Improvements in education substantially raised the countrys literacy rate. And in this atmosphere literature and art and religious life flourished. But in 1939. the socalled nonaggression pact between Nazi Germany and Communist Russia destroyed what we commemorate todaythe independence of Lithuania. Fortyseven years ago. the Government of the Soviet Union began the mass deportation of hundreds of thousands of Estonians. Lithuanians. and Latvians. This was the latest in a series of genocidal tactics used by the Soviets to legitimize their annexation of the Baltic States and to erase from the Earth all traces of the people. the cultures and the countries of Estonia.
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deportation