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Enno Piir's eighth volume in this series, titled “Põltsamaa kihelkond” (district) contains a list of 1078 names, repressed Estonian citizens, imprisoned or deported to Russia by the Soviet occupants of the country. The great number of the deportees does not leave much room in the pages of the book for other details about each individual case. Besides, very little has become known to the author of the book over the fate of about 20 % of the cases.
Enno Piir: It has become known that the original plans of the Soviet rulers called for the elimination from our country every tenth Estonian citizen, whether to be killed on location, or to be deported for a slow death in Siberia. For this purpose, a list had been drawn up, containing the names of 633 men and 445 women, selected by the various communist authorities and their agents in various locations all over the district of Põltsamaa (as everywhere else in our land). These plans remained somewhat unfulfilled, thanks to the death of the super-tyrant J. Stalin just in time.
Anyway, the rulers in Kremlin had planned to deport from this district 625 people, in two massive operations. This would have removed over 6 % of the district's population. The first wave, in June 1941, they did accomplish by 100 %. (Even if the person they had blacklisted could not be found, they often simply picked someone else. — H.K.) But the second wave, in March of 1949, remained somewhat incomplete.
After the first wave, the population had become wry, or had received advance warning, that another massive deportation was about to begin. So many had gone into hiding, leaving all their property behind, just in time to escape the more than likely death in Siberia, of themselves and their families. As a result, “only” 399 people from Põltsamaa district fell victims of the March deportations.
As time went by, and especially after the death of Stalin, the general conitions of the deportees and the prisoners began slowly to improve. The food parcels from home saved the lives of thousands from starvation in Siberia. After languishing in the forced labor camps for eight or more years, 114 men and 203 women from the district's March of 1949 deportees arrived back in Estonia alive, or 79 %. But of the year 1941 deportees, only 22 % of the men, and 56 % of the women made it back to their homeland. The women, as a rule, died of starvation. The men, during that period, were mostly murdered.
Over 3 % of Põltsamaa district's population were in prison, as the Soviet version of “political criminals”, opponents to the Soviet occupation of our country, and as the so-called “enemies of the working people”. (Albeit none of the communist rulers themselves could have been called “workers”, by any stretch of the imagination — unless the killing and deporting innocent people could be somehow visioned as “Work”. — H.K.) The majority of the prisoners were sentenced to 25 years of forced labor. Any survivors after this period of slavery were then given either lifelong, or five years of forced exile somewhere in the Soviet Russia, usually close to a prison camp, where the person had served his long sentence.
The greatest number of arrests in Estonia under Soviet rule occured in the fall of 1944 and in the year 1945, during the period of the return of Soviet forces into our land. And again in 1948, before the great sweep of forced collectivization of our agriculture, and also during the period of the second wave of mass deportations in 1949. This was then followed by the relentless hunt for the still remaining “forest brothers”, the Estonian freedom fighters and their friends and supporters. This chase was carried on still in 1951.
Of the deportees, 22 % had been children under 15 years, and 27 boys and 19 girls less than 5 years old. They had been taken to Russia, there to remove them from their starving mothers, so they could be placed into the Soviet-style childrens colonies, there to turn them into regular Russians, from their earliest years onward.
About 11 % of the deportees were old people, 53 retired farmers and 51 old women just from Põltsamaa district, eleven of whom were over 80 years old. They were taken to Russia, only to die there, but even so, many were still forced to work, before dying of starvation.
Those masters of genocide had no mercy. The prisoners, who had been forced to suffer many torments in this hell on earth, and who after the death of Stalin still made it back to Estonia alive, have told us how even children ten years old were forced to perform hard labor, and how the near death oldsters had to enrich Soviet economy practically to their last breath.
Yet there are some people in this upside-down world of ours, who keep attempting to prove that there was no Soviet genocide, and that all these activities resulted from the Soviet government's wise decision to resettle certain peoples purely out of very practical, humane and economic reasons.
Fifty years ago (this was written in 1996. — H.K.) an international war crimes tribunal was in session in Nuremberg, Germany, condemning numerous Germans for war crimes committed during the last world war. When will such process be repeated, this time in judgement over the horrendous Soviet war crimes, including genocide? Although most of the Soviet war criminals are already in their graves (and died in great honor! — H.K.). But modern history also acknowledges some posthumously reached convictions.
Enno Piir: The massive deportations that began on June 14th, 1941, turned into the great eye-opener for all Estonians including some, who had at first held foolish hopes for improvement in their lives under Soviet government.
Now it quite suddenly became very real to everyone, what really awaited our nation under the Soviet system. From what had already happened to us, it was not difficult to deduce Stalin's intent to deport most of us to Siberia, provided that he had enough time to do it, and enough rail cars and locomotives to carry out the plan. As for us, the Estonians, we were suddenly hit with a wave of despondency. Uncertainty and confusion turn powerless the most energetic minds.
But then, eight days after the great deportations in 1941, the brown dictatorship declared war against the red dictatorship, and soon thereafter this war reached into Estonia. It brought a temporary end to the Soviet occupation of our land, but instead our freedom being restored, which we had very much hoped for, the Nazi-German occupation had just begun. Still, for the time being, we felt relieved, to be finally outside the reach of further
Soviet horrors.
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Kaselaid, Ain. Born on January 24, 1905. A forester by profession, was arrested in the last days of May, 1945. Was summoned to Pajusi township office, from where he never returned. His daughter Marju wrote on December 22, 1990:
“...Then later I heard from other folks, that several other people had also been held in the township hall, where horrible beatings and torture had taken place, resulting in little trickles of blood visible in the corridors and on the stairs. From there my father had been taken to Viljandi, where he had been sentenced on the 5th of June, 1946. After this, he had been imprisoned in Tallinn, then deported to Russia, to Vorkuta and Karaganda gulags, where his life ended.”
•••••
Among other things, every book in this series by Enno Piir contains fairly extensive descriptions of the pre-war way of life in each and every township in each district, in the entire county of Viljandimaa, during the years of independence, before the Soviet invasion in 1940. Included are sections on educational and cultural, business and social activities, agricultural and industrial enterprices, and the country life in general in the former free Estonia. Numerous historical photos accompany the texts. Any interested visitor to the county of Viljandimaa may obtain a copy from any particular township's office. All these books have been printed in Estonian.