News

In Washington, D.C., Lithuania's Minister of Foreign Affairs Kęstutis Budrys along with the Foreign Ministers of Latvia and Estonia attended a commemoration event of the biggest Stalin-era Soviet mass deportations from the Baltic states known as March deportations at The Victims of Communism Museum.

The Minister told the event participants that the world must recognise the crimes associated with both major totalitarian ideologies – Nazism and communism.

“Crimes that are not investigated, revealed, and evaluated in time open up opportunities for the revival of regimes. Russia’s war against Ukraine is an example of this, echoing the criminal imperialist ambitions of the Soviet Union,” said the Minister.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Western world started to forget the traumatic legacy of communism and the crimes of this totalitarian regime against millions of people around the world.

"The scale of communist crimes exceeds the scale of Nazi crimes, but communist crimes still did not get their Nuremberg, and the memory of their victims has not yet found a place in the historical consciousness of Europe," the minister said.

At the end of March 1949, the Soviet intelligence and counterintelligence agency (MGB) launched a codenamed Operation Priboi ("Tidal Wave"), during which about 94,000 civilians were deported from the three Baltic states, more than a third (34 thousand) of them were from Lithuania.