On Wednesday, March 25th, Latvia commemorates the victims of the 1949 deportations and communist genocide. 42 thousand Latvian residents were stuffed into cattle trucks and taken to Siberia on that day.
To mark the event and remember the victims, various events are being held across the country.
At 10:00 a.m. a memorial service will be held at the Šķirotava railway station, from which many were deported and other rail stations are also visited and flowers laid in memory of those summarily sent away.
At 11.00 a.m. the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Latvian Association of Politically Repressed Persons are holding a flower-laying ceremony outside Occupation Museum in central Rīga. The ceremony will be attended by senior officials of state and government and members of the diplomatic corps.
In the evening, at 6:00 p.m., a memorial concert “I Hope While Singing” will be held at the Latvian War Museum, featuring the male choir “Tēvzeme” and the female choir “Minjona”. Admission to the concert is free.
Then at 7:00 p.m., the concert “I Want to Go Home” will be performed at the Culture and Folk Art Center “Mazā ģilde”. Admission to this concert is also free.
Also at 7:00 p.m., the Riga Lutheran Church in Torņakalns will host a concert called “Holding Breath” featuring the “Rīga” orchestra, conducted by Māris Kuģis.
The Siberian Children’s Foundation also invites you to a free memorial concert “For Those Taken Away” at 7:00 p.m. in Riga’s St. John’s Church. The mixed choir “Sõla” of the Latvian Academy of Culture, organist Ilze Reine, and violinist Arvīds Zvagulis will participate.
Two mass deportations were carried out in Latvia: during the first Soviet occupation in 1941, and in 1949, during the second occupation, though smaller-scale deportations to the Gulag took place at other times as well.
As well as being crimes against humanity, the deportations deprived Latvia of skilled workers and professionals and created shortages in the labour force, which were made up by immigrants from other parts of the Soviet Union as part of a Russification programme.
“The representatives of the power institutions in Moscow decided to perform a mass deportation, mainly from Latvian villages. The aim was to break the resistance against collectivisation of farming. Moreover, the purpose was to create the physical infrastructure for kolkhozes and to get rid of supporters of the national partisans,” says the Latvian Occupation Museum.
“By deporting the most successful and productive part of the rural population, the occupation regime destroyed not only agricultural production in Latvia, but the long traditions of the Latvian rural community and its structure,” the Museum adds.
You can find more details of the deportations and other Soviet crimes in Latvia and the Baltic states at the website of the Latvian Occupation Museum here.
March 25, 1949 deportations
Arhīva foto. Pievienots 25.03.2024. Latvian Occupation Museum
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