June deportation: the first major wave of Soviet mass deportations and murder of Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians, begins.
The June deportation (Estonian: juuniküüditamine, Latvian: jūnija deportācijas, Lithuanian: birželio trėmimai) was a mass deportation by the Soviet Union of tens of thousands of people from the territories occupied in 1940–1941: Baltic states, occupied Poland (mostly present-day West Belarus and western Ukraine), and Moldavia.
This mass deportation was organized following the guidelines set by the NKVD and KGB, with the USSR Interior People's Commissar Lavrentiy Beria as the senior executor. The official name of the top secret operation was “Resolution On the Eviction of the Socially Foreign Elements from the Baltic Republics, Western Ukraine, Western Belarus and Moldova”. The Soviet police, called "militsya", carried out the arrests with the collaboration of local Communist Party members.