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Marking 70 years since the mass deportation of Estonians, including my great-grandmother

In a free world, she would have been considered ‘an entrepreneur.’ Instead, the Soviets labelled her a ‘kulak’ and treated her with all consequences of the meaning of the word.

Estonian Ambassador Toomas Lukk’s great-grandmother was forced to leave her home and move to Siberia as part of the Soviet Union’s March 1949 deportations from Baltic states.The Hill Times photograph by Andrew Meade

Opinion

BY TOOMAS LUKK

March 28, 2019

Operation Priboi (“Tide” in Russian) in Soviet-controlled Estonia began with a pounding on the door in the early hours of March 25, 1949. This was a wake-up call that changed the lives of many Estonians forever. NKGB (People’s Commissariat for State Security) agents and their collaborators we...

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