Speech #870210054

Latvians. and Llthuanianshave had their share of misery and misfortune. but fate was most cruel to them in 1940. In that year these three countries. once the home of rising young and progressive democracies. were attacked by the Soviet Union. overrun. and then annexed to the Soviet Union. Many hundreds of thousands of their inhabitants were uprooted from their homes and deported to other parts of the Soviet Union. Unfortunately many innocent and helpless victims of the Soviet Unions unbridled aggression of 1940 are still suffering in some distant and desolate corner of the Soviet empire. For the last 22 years the free world has heard practically nothing about these people except what has been learned from those few who have had the extraordinary good luck to escape. And the fate of millions of Estonlans. Latvians. and Lithuanians in their homeland is not much better. It is true that they were not deported. but they certainly suffered much privation and hardship during the war. and are still suffering under the unrelenting tyranny of Communist totalitarianism. We have also learned that in recent years the native population of the coastal areas of these countries were moved to the interior in order to make room for Asiatic people brought in to settle there. Outrageous and almost unbelievable as this may sound. yet the deliberate policy of the Soviet Union seems to be to colonize these frontiers exposed to the West with people from other parts of the Soviet Union. We in the West are fully cognizant of these heartrending facts. We are well aware of the sad fate that befell those deportees and of the unbelievable lot of those who are living in the three Baltic countries today. I wholeheartedly sympathize with their lot. and ardently hope that soon a way will be found to ameliorate their lot and free them from Communist totalitarian tyranny. Soviet Deportation of Lithuanians in 1940