We have talked to Estonians of several generations about the impact that the mass deportations of Estonians in the 1940s have had on the lives of their family and their country.

Soviet power carried out policies of forced Russification in Ukraine, as well as a number of repressive and murderous measures targeting ethnic and national groups, in particular during the Great Terror of the 1930s. Ukraine’s minorities - Jews, Poles, Greeks, Germans and others - were subjected to varying degrees of oppression. In the parlance of the Soviet police, campaigns targeting specific nationalities were known as “national operations”. We have translated the text of a presentation by Ukrainian researcher Roman Podkur that he gave in December 2023 at a conference organized by Memorial France and titled “Imperial Violence”.

Memorial Krasnoyarsk has been collecting information about the victims of Soviet terror in Krasnoyarsk Krai since 1988. The group prepared a multi-volume Book of Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repressions. Last year they published the registers of those deported from Lithuania to Krasnoyarsk Krai last year. Today, we want to talk about our colleagues' work on the echelon lists of Germans deported from the VG ASSR (Volga Germans Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic).

2024 marks the 80th anniversary of the  deportation of the Crimean Tatars, a crime perpetrated by Stalin’s regime. This is indeed a mournful date, particularly dark because repressions against Crimean Tatars continue to this day, arguably as a direct follow up to the Soviet period. Activists call this a “hybrid deportation.”