Iz spravki o kolichestvennom i ėtnicheskom sostave spet︠s︡poselent︠s︡ev, ikh trudoustroĭstve i khozi︠a︡ĭstvennom polozhenii na dekabrʼ 1949 g.

This item is from a collection of 101 documents from the archives of the Tomsk Regional Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union relating to the mass deportation to Siberia of Baltic peoples from Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. The documents, which date from the period 1941-60, are nearly all stamped “Secret.” They shed light on such aspects of the deportations as the numbers of people involved, how the reception of deported peoples was organized, the resettlement and placement of deportees, material support, methods of ideological control and the assessment of the communist authorities of the ideological and political influences on the deportees, and the eventual lifting of legal restrictions on these population groups. The Soviet Union invaded the Baltic countries in the summer of 1940 and the deportations of Baltic peoples were carried out the following year, just before the Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. Estimates of the numbers of deported citizens of the Baltic countries vary, but probably about 50,000 were sent to camps in Siberia in this period. The deportations were aimed out eliminating resistance to communist rule and targeted the political and intellectual elites in the Baltic countries. Deportations were halted following the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, but a second mass deportation of Baltic peoples to Siberia occurred after World War II, in March 1949, as the authorities sought to stamp out continued resistance to Soviet rule. The documents were assembled by the Center for Documentation of Tomsk Oblast Recent History in Tomsk and were digitized for the Meeting of Frontiers digital library project in the early 2000s. World Digital Library.