Truth about the Gulag
From Mr Andrius UzIcalnis Sir: In her article 'The great error' (28 July), Anne Applebaum suggested that political prisoners deported to Russia from the Baltic states were condemned `for joining anti-Soviet partisan movements'.
This is not true. Those who joined antiSoviet resistance were, in most cases, executed. Deportation to north of the Arctic Circle and to Siberia was intended merely as a preventive measure against those who were least likely to embrace the new rule. About 300,000 of the Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians deported after the Soviet occupation in the 1940s were mostly welloff farmers, along with people like teachers, customs officers and postmen, seen as loyal servants of the former 'bourgeois regime'.
There is a grim joke about a prison during Stalin years. 'How much did you get?' fellow cellmates asked a new arrival. 'Fifteen years.—What did you do?' Nothinu,' he replied. 'That's rubbish. Sentence for nothing is only five years.'
Andrius Uzkalnis
Caversham, Berkshire
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