rad Oblast were gathered together in preparation for deportation.
About half of the Jehovah’s Witnesses that were expelled from the Baltics and Kaliningrad were from Estonia. These people were sent to special settlements in the Turgan district of the Tomsk region. In the Turgan district, most of the deportees were placed in local collective farms.
Despite the fact that the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet did not decide to release individuals sent to special settlements on the basis of religion until 1965, the Jehovah’s Witnesses began to return home after Stalin's death in the mid-1950s. At least 21 Estonian Jehovah’s Witnesses died in Russia following their deportation.
Olev Liivik (born in 1975) is an Estonian historian and senior researcher at the Estonian Institute of Historical Memory. His main research interests include the political history of post-World War II Estonia and the history of the Baltic German minority in Estonia in the 1920s and 1930s.