatars in 18–20 May 1944 carried out by the Soviet government, ordered by Lavrentiy Beria, head of the Soviet state security and secret police, acting on behalf of Joseph Stalin.[11][12][13][14] Within three days, the NKVD used cattle trains to deport mostly women, children, the elderly, even Communists and members of the Red Army, to mostly the Uzbek SSR, several thousand kilometres away. They were one of the several ethnicities who were encompassed by Stalin's policy of population transfer in the Soviet Union.
The deportation officially was intended as collective punishment[15] for the perceived collaboration of some Crimean Tatars with Nazi Germany; modern sources theorize that the deportation was part of the Soviet plan to gain access to the Dardanelles and acquire territory in Turkey where the Tatars had Turkic ethnic kin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_the_Crimean_TatarsAlso see the previous post about other Soviet ethnic cleansings and settler colonialism:
https://trueleft.createaforum.com/colonial-era/western-revisionism-of-wwi-and-wwii/msg6582/#msg6582No wonder so many people from the USSR volunteered in the German military to fight the communists.
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My mother has a similar story - I've never asked for details because it's still too hard for her to talk about it. I think it was her grandparents who were deported. Upon returning some years later, they found that the same soldier who removed them from their home and shoved them on the train was now living in their house. They never regained it.
https://old.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/tom6h7/73_years_ago_today_soviet_union_started_the/i26lxsh/