On the deportations

This is one of the most difficult and important episodes I have recorded: the deportation of over 57,000 Latvians by the Soviet Russian regime in 1941 and 1949. Regarded as genocide and a crime against humanity by the European Court of Human Rights. I tell the story of what happened and how it happened.

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On the deportations

The trains to Siberia

There's a railway station in Torņakalns, just across the Daugava river from Rīga’s Old Town. If you go there today, you'll find an old wooden freight wagon sitting on a short stretch of track. It looks unremarkable. A little battered. Reddish-brown timber, faded and weathered by decades of Baltic winters.

But that wagon tells a story Latvia has never been allowed to forget.

Today, I want to take you on one of the most difficult and, I think, one of the most important journeys this podcast has made. We're going to talk about the deportations — the two great waves of terror in which the Soviet Russian regime tore tens of thousands of Latvian men, women and children from their homes and sent them to the far corners of the Soviet empire, in June 1941 and March 1949.

These are dates that every Latvian knows by heart, taught and commemorated in schools. Nowadays, we call the deportations a crime against humanity.

I want to tell you not only what happened, but how it happened — the machinery of it — and why the Soviets did it. I want to tell you about one extraordinary Latvian woman who survived it all and refused to be broken. And at the end, I'll tell you where in Rīga you can go to understand this history for yourself. All from the perspective of an outsider, a foreigner, living in Latvia.

Let's begin.

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The first wave

It is the night of the 13th of June, 1941. Latvia has been a Soviet republic for less than a year. In June 1940, the Red Army rolled across the border, and by August that year, the Soviet Union had formally annexed Latvia, a takeover that the major Western powers never recognised as legal.

The new Soviet authorities got to work immediately. They dismantled Latvian institutions, arrested political figures, and began compiling lists. Long, detailed lists of people.

Because across Moscow, in the offices of the NKVD — the Soviet secret police — a general named Ivan Serov had spent the previous two years refining a blueprint for what he called the deportation of "anti-Soviet elements". His instructions had originally been prepared for occupied western Ukraine. By the winter of 1941, they had been adapted for the Baltic States.

The plan was bureaucratic in its thoroughness and brutal in its intent. Families with connections to state and local government, the military, civic organisations, and trade were all on the lists. Former members of the National Guard. Landowners. Merchants. Schoolteachers. Scouts. Anyone who, in the eyes of the Soviet state, had occupied a position of influence in an independent Latvia. They were labelled "suspect and anti-Soviet elements", "class enemies", and "bourgeois nationalists”.

And on the night of the 13th of June, 1941, they came for them.

NKVD officers and local activists arrived at the doors of targeted families across Latvia: in cities, in towns, and on farmsteads in the countryside. They knocked in the small hours of the morning, when children were still asleep, and men were still in bed. People were given less than an hour, some sources say as little as twenty minutes, to gather what they could carry. Everything else — their homes, furniture, livestock, and savings — was confiscated by the state.

In the early-morning darkness, families were herded to assembly points. More than fifty had been prepared across the country. They were then loaded, crammed is the better word, into railway cattle wagons. Freight cars designed for animals. Wooden walls. No proper sanitation. A hole cut in a corner of the floor served as a toilet. Over forty people were pushed into each car.

Then the doors were bolted shut.

But before the trains pulled out from Torņakalns and other stations, something happened that has haunted Latvian memory ever since. The men were separated from their families. Husbands were taken from their wives. Fathers from their children. The men, some eight thousand two hundred and fifty of them, were arrested as "enemies of the people" and sent to hard labour camps deep within the Soviet Gulag. The women and children, labelled "family members of enemies of the people," were taken to so-called "administrative settlements" and forced into exile in Siberia and Central Asia.

Many of those women never knew what had become of their husbands. Soviet-censored newspapers said nothing. The militia provided no information. Families waiting at home in Latvia had no way to find out who had been taken or where. In the days that followed, small handwritten notes, farewell letters thrown from the wagons by the deported, were scattered along the railway lines, a last attempt to reach those they loved. Few of them ever arrived.

In total, in that single night and the days that followed, approximately fifteen thousand Latvian residents — among them two thousand four hundred children under the age of ten — were deported without trial, without charge, and without any legal process whatsoever.

The trains headed east. Weeks on the rails. Some died on the journey: the elderly, the very young, and those already ill. Those who survived arrived in the Amur, Tomsk and Omsk regions, vast, emptied corners of the Soviet Union where winters were ferocious and conditions were designed to break people.

Of those fifteen thousand, around five thousand, between thirty-four and forty per cent, died in exile, on the journey, or were executed.

International law has since classified the June 1941 deportations as both genocide and a crime against humanity.

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The second wave

The second occupation of Latvia began in 1944 and 1945, as the Red Army pushed German forces westwards. By 1949, Latvia had been under Soviet rule for four years. But the Soviet authorities had a problem. Two problems, in fact.

The first were the mežabrāļi — the Forest Brothers. They were Latvian men and some women who refused to accept Soviet rule. They retreated into the forests, built hidden bunkers, and waged guerrilla warfare against the occupying forces. At their peak, from 1946 to 1948, there were hundreds of small units fighting across Latvia. They were a constant thorn in the side of Moscow and were quietly supported, at great risk, by ordinary Latvian families in the countryside. Farmers who left food at the edge of the trees. Mothers who smuggled medicine to sons they hadn't seen in years.

The second problem was collectivisation. Stalin wanted Latvia's independent farms — the proud, centuries-old farmsteads that defined rural Latvian life — transformed into Soviet collective farms, known as kolkhozy. But Latvian farmers were resisting. They were not signing up. They were not handing over their land. And the resistance was stiffening, not weakening.

In Moscow, the solution to both problems was identical.

On the 29th of January 1949, Stalin signed a decree ordering the permanent deportation of twenty-nine thousand families from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, a total of approximately eighty-seven thousand people. The operation was given a code name: Priboi. In English, it means "Coastal Surf”. A breaking wave that would sweep people out of Latvia forever.

The preparations took months. Instructions were drawn up in meticulous, terrifying detail. Operational group leaders were briefed on exactly how to approach a family. They were to explain, with a kind of grotesque Soviet bureaucratic courtesy, that the family was being relocated to "more distant regions of the Soviet Union". They were told to take note of who offered resistance. At loading stations, commanders were instructed to organise "the swift and correct loading of deportees" into cattle wagons.

More than seventy-six thousand Soviet troops, security personnel, and Communist Party activists were mobilised. Local officials and activists considered loyal to the regime were assembled in community centres the night before, told they were attending a spring sowing meeting, and kept there under guard so they couldn't warn the victims.

At one hour past midnight on the 25th of March 1949, the operation began simultaneously across all three Baltic republics.

Dawn broke over Latvian farms to the sound of knocking, or sometimes the sound of boots breaking down doors. Families were given time to pack. Some managed to grab blankets, a few clothes, a photograph. Many were loaded onto trucks first, then transferred to freight trains at railway loading points. Eight thousand four hundred and twenty-two trucks and sixty-six freight trains — the scale is staggering.

This time, entire families were deported together: men, women, the elderly, and small children. But over seventy per cent of the deportees were still women and children under the age of sixteen. In many cases, the men had already been arrested in earlier sweeps or were out in the forests with the partisans.

In four days — just four days — over forty thousand Latvians were deported, part of a Baltic total exceeding ninety thousand people.

They were transported to the most inhospitable parts of the Soviet Union. Settlements that one historian has described as "gulags without barbed wire." They were classified as "special settlers", forbidden to leave their designated area and required to report regularly to Soviet authorities. Attempts to escape were punishable by twenty years’ hard labour.

The operation was brutally effective. By the end of 1949, ninety-three per cent of farms in Latvia had been collectivised. In just one year, the mass deportation achieved what years of pressure and propaganda had failed to achieve. The Forest Brothers, stripped of the family support networks on which they depended, began to collapse. The 1949 deportation effectively ended organised armed resistance to Soviet occupation in Latvia.

The European Court of Human Rights has since ruled that the March deportation was a crime against humanity.

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One woman who did not break

Now I want to tell you about one person. Because history has a habit of becoming numbers, and numbers don't bleed, I want to make sure that in this episode we remember that behind every statistic there was a life.

Lidija Lasmane was born on the 28th of July 1925 in the Ulmale parish of Aizpute district, to a farming family in Kurzeme, western Latvia. She was raised in a Baptist household, a faith that would, over the decades that followed, become the bedrock of her survival.

By the end of the Second World War, Lidija was a young woman training as a nurse in Rīga. Kurzeme — where she had grown up — had been the scene of intense fighting in the war’s final months. The young men of the region who refused to surrender to the Soviets had gone into the forests. The mežabrāļi, as we described earlier.

Some of them came through her family's home.

“All the boys from Kurzeme who did not raise the white flag," Lidija has said in interviews, "ran to the forest. Our house was full of them. Could you really drive your own people away?"

Lidija didn't drive them away. She helped them. She used her nursing training to bring medicines and bandages to the partisans. She treated them in the hospital in Rīga where she worked. It was extraordinarily dangerous work. It was also, in the moral world Lidija inhabited, simply what you did.

On the 23rd of November 1946, the knock came at the door. Lidija was twenty-one years old. She was arrested along with her parents. The partisans she had helped were also arrested. Her father, Andrejs Lasmanis, was sentenced to ten years in a labour camp. Her mother received a three-year suspended sentence. Lidija herself was sentenced to five years in the East Ural corrective labour camp, the Vosturallag, in Sverdlovsk Oblast. In that camp, she contracted tuberculosis.

She survived it.

She came home, but the Soviet state was not finished with Lidija Lasmane.

In 1970, she was arrested a second time. This time for distributing samizdat, the underground self-published literature of Soviet dissent. Banned books. Forbidden ideas. She was sentenced again.

She survived that, too.

And in 1983, during the repression campaigns of the Andropov era, when the Soviet regime launched a new crackdown on Baltic dissidents, Lidija was arrested for the third time, and charged with "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda." She was sentenced to five years in a labour camp, followed by three years of internal exile in the Altai region of Siberia.

In total, Lidija Doroņina-Lasmane — she took the name Doroņina from her husband — spent fourteen years in Soviet prisons and forced labour camps. Fourteen of her birthdays behind bars.

She was released in January 1987, as Gorbachev's perestroika began to loosen the grip of the Soviet system. She returned to Latvia, and Latvia regained its independence four years later.

Today, Lidija lives in a small rented apartment near Brīvības iela (Freedom Street) in Rīga. As of 2025, she is one hundred years old. She was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2018, although the prize was ultimately awarded to Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad "for their efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict." She has grandchildren. Her biographer writes that she rejoices "in God, in the freedom that her beloved Latvia has regained, and in her many grandchildren."

In 2025, a book about her life was published, written by the Latvian author Inga Ābele and is now available in English. It's called Lidija's Little Flowers, Lidijas ziediņi in Latvian. It is a collection of Lidija's memories, reflections, and the fragments of beauty she found even in the darkest places. Her story is described as "a poignant collection of memories and reflections of a remarkable woman who has become a distinctive symbol of resistance against brutal oppression and the belief in the positive in human nature."

You can buy it at the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia for twelve euros. I highly recommend it.

Lidija says her mission is to live and bear witness, "like a glorious sunset that tells the story of the preceding day.” I find that sentence so beautiful, as someone who often watches the sun go down.

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Where to learn more, and how Latvia remembers

If you want to understand the deportations in depth, Rīga is one of the best places to do so. Latvia has not concealed this history. It has built memory into the city itself.

The Museum of the Occupation of Latvia

Start at the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia, at Latviešu strēlnieku laukums 1, right in the heart of the Old Town. The building itself is a striking example of late-Soviet architecture, originally designed as a museum for the Red Latvian Riflemen. After independence, it was repurposed — in one of history's neater ironies — to tell the story of what Soviet occupation meant for the people who lived through it.

The museum was established in 1993, and after ten years of renovation, a completely new permanent exhibition opened on the 1st of June 2022. The new exhibition covers eleven chapters of Latvia's twentieth-century history, from the interwar republic through to re-independence. It uses modern technology, personal testimonies, photographs, original documents and artefacts to bring you as close as is possible to what it felt like to be Latvian in these decades.

There is a replica of a deportation wagon inside the museum. You can step inside it. When you do, I challenge you to imagine forty people in that space.

The museum is open every day.

The Torņakalns Memorial

But before you go to the museum, or after — it doesn't matter — take the train across the Daugava to Torņakalns, the first stop.

The memorial at Torņakalns railway station is one of the most moving places in Rīga, precisely because it isn't grand. The old Torņakalns station is quiet now. There are no long-distance trains here, no crowds. But walk just 10 metres south of the station, and you'll find the wagon.

It's a reddish-brown wooden freight car, the kind you might see rusting on a siding anywhere in Eastern Europe. It sits on a short length of track laid specifically for this purpose. Steps lead up to its door. Next to it, a small white panel in Latvian, English and Russian tells you that, in June 1941, the Soviet communists deported approximately fifteen thousand Latvians to distant parts of the Soviet Union in a wagon like this.

The wagon was restored using historical photographs and, in 1996, placed here by the Occupation Museum in cooperation with Latvian Railways. It has weathered since then, and there have been ongoing concerns about its condition, yet it remains, stubbornly, in place.

A memorial stone in front of the wagon lists the headline figures: 15,424 Latvians were deported on 14 June 1941, and 42,125 on 25 March 1949. As you might expect, candles are lit in front of the memorial.

Stand there for a few minutes. Listen to the trains passing by. You'll understand why this place was chosen.

How Latvia commemorates the deportations today

Latvia has made the 14th of June an official national day — the Commemoration Day of Victims of Communist Terror.

Every year, on the 14th of June, a wreath-laying ceremony and the laying of flowers take place at the "History Tactile" memorial — a wall dedicated to the victims of the Soviet occupation — at Latviešu strēlnieku laukums, right outside the Occupation Museum. Senior state officials, members of the diplomatic corps, and, of course, ordinary Latvians attend.

The Latvian Association of the Politically Repressed, the organisation of survivors and their descendants, holds an annual march from the Occupation Museum to the Freedom Monument, accompanied by a men's folk group.

It was at the Freedom Monument, incidentally, that Latvians first dared to gather publicly to commemorate the deportations in 1987, while the country was still under Soviet occupation. It was an act of collective courage in the age of glasnost, when the old certainties of the Soviet system were just beginning to crack.

The 25th of March — the anniversary of the 1949 Operation Priboi deportations — is also observed in Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania as a Day of Mourning.

These commemorations are not merely rituals. They are living acts of remembrance. In a country occupied for fifty years, an occupation the occupier even denies, the act of remembering, publicly and defiantly, is itself a form of resistance.

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Back to Torņakalns

That wooden wagon at Torņakalns station. Let me bring you back to it to end.

When I went to see it, I stood there for quite a long time. I took some photographs and video. It's not a large space. Forty people in a cattle wagon. Weeks on the rails. Little food. Little water. Barely any light. And through every crack in those wooden walls — Latvia disappearing behind them.

The Soviet Union that compiled those lists, issued those decrees, and loaded those trains is long gone. The KGB headquarters on Stūra māja, the Corner House, is now a museum as well. The people who signed the orders are long dead.

But the people who were on those trains — some of them are still alive. Lidija Doroņina-Lasmane is one hundred years old, and she lives on Brīvības iela, Freedom Street. To me, that is the whole story of Latvia in one address.

If you're in Rīga, head to Torņakalns. Visit the Occupation Museum. Pick up a copy of Lidija's Little Flowers from the museum shop and read it.

And if you want to understand why Latvians are the way they are — resilient, fiercely proud of their language and their culture, with a profound instinct for the value of freedom — stand in front of that wagon, and stay there until you understand.

Paldies — thank you for listening.

[Illustration by An Englishman in Latvia of the train wagon at Torņakalns. Music by Music Word and sound effects by freesound_community, universfield, dragon-studio, Michael Koreli and Martha Whitehouse from Pixabay]