Прибой

Flags with black tassels hang in heavy snow today, fifty-nine years after Operation Прибой -- "the Surf." The document at left is a report by Major General Spasenko, dated 31 March 1949, on the success of the operation: from 25 March to 30 March 1949, 30 629 families were deported from Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania -- a total of 90 844 persons, comprising 24 630 men, 40 688 women, and 25 526 children.

This map shows the approximate percentages of the population deported from Latvia by locality -- the darkest areas are civil parishes that lost more than 10% of their inhabitants, the red areas 6-10%. The yellow areas lost less than 2%. Roughly, the areas that lost a higher share were the most Latvian areas, ethnically -- it's not possible to determine the proportions of deportees in relation to the total population by ethnicity in 1949 (as can be done with regard to the 1941 deportations) because there was no census during the period of drastic Russification (there is no data between the census taken during the German occupation, in 1943, and the census of 1959).

In sheer numbers, however, 41 084 ethnic Latvians, 772 Russians, 4 Germans, and 1114 others were deported in 1949. By the census of 1959, ethnic Latvians made up only 62% of the population. The percentage of ethnic Russians had meanwhile risen to 26,6% (556 400 ethnic Russians in 1959; there were 207 003 ethnic Russians in Latvia in 1943, about eight out of ten of them in the eastern region of Latgallia -- mostly yellow on the map).

The 1949 deportations ostensibly targeted "kulaks and nationalist families." One was a member of a "nationalist family" if a relative had resisted the occupation, for example. Kulaks -- "the rural bourgeoisie" -- were defined using prewar statistics, despite the fact that many people had lost their land or livestock in the intervening decade. Some supposed kulaks possessed no land at all. Complaints from the Gulag were met with a standard NKVD response: "you (your mother or your father) possessed a kulak farm in 1939."

In hundreds of cases, children were deported alone, without their families. When they reached sixteen years of age, they were assigned the status of deportees.

The status of those not defined as kulaks was shifted retroactively with no charges being brought -- in the summer of 1949, special sessions simply declared their permanent resettlement and the confiscation of their property, without trial.

From 1955, people were allowed to return to Latvia, but incrementally -- Jānis Riekstiņš, Senior Researcher at Latvia's National Archives, compares the process to chopping off the tail of a dog, piece by piece. About 12% of the deportees had perished. Those who returned were required to sign documents agreeing not to return to their place of residence.

Latvia's relative birthrate, which had been ca. 75% prior to the occupation, had fallen to 40-45% in 1946 and never recovered.

The map is from this site, which includes facsimiles of other documents and information on ongoing research (in Latvian).

The Fourteenth of June

Latvia marks the 66th anniversary of the 14 June 1941 mass deportation today. 11 598 Latvians, 1789 Jews, 761 Russians, 42 Germans and 238 others were deported. A virtual exhibition including a structural analysis and life stories is available here.

The photograph of last year's memorial service in Daugavpils is from Latgales Laiks.

"The Surf"

Today is one of the two major days of remembrance set aside for the victims of Soviet genocide in Latvia. Last night in 1949, many received the dreaded midnight knock on their doors. Others were arrested at work or taken to trains directly from school.

Fifty-eight years ago this morning (and for two days thereafter), 42 322 Latvian citizens were deported to Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk, Amur, Irkutsk, Omsk and Tomsk. Ca. 11 000 were under the age of 16. 3369 were under the age of 7. 734 were over the age of 80. 167 were pregnant. Their property was sold or distributed to the kolkhozes -- or simply stolen. The operation bore the Russian code name "Прибой" -- "the Surf". The top secret instruction "Concerning the Procedure for Deporting Several Categories of Inhabitants from the Latvian SSR, Lithuanian SSR and Estonian SSR" had been issued by the Kremlin in January -- Vilis Lācis, one of Latvia's most popular novelists and a leader of the occupation régime, signed the decision for the Latvian SSR on March 17th.

Anna Rancāne, a poet and journalist, wrote a fine article in Diena two years ago about "the Hawks of Latgallia" -- high school students who tried to resist the occupation and managed to foil the deportation of some rural Latvians by stealing the list of persons to be deported and booby-trapping the road from Rogovka to Ruskulova. The organization was later betrayed, its members shot or deported. Antons Ludboržs is among those still living -- he returned to Latvia after Stalin's death. When Lenin's statue came down in Rēzekne after the restoration of independence in 1991, he was the one who cut it down.

Breaking rocks in a copper mine in Kazakhstan, watching the guards stab skeletons drawn from the shaft, his only prayer was: "Lord, give me a little piece of bread so that I might walk to the Latvian border, lay down my head and die."

An analysis of the 1949 deportations by the historian Heinrihs Strods is available in English here. The photograph of people laying flowers at the Freedom Monument in Rīga was taken today by Reinis Oliņš for Apollo -- more pictures from today's commemoration are avalable here.