The Power of Freedom. Mart Laar

      The terror was even more intense in the countries formally integrated into the Soviet Union in 1940; as a result of the Soviet occupation, Estonia lost 25-30 % of its original population in the period between 1940 and 1955. Hundreds of thousands of Estonians were killed, arrested or deported to Siberia. The same happened to the citizens of the other Baltic countries. During the night of 26 March 1949, 20,722 Estonians, 43,230 Latvians and 33,500 Lithuanians were deported to the eastern territories of the Soviet Union. Taimi Kreitsberg, who managed to escape from the deportation officials, recalled as follows:

      Deportations and massive arrests continued into the 1950s. Altogether, Latvia lost 340,000 and Lithuania, 780,000 people as a result of the deportations or other persecution.44 A large Soviet military garrison and the continued influx of Russian-speaking colonists, who acted like a ‘civilian garrison’, replaced the lost populations. The goal of this migration was to transform the indigenous people of the conquered nation into a minority within their own homeland. In 1989, native Latvians represented only 52 % of the population of their own country. In Estonia, the figure was 62 %. In Lithuania, the situation was better because the colonists sent to that country actually moved to the former area of Eastern Prussia (now Kaliningrad) which, contrary to the original plans, never became part of Lithuania.45

      In the other Central and East European countries, so-called ‘people’s democracies’ were established with Soviet-dominated governments which, with assistance from the KGB and its local counterparts, destroyed democratic opposition in the conquered countries. As usual, the first step was open terror against ‘enemies of the state’ whose ranks could include anyone, not only collaborators of former regimes. The goal of such terror was to introduce an atmosphere of absolute fear that sought from the very beginning to destroy any desire to resist Soviet power. This was mostly done in close cooperation with the Soviet security apparatus. In Poland, for example, the Peoples’ Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) had its own jails and camps. Between 1944–1946, various Soviet units held around 47,000 people, a quarter of them Polish underground fighters. In the spring of 1945, about 15,000 Silesian miners were sent to the mines in the Donetsk area of the USSR. To combat resistance movements, tens of thousands of people were arrested. In the first 10 months of 1947 alone, nearly 33,000 people accused of ‘banditry’ were arrested and 10,500 were sentenced. In order to liquidate the Ukrainian underground units, all Ukrainians from the combat area – 140,000 people – were resettled in the former German territories of Northern and Western Poland.46 During 1944–1945, the courts passed around 8,000 death sentences, 3,100 of which were carried out. This figure probably does not represent the actual number of people executed as in 1944–1946 hundreds of summary executions were carried out on the spot by firing squads.47 Between 1945 and 1950, almost 60,000 individuals were hauled before ‘people’s tribunals’ in Hungary, 27,000 of whom were found guilty, 10,000 given prison sentences and 477 condemned to death, although only 189 were executed.48 In Bulgaria, after the occupation of the country by the Red Army, between 2,000 and 5,000 people were killed intentionally and without any legal basis. In 1944–1945, so-called ‘People’s Courts’ pronounced 9,115 verdicts, with 2,730 people sentenced to death. The first concentration camp began functioning as early as the end of September 1944 in the village of Zeleni Doli. Several such camps were subsequently established. As of September 1951, over 4,500 people were held in these labour camps. Another figure that should be added to the labour camp statistics is that of the forced labour mobilisations and the internment and relocation of families. In 1945-1953, 24,624 people were forcibly relocated or interned.49

      Prisoners of war killed by Communist partisans in May 1945 near Lesce in 2008

      The same tactics were used even in countries not under the direct control of the Red Army, such as Yugoslavia, where already at an early stage in the war, Communist partisans were fighting not only against the Germans but also against their ‘class enemies’, executing their opponents and those they identified as ‘kulaks’. After the end of the war, terror reached massive proportions. Tens of thousands of members of the civilian population, as well as members of different military units, fought against the Communists and escaped from Yugoslavia to Austria during the last days of the war where they surrendered to British forces. On the Austrian border in Bleiburg, however, British forces did not accept the surrender and forced the refugees back across the border into the hands of the Yugoslavian Communists. These refugees were then subjected to forced marches over long distances under inhumane conditions and any survivors were killed in the series of massacres known as the ‘Bleiburg massacre’. Afterwards, many gravesites were destroyed by explosions, covered in waste or built over. The exact number of victims is not known; most estimates vary between 15,000 and 80,000 unarmed soldiers and civilians.50

      The next wave of terror was targeted against the opposition.

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