#575, Friday, June 9, 2000
TOP STORY
Deportations
By Vladimir Kovalyev
STAFF WRITER
after another tells the story - in KGB-bureacratese - of the deportation of one family
after another to
The pages in the folders crackle, but the ink is still visible: A deportation order for a
family, including a three-year-old girl; a 78-year-old man deported for owning a modest
plot of land; a 21-year-old man executed for belongin 15215o1416p g to a youth group called the
Young Eagles; a 17-year-old boy exiled for wearing the "wrong" school badge.
All were a part of the 10,000 men, women and children deported at gun-point that night
and chuffed off by jack-booted Red Army soldiers into cattle cars for deportation.
Husbands were separated from wives and children. Three-quarters of those deported
that night did not survive the brutal Siberian winter.
Accounts by Estonian President Lennart Meri, who was also deported with his family
that
fateful day when he was 12, revealed the chaotic scene at the station in the
Globe recently.
"There were cattle carriages with small windows and iron bars. Behind these bars I saw
human faces, children weeping, women weeping," he said.
As a high ranking Estonian diplomat, Meri's father Georg was taken on a separate train.
They never met again.
The Estonian State Archives contain 43,683 files on people who were deported from the
country to
task. In total, 274,260 suffered from the reparations - from KGB harassment to execution
- that began in 1941 and continued until 1988.
The KGB archives in
counterparts, which remain sealed - but interest in them remains high, not only for the
hundreds who visit annually seeking news of relatives, but for law-enforcement
officials, who have vowed to punish those who ordered deportation and executions.
It is slow work. So far, Estonian courts have convicted only a few former secret police
officials who organized deportations and political executions. All received suspended
sentences, Hannes Kont, a spokesman for
But in order to build a "free and democratic future," Meri said in the Globe interview,
"
And within the general population, a somber interest in the files has been rekindled by
the approaching 55-year anniversary of that June 14 night as families try to find the
names of relatives and, in some cases, their own.
"I was awakened at about 4 a.m. with my brother," said Leo Oispuu, 69, in an interview
of the night the Soviet secret police came for his family. His father, it turns out, was
guilty of working in the local self administration body in
"Our maidservant said that soldiers were waiting outside and we had half an hour to
gather our belongings."
When they were brought to the station with several hundred other families, he, his
mother and his brother were separated from their father by soldiers.
Terrifying as it was, the 10-year-old Oispuu recalled the deportation, with some guilt, as
a kind of adventure.
"I was thinking that this is OK, I will go to
even think that I would end up spending so many years there in exile," he said.
In the end, his exile lasted 17 years. During that time, his father died in one of the 857
anonymous Siberian camps where Estonians were imprisoned. There is no record of
where. He watched his mother die of starvation in the camp where they were kept, and
his brother died of exhaustion after being forced into physical labor beyond his
capacity.
He also escaped back to
sent back into exile. He was put in charge of tending to livestock, which began his first
lessons in Russian.
"I learned just a few short words, I think rude ones, " he said. "The cattle understood,
though, so that was enough."
Later, as his Russian became more refined, he enrolled at the nearby Yekaterinburg
Polytechnical Institute, despite the obstacles Russian authorities invented against his
matriculation.
"It was prohibited for us to join the full time student body," Oispuu said. "I had a
feeling that they wanted to destroy our nation not just physically, but morally." Despite
this, he managed to earn a degree from the technological and industrial department.
In 1958, a relaxing of regulations allowed Estonians wishing to return home to do so, as
Oispuu did. But the Estonian population had undergone a profound change during the
war. Where before the war the country was populated by 95 percent Estonians, the
immigration of Russians loyal to
down to 65 percent. It had also suffered the double insult of being occupied by Nazi
and then Red Army troops.
Oispuu now heads an organization called Memento which brings together former
victims of the purge. It has been operating since 1989 - two
years before
declared its independence.
Now, as he and his colleagues examine the charges brought against their "anti-Soviet"
countrymen, they could almost laugh if the tragedies cataloged were not so mordant.
Joseph Siirmae, born in 1863, was sent to
and domestic animals.
According to his file, the gist of Siirmae's crime was that "before the Soviet Power was
established in
agricultural implements, and employed four permanent and three temporary workers."
Then there was Udo Josia, 69, who in 1948 was one of 24 schoolboys to defy Soviet
norms and wear pins from prior to the invasion with their school uniforms. Accused by
the KGB of organizing an anti-Soviet group, the 17-year-olds were sentenced to 25
years in Siberian exile.
"They prohibited us to wear old uniform, which we liked," Josia said in an interview.
"They did not understand that it was a sign of patriotism for us."
Josia's "group" was only one of many: From 1945 to 1954, 82 schoolboys were brought
to trial as the KGB "revealed" over 100 so-called anti-Soviet organizations.
Six-hundred-and-sixty-two students, aged between 11 and 16, were arrested for
belonging to supposed anti-Soviet organizations. In many cases, these "organizations"
had just one member - in other words, a kid with a strange pin.
Indeed, many of the protocols in the archives show that schoolchildren were often worn
down with long hours of questioning and driven to such exhaustion that they would
sign confessions against themselves.
The unsteady signature of Evald Kokhler, a 16-year-old from
protocol shows that his interrogation began at 11:30 a.m. but neglects to record the time
it finished.
Other students rebelled - and had a good time of it.
"We were young and for us it was like a game," said Josia. "But on the other hand we
were consciously protesting against invaders."
Many of these students cooperated with so-called forest brothers, Estonian partisans,
who created havoc for the Soviets during the occupation year. At one point, tens of
thousands of young men took to the woods and hid in underground shelters. They
would emerge and kill Soviet officers, policemen and other authorities and then
disappear back into the woods. They received food and support and weapons from
local villages.
Their hey-day came to an end in the late '50s, however, as the KGB infiltrated the
organization. One of its leaders, identified in reports as Kozenkranius, was caught by
agents when he was fed a sandwich with a sleeping pill by someone he thought to be a
partisan fighter.
Now, Estonians are free to view this part of their past on dusty parchment, but what
they make of it is anybody's guess. So far, law enforcement is most involved, poring
over the documents, looking for signatures that match the signatures on the
deportation orders and death warrants. Then officials try to match those signatures with
living people to bring them to trial.
But year by year, both the victims and the oppressors are dying off.
"You can only convict a person if you have real evidence, not just somebody making a
speech saying he is guilty," said the Security Police's Kont in his Globe interview.
"The main idea is to get the court to prove that the Soviet regime committed crimes
against humanity. This is not a question of revenge, but one of justice."
copyright The St. Petersburg Times 1999
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