CartoGraphy

JOURNEYS INTO EXILE

Journeys across the WORLD

For many of these women and men, their deportation began a story of movement across the world, in addition to the endless crossing of the Soviet Union to where they were resettled or imprisoned. The he violence of Nazis and Stalinists was, for some of them, the starting point for journeys across the world after being released from relegation. These journeys across the world need to be represented on two maps, with different scales and projections.

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« Ice children »

The ‘ice children’ crisscrossed the Soviet Union from North to South, East to West. While still children, they were sent on endless journeys by train, lorry and barge to the farthest points of Soviet territory. The children’s journeys had two legs, first deportation to the Altai, and then north of the Arctic Circle.

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Departure but not return

Some of the resettlers neither returned to their homeland nor set out for distant places. They decided voluntarily or under pressure to stay: they were firmly established in their resettlement location, had found a spouse or a position of responsibility, failed to settle back home, had money problems, etc. They were a minority (hard even to estimate), but they were to be found in Siberia and Central Asia.

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Prisons, camps and ressetlment

Many of these deported women and men spent time in the Gulag. Their journeys were a succession of imprisonments, long distances covered by train or on foot, alternating between camps and special resettlement villages, in harsh natural environments. Some would travel from the terrible cold of the Russian Far North to the searing heat of the steppes of Central Asia.

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« Ice children »

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Deportation trains

The first stage in deportation was the arrival of NKVD internal troops and local auxiliaries to snatch the future exiles from their homes, put them on lorries or wagons to a station and then into goods carriages. A given train comprised people who lived close to each other and often knew each other. After a lengthy journey, the families were taken further by road or river to places that might be close together or far apart.

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Ukrainian and Lithuanian women who became Siberian

Olga Vidlovskaia was removed from her home with her two young children in 1944, after her husband had been killed fighting the Red Army. She was deported to a place near Lake Baikal, moved to other resettlement sites and ended up in Nikilei, Siberia. She did not go back to Ukraine to live.

Vanda Valiutė was arrested in 1946 because her family were helping relatives resisting the Soviets and she was personally accused of passing messages. Sent to a camp in the Krasnoyarsk region, then to the notorious Kengir camp in the Kazakhstan steppe, she was put under house arrest on release, and finally managed to join her relatives who had been deported to a place near Lake Baikal, where she gave up her right to return. This non-return finally became a real return in 2022, when the Lithuanian authorities brought her home. She was 95 [Maps currently in preparation, not yet available].