The June deportation (Estonian: Juuniküüditamine, Latvian: Jūnija deportācijas, Lithuanian: Birželio trėmimai) was a mass deportation by the Soviet Union of tens of thousands of people from the territories occupied in 1940–1941: Baltic states, occupied Poland (mostly present-day western Belarus and western Ukraine), and Moldova. The deportation took place from May 22 to June 20, 1941, just before the invasion of the Nazi Germany. However, the goal of the deportations was to eliminate political opponents of the Soviet regime, not to strengthen security in preparation for the German attack.
The deportation took place a year after the occupation and annexation of the Baltic states and Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina and targeted "anti-Soviet elements" – former politicians, policemen, wealthy industrialists and landowners, etc. In occupied Poland, it was the fourth wave of mass deportations and was intended to combat the "counter-revolutionary" Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. The procedure for the deportations was approved by Ivan Serov in the so-called Serov Instructions. People were deported without trials in whole families. Men were generally imprisoned and most of them died in Siberian prison camps (see Gulag); women and children were resettled in forced settlements in Omsk and Novosibirsk Oblasts, Krasnoyarsk and Altai Krais, and Kazakhstan. The mortality rate among the Estonian deportees was estimated at 60%.
The number of deported people include:
In media
The June deportation has been the subject of several Baltic films from the 2010s. The 2013 Lithuanian film The Excursionist (Ekskursante) dramatises the events through a 10-year-old girl who escapes from her camp. Estonia's 2014 In the Crosswind (Risttuules) is an essay film based on the memoirs of a woman who was deported to Siberia, and is told through staged tableaux vivants filmed in black-and-white. Estonia's Ülo Pikkov also addressed the events in the animated short film Body Memory (Kehamälu) from 2012. Latvia's The Chronicles of Melanie (Melānijas hronika) was released in 2016 and is, just like In the Crosswind, based on the memoirs of a woman who experienced the deportation, but is told in a more conventional dramatic way.