the terror museums
Remembering KGB oppression in the Baltics.
The Baltic states fell under control of the Soviet Union thanks to a secret provision of the notorious Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939. With Poland's quick collapse to the combined armies of Nazi Germany and the USSR, the nations of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania could offer little resistance to Stalin's pressure. The USSR's control of the Baltics was initially short, lasting only a year before the Nazi invasion of Russia forced a Red Army retreat. By 1944, the Soviet Union once again moved into the region.
Numerous underground resistance movements plagued the Soviet occupiers for approximately two decades. Notable among these groups was the "Forest Brothers," a group of Estonians and Lithuanians hardened by years of fighting in the Second World War who conducted guerilla attacks on the Soviet military from the Estonian & Lithuanian woods.
Soviet crackdowns as a response to the resistance movements led to approximately 600,000 sent to the Gulag. These men, women, and children are remembered through museums in Tartu, Estonia and Vilnius, Lithuania. The Tartu KGB Cells Museum has restored several cells, lock-ups, and corridors back to their original condition. In Vilnius, the KGB museum has restored torture chambers, isolation rooms, and prisoner cells. Among those held in the KGB prison in Vilnius was future Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, one of the 10% of the Lithuanian Jewish population that survived the Holocaust - in his case somewhat ironically as he was deported to the Siberian gulag one week before the Nazi invasion of Lithuania.
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01.06.2003 © ljr