In June 1941, the Soviet authorities deported 95,000 people from the Baltic States, Poland, Bukovina, and Bessarabia (present-day Moldova and Southwest Ukraine) to force the collectivization of farms and destroy the local rural economies. Estonia commemorates the victims of the deportations every year on 14 June.

Propaganda prepared the field

When the communists set out to force the collectivization of Estonian farms, they had a problem. The ideology they had used elsewhere, namely taking away the land of the rich and giving it to the people, didn't work very well in this country.

The agricultural reform that had followed Estonia's independence moved property from a small number of mostly German and Russian families to those who had fought in the War of Independence, as well as commoners and small farmers.

This meantwas put in place to identify the supposed kulaks, with village committees selecting them. At first, the results were modest. But after in what today is Viljandi County a parish identified as much as 15 times as many as the average, pressure increased on all committees to raise the number of those selected for deportation.

The local bodies had a lot of influence. People did slander and denounce each other, but today's research actually suggests that the authorities received more letters of support of those arrested than they received hints out of the population who to go after.

Lists of people to be deported had been in the works since the early 1930s. They targeted the political, military, financial, and cultural elite as well as their families, but also minorities,