TRAIN No. 293

In one of his last acts as president, Lennart Meri marked the 60th year since he and thousands of other people across the Baltic states were deported by Soviet forces.

By Michael Tarm

Two twelve-year-old friends sat on separate prison trains 60 years ago peering out barbed-wire windows and listening, confused and afraid, to the clickety-clack of wagon wheels against the rails.
Their families, like thousands of others across the Baltic states, had been awakened by Soviet troops, marched at gunpoint to these cattle cars and packed in. There wasn’t room to lie down; holes in the wooden floors served as latrines.

But in a surreal interlude to their forced exile, their trains had drawn side by side, and young Lennart (above photo) and Ãœlo suddenly saw each other. They shouted excitedly across the gap for several minutes until their trains finally diverged for good.

One of those childhood playmates, Lennart Meri, became Estonian president and he met Ülo Johanson again in one of many emotional events across the region marking the anniversary of that first large-scale Soviet deportation on June 14, 1941. It was Meri’s last major tour of the country before leaving office several months later as his second and final term as president ended.

Flags draped with black ribbons flew across all three Baltic states on the occasion. In Estonia, church bells tolled at noon, and in Latvia people lit candles by a railway where they or their relatives had been herded onto Siberian-bound trains.
In the decade after the Red Army occupied Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in 1940, more than 200,000 people seen by dictator Josef Stalin as potential enemies of the new regime were shipped to Siberia, more than 2,000 kilometers away.

The first wave of arrests, including of Meri and Johanson, were on that day in June.
“Estonians were also arrested and killed before June 14, though this was done mostly in silence,” explained historian Toomas Hiio. “But that day was when all Estonians saw with their own eyes what the new regime meant.”

Nearly 10,000 Estonians, including 4,000 children and infants, were arrested on June 14 alone; that was roughly 1 percent of the population. Some 15,000 people were deported from Latvia the same day, and nearly 20,000 from Lithuania. Two-thirds of those deported died in the harsh Siberian conditions—including extreme cold and food shortages—or were executed.

The most ambitious commemoration in June (2001) was a three-week tour by outgoing President Meri to meet fellow survivors. His office said he met one-on-one with some 7,000 former deportees during gatherings at parks and farms.
At a park in Tallinn on June 13, the last day of the tour, 2,000 people—some in wheel-chairs or clutching canes—waited in a cold, blustery rain for three hours to shake hands and exchange words with the president.

One of the last in line was Ãœlo Johanson.
“What a wonderful feeling to meet him again,” said Johanson, 72, minutes after shaking Meri’s hand. “We played as children and we shared the same tragic fate. When we shook hands just now, he said, ‘You see, we survived after all.’”

The president had said he wanted to thank each survivor in person for persevering. He said they had lived to see their country regain independence against the odds.
“This isn’t our day of glory, but neither is it a day of infamy,” Meri told one gathering in southern Estonia. “We have won, and they have lost.”
Meri has backed the prosecution of a handful of those who helped carry out the deportations, insisting it has nothing to do with revenge.

“We don’t have the luxury of living in the past like some old French aristocrats,” he said in an interview. “It’s our duty to live for the future. And this can only be achieved without hating the past and without seeking revenge….But we must fully understand this aspect of our past, to be absolutely sure that it is not repeated in the lives of my children and grandchildren.”

Meri said he clearly remembered the day he was deported. He recalled that he awoke to the sound of soldiers’ boots stomping down the hall outside his bedroom.
Meri, his five-year-old brother, mother and father were given 20 minutes to pack. The soldiers told the Meris they were, of all things, being taken to have a sauna.

“It was the most ridiculous explanation I’d ever heard in my life,” said Meri.
He said the time they did have to pack, however short, proved critical.
“It was minus 50 Celsius in Siberia,” he explained. “Twenty minutes is enough to find your trousers and your snow boots. Finding them saved my life.”

When they were delivered to awaiting trains, it became clear that Meri’s father would be put on one train and the rest of the family on another.
“‘We have to say goodbye now. We may not see each other for a long time,’” Meri recalls his father saying. “He then took me aside and said that I was now the elder in the family, at just 12, and that I should take care of my mother and brother. As we walked away, I looked back twice at him before he disappeared.”

In the 1990s, Meri got access to KGB archives in Tallinn that provided further details about his deportation. He discovered that the number of the train that carried him to Siberia was 293, the convoy unit was No. 153 OKV and the commanding officer that day was a Lieutenant Donchenko.
Detailed instructions on how to deal with those being deported aboard train No. 293 included the short but ominous Clause G: “Singing prohibited.”

Meri told an audience during his cross-nation tour that Estonians now needed to focus on integrating with the West, including by joining NATO, to ensure their children and grandchildren never share their fate of six decades ago.

“Estonia is expecting to join NATO,” he said. “It’ll mean our children and children’s children won’t have to be worried about their security. Let them be worried about their math homework instead.”