“Siberia. Mass deportations from Lithuania to the USSR” is the best English-language pocket-size book about the Stalinist regime’s repression on the Lithuanian nation. There are some 50 photos in the book.During the Soviet occupation, our nation sustained heavy losses. Every third Lithuanian became a victim of Soviet terror.During 1940–1953, some 132,000 Lithuanians were deported to remote areas of the USSR: Siberia, the Arctic Circle zone and Central Asia. They were not allowed to leave remote villages. More than 70 percent of the deportees were women and children. There were 50,000 women and 39,000 children deported to remote areas of the USSR. Some 30,000 of the deportees died there mostly because of slave work and starvation. Some 50,000 of the deportees were not able to return to Lithuania.During the same period, another 200,000 people were thrown into prisons. Some 150,000 of them were sent to the Gulags, the USSR‘s concentration camps, situated mostly in Siberia.There is an old and cynical saying that one death is a tragedy, but a thousand are just a front-page headline. Deaths of thousands of deportees began to make headlines only in the late 1980s. The book looks to personal tragedies.
Apie mus