This Baltic states were under Soviet rule from the end of World War II in 1945, from Sovietization onwards until independence was regained in 1991. The Baltic states were occupied and annexed, becoming the Soviet socialist republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

1940

On 16 June 1940, the Soviet Union invaded Estonia. The Red Army exited from their military bases in Estonia, some 90,000 additional Soviet troops entered the country. Given the overwhelming Soviet force both on the borders and inside the country, not to resist, to avoid bloodshed and open war.

June 1940

The Soviet occupation of Latvia in 1940 refers to the military occupation of the Republic of Latvia by the Soviet Union under the provisions of the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany and its Secret Additional Protocol signed in August 1939.

World War II, 1941–1945 Some 1.9 million people were deported to Siberia and the Central Asian republics. Treasonous collaboration with the invading Germans and anti-Soviet rebellion were the official reasons for these deportations.

In creating incentives for peasants to produce more agricultural goods, the kulak peasants became more prosperous. Stalin’s forced collectivization seized all farm property under government control, evicted families from their homes and farms, and approximately five million kulaks were deported to the east (6).

In a short period of time, around 100,000 Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians were sent to Siberia in cattle trucks to scratch a living from the permafrost in labor camps. Some died on the way, some died as the years passed – and a few made it home.

The Ukrainian famine—known as the Holodomor, a combination of the Ukrainian words for “starvation” and “to inflict death”—by one estimate claimed the lives of 3.9 million people, about 13 percent of the population.

Some [kulaks] murdered officials, set the torch to the property of the collectives, and even burned their own crops and seed grain. Most of the victims were kulaks who had refused to sow their fields or had destroyed their crops.

During the height of collectivization in the early 1930s, people who were identified as kulaks were subjected to deportation and extrajudicial punishment. They were often murdered in local violence while others were formally executed after conviction as kulaks.

In 2013, these events led to the starvation of 61,000 of the 275,000 reindeer on the peninsula. “Losing 22 per cent of the population has never happened before,” says Forbes. In 2006, about 20,000 of the animals died.

But their suffering actually goes back further, a new study published in journal Biology Letters on Wednesday reports. In the Novembers of 2006 and 2013, more than 80,000 reindeer in the Arctic died of starvation as a result of warmer, wetter Arctic falls and winters.

Stalin had many kulaks transported to collective farms in distant places to work in agricultural labour camps. As a form of protest, many peasants preferred to slaughter their animals for food rather than give them over to collective farms, which produced a major reduction in livestock.

Answer: To develop modern forms and run them along industrial lives with machinery, it was necessary to eliminate Kulaks, take away land from peasants and establish state controlled large farms.

Kulak, (Russian: “fist”), in Russian and Soviet history, a wealthy or prosperous peasant, generally characterized as one who owned a relatively large farm and several head of cattle and horses and who was financially capable of employing hired labour and leasing land.

wealthy peasant farmer

The 1905 revolution was spurred by the Russian defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, which ended in the same year, but also by the growing realization by a variety of sectors of society of the need for reform. Politicians such as Sergei Witte had failed to accomplish this.

the 1905 Revolution