Siberia. Mass deportations from Lithuania to the USSR is the best English-language pocket-size book about the Stalinist regime’s repressions 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. During the same period, another 200,000 people were thrown into prison. 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 frontpage headline. Deaths of thousands of deportees began to make headlines only in the late 1980s. The book presents some personal tragedies of Lithuanian deportees.