· June 1941 (Operation Priboi - “Coastal Surf”): Just over a week before the Nazi invasion of the USSR, Stalin ordered a preemptive purge. In a single coordinated action on June 13-14, 1941, over 34,000 people were deported from the Baltics (approx. 15,400 from Latvia, 10,000 from Lithuania, 8,800 from Estonia). Entire trainloads of families—including children, the elderly, and pregnant women—were sent to “special settlements” in Siberia and the Arctic. Mortality rates in the first winter were catastrophic.
· March 1949 (Operation Vesna - “Spring”): After re-establishing control following WWII, Stalin launched a second mass deportation to crush remaining nationalist partisans (“Forest Brothers”) and force collectivization. On March 25-28, 1949, over 90,000 people were deported (roughly 72,000 from Lithuania, 20,000 from Latvia, 9,000 from Estonia). This time, the operation systematically targeted wealthy farmers (kulaks), nationalist sympathizers, and their families.
Total: By 1953, an estimated 120,000–140,000 Baltic people (about 5% of the combined population) had been deported. Tens of thousands perished from starvation, exposure, and disease.
Stalin’s “National Operations” (1937–1938)
The Baltic deportations were part of a wider Stalinist policy of deporting entire ethnic groups accused of “potential disloyalty.” This escalated during the Great Terror (1937–1938) and continued through WWII. Key examples include:
· Soviet Koreans (1937): Nearly 172,000 ethnic Koreans were forcibly moved from the Far East to Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan) over suspicion of spying for Japan.
· Polish Operation (1937–1938): Approximately 140,000 Poles living in the USSR were executed or deported as “enemy nationals.”
· German Operation (1937–1938, then 1941): Ethnic Germans across the USSR were targeted; after the Nazi invasion in 1941, over 800,000 Volga Germans were deported en masse to Siberia and Central Asia.
· Chechens, Ingush, Crimean Tatars (1943–1944): Accused of collaborating with the Nazis, entire nations were deported in a single day. Over 500,000 Chechens and Ingush were sent to Central Asia; up to 25% died en route or in the first year. The Crimean Tatars (200,000) suffered similar fates, and their autonomous republic was abolished.
These “punitive operations” targeted 14 separate nationalities during Stalin’s rule.
“the operation systematically targeted wealthy farmers (kulaks), nationalist sympathizers, and their families.”
Sucks for their kids, not a lot of options though. Can’t let their parents run loose fucking things up for the war effort, which they verifiably did at every opportunity.
Huh?
I don’t know where you live, but just imagine for a moment that a foreign military would swoop in and kill hundreds of thousands of your people. Forbid you to speak your language and try to ethnically cleanse your people, and the whole culture and brutally try to replace it with a cold and immoral, inhuman regime.
Wouldn’t you join the Forest Brothers and try to fuck everything up that shit stands for?
Or you would bend over, forget your language, your roots and follow the leader to the frontlines?
We were there when they came. And we still stand strong after they are long gone. All they did was traumatize few generations.
Can I ask you your perspective for supporting it? How do you justify genocide in all directions?
It’s really freaky to witness this, coming from regions that were severely affected.
To add: those wealthy farmers were just people who had worked a lot, in generations and had built something beautiful.
And those ‘nationalist sympathisers’ were simply people who loved the land and culture of their ancestors.
They threw people in prisons if they got caught singing a traditional song. Can you imagine?
The vast majority of what you’ve typed here is complete bullshit cooked up by the US and our lackeys during the cold war, the rest I’ve already addressed adequately. Tough times require tough decisions, it’s easy to criticize when you’ve never had to face them yourself.
What I wrote is very short, soft and fluffy even cute compared to atrocities my people had to suffer thru.
Go out of your country, travel to eastern europe to countries that used to be under CCCP and talk with locals, ask what happened and how super great it was when a boot was stomping on your head for years and years.
It’s simply obvious that you don’t know what actually happened.
Not sure, but I think you have read about communism in theory but reality was quite a different story. I get it that the idea can seem appealing.
Ok let’s say cccp was great. Even if that would be true, we did not need them. Nothing of what they brought, was of any value. We were much better off on our own, you know. We had everything going for us.
But they arrived and tried to eliminate us. Went with bulldozers and smashed stone circles and most of the holy places were we gathered for generations. They stole everything we had made with our own hands, and said that it belongs to Comune. Now you can go work in a factory. And instead of your country farm property that was nurtured by your whole family of many generations, you got a small apartment on the 5th floor, with a view to 30 other apartment buildings.
What they brought was grim, dark and sad. No human deserves to live in such a golly commune.
Like I said, bunch of bullshit
And you have literally nothing else you are able to say.
They stole everything we had made with our own hands…country farm property that was nurtured by your whole family of many generations
You didn’t make farmland dumbass, your family were dipshit kulaks who thought their right to profit superceded the needs of their starving neighbors during one of the bloodiest wars in history. The Soviets were right to collectivize, your folks fucked around and found out. Sucks to suck.
The USSR had steady and consistent economic growth, and provided free, high quality education and healthcare, full employment, cheap or free housing, and fantastic infrastructure and city planning that still lasts to this day despite capitalism neglecting it. This rapid development resulted in dramatic democratization of society, reduced disparity, doubling of life expectancy, tripling of functional literacy rates to 99.9%, and much more. Living in the 1930s famine would not have been good, but it was the last major famine outside of wartime because the soviets ended famine in their countries.
Literacy rates, societal guarantees in the 1936 constitution, reports on the healthcare system over time, and more are good sources for these claims.
The USSR brought dramatic democratization to society. First-hand accounts from Statesian journalist Anna Louise Strong in her book This Soviet World describe soviet elections and factory councils in action. Statesian Pat Sloan even wrote Soviet Democracy to describe in detail the system the soviets had built for curious Statesians to read about, and today we have Professor Roland Boer’s Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance to reference.
When it comes to social progressivism, the soviet union was among the best out of their peers, so instead we must look at who was actually repressed outside of the norm. In the USSR, it was the capitalist class, the kulaks, the fascists who were repressed. This is out of necessity for any socialist state. When it comes to working class freedoms, however, the soviet union represented a dramatic expansion. Soviet progressivism was documented quite well in Albert Syzmanski’s Human Rights in the Soviet Union.
The truth, when judged based on historical evidence and contextualization, is that socialism was the best thing to happen to Russia in the last few centuries, and its absence has been devastating.
Death rates spiked:
And wealth disparity skyrocketed alongside the newly impoverished majority:
Capitalism brought with it skyrocketing poverty rates, drug abuse, prostitution, homelessness, crime rates, and lowered life expectancy. An estimated 7 million people died due to the dissolution of socialism and reintroduction of capitalism, and the large majority of post-soviet citizens regret its fall. A return to socialism is the only path forward for the post-soviet countries.
When you look at the US Empire and western Europe as having higher quality of life than the USSR, you are looking at the benefits of imperialism, colonialism, and neocolonialism and wishing the USSR also practiced this, instead of helping liberate colonies and the global south. Russia in particular was a semi-feudal backwater in 1917, and made it to space 5 decades later. The USSR was not the picture of wealth, but was for its time the picture of development and rapid progress.
What you still don’t understand?
I don’t give a fuck that their factories never stopped, which they built on the bones of my ancestors, enslaving my brothers and sisters.
All they brought was suffering. They should have stayed in russia and enjoyed their empty life where human life was nothing more than tiny gear in an engine that’s only a drive is to churn out more useless shit. No soul. No love. Nothing sacred. No creativity.
Our culture was, and still is rich. With a deep, sacred attitude and bright vision. And will keep evolving that way, because we are free people.
Go plant a tree. Be a fucking badass, edgiest of them all, and improve the ecosystem. That is the only system that matters for all of us.
Your ancestors were not enslaved, and you seem to have a deeply racist view towards Russians and the other soviet peoples. Socialism uplifted hundreds of millions, it was Tsarism where Russians had empty lives and were ground to dust for profit, profit for kulaks, landlords, aristocrats, and the bourgeoisie. The peasants and industrial workers overthrew the kulaks, aristocracy, landlords, and bourgeoisie precisely because they lived in such misery.
Counter to what you believe, the arts flourished. Soviet cinema was beautiful, and unlike in the west, was not subject to the same profit pressures and thus directors had more freedom. In paintings, the soviets centered the working classes and a beautiful, hopeful picture for the future:
I agree that environmentalism is badass, but we shouldn’t be ecofascists. Ecology requires deliberate, scientific planning of production and distribution, which is only compatible with socialism and communism. Greenwashing and capitalism will never be able to solve the climate crisis.
The soviets brought one of the greatest increases in quality of life in recorded history for millions of people, your kulak kin threw a fit about being asked to help make that happen and got what they deserved
Simply paradise. And great that your job in the factory was just there and vodka was as plentiful as water, just to feel a little warmth and not think too much while living thru hell.
Uh look at all those trees and parks and find me a similar desaturated photograph of an american city during winter. They’re gonna come off worse I guarantee.
Have you ever planted a tree?
Looks like no homelessness, better than the US by a wide margin
Exactly. They murdered my people, destroyed my culture, stole all that was of any value but hey - at least they threw us into forced labour camp. And we have some choices too, if we don’t slave off we can be sent to frontlines or put in prison.
Paradise.Thank you comrade, have a lovely day!
Housing under Tsarism consisted largely of shacks, that would often fill with smoke from heating them. Life expectancies were cut short due to breathing in the smoke all the time, the poor resistance to weather, and more.
Soviet housing was mass-produced, meaning it was simple but effective at transforming daily life. Cities were planned to be walkable, and traversed by bus, railcar, or subway/train. Communal playgrounds were plentiful, and during the USSR itself, soviet housing was better maintained.
I can pick which I would prefer quite easily. Having a government run by the people and in the people’s interests was transformative, and the dissolution of socialism devastating, resulting in crumbling infrastructure once proudly maintained by a more advanced society.
This is largely nonsense. Alongside protections of national identities, a broader soviet identity was promoted. The goal of literacy campaigns was not to eliminate languages, but to better facilitate education and administration in a large, multi-national, multi-ethnic federation of socialist states.
Kulak farming was not something “beautiful.” It was a semi-bourgeois form of farming that relied on slave-like labor. Kulaks were also loan sharks, and would contribute to the immiseration of those around them. Imagine calling the plantation system of the Statesian south “something beautiful.”
The nationalist sympathizers were largely those that lost from having their land and capital collectivized, ie the privledged classes of prior society that created the brutal conditions that led to revolution in the first place.
Watch this, and pay close attention.
I did, it’s largely nonsense. Marxism-Leninism never took hold in the US Empire, no matter what the far-right crowd believes. Rather, to the contrary, the Red Scare hysteria and mythologizing of the USSR is what dominated Statesian thought. Here’s something for you to read: Psychological Warfare in the Strategy of Imperialism, by V.L. Artemov.
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No? What makes you say that?
