NKVD

Aigi Rahi‑Tamm, Meelis Saueauk - Relations between Soviet Security Organs and the Estonian Communist Party In 1940–1953: A Case of Mass Deportations in March 1949
Abstract

The March deportation in 1949, carried out as Operation Priboi in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, was the largest post‑war deportation operation in the Soviet Union. Like the Great Terror, such major operations allow for an analysis of the mutual relations between Party authorities and Soviet State Security structures. This study aims to focus on these relations. An analysis of the March deportation clearly reveals the leading role of the security apparatus, including their relations with Party organs, in such extremely important operations concerning the sovietization of Estonia. The Estonian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) (ECP/B/) Central Committee Bureau later approved the deportation in its decision. Thus, the Party authorities are jointly responsible for the planning, implementation, and consequences of the March deportation and the policy of violence as a whole. Regardless of whether the ECP(B)’s leading position was factual or fictitious, its leadership assumed the duty of directing the security organs in a serious manner and demonstrated initiative in this regard. The security organs almost completely ignored the Party as an institution, and this only started to change gradually in the final months of the Stalinist period.

Igor Cașu - The Mass Deportation from Bessarabia/Moldavian SSR in Mid‑June 1941: Enhancing Security, a Social Engineering Operation, or Something Else?
Abstract

This article draws on the files of the Soviet political police in Chișinău as well as Western and post‑Soviet scholarship on Stalinist deportations from the western borderlands in the wake of the German attack on the USSR on 22 June 1941. There are two main and contrasting interpretations of the motives behind the mass resettlements in this period. The first one stipulates that it was mainly security reasons which determined the timing and the target of the mass deportations. The other one states that ethnic cleansing was the aim of mass deportations before the Barbarossa operation. I argue that, at first glance, both interpretations seem mutually exclusive, but in reality, they are complementary. Among the deportees from Soviet Moldavia in mid‑June 1941, as well as from other newly annexed territories, according to the Molotov‑Ribbentrop Pact, were social elements deemed ideologically dangerous. At the same time, the official Stalinist view since the 1930s claimed that these social categories, in particular, would raise serious security threats in the event of a foreign invasion by sympathizing and siding with the external enemy.