Liberal

Those who had fallen short of the "political duty" of voting Estonia into the USSR, who had failed to have their passports stamped for so voting were allowed to be shot in the back of the head by Soviet tribunals. Estonia was formally annexed into the Soviet Union on August 6 and renamed the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic. The 1940 occupation and annexation of Estonia into the Soviet Union was considered illegal and never officially recognized by Great Britain, the United States and other Western democracies. The Soviet authorities, having gained control over Estonia, immediately imposed a regime of terror. During the first year of Soviet occupation (1940-1941) over 8,000 people, including most of the country's leading politicians and military officers, were arrested. About 2,200 of the arrested were executed in Estonia, while most others were moved to prison camps in Russia, from where very few were later able to return alive. On June 14, 1941, when mass deportations took place simultaneously in all three Baltic countries, about 10,000 Estonian civilians were deported to Siberia and other remote areas of the Soviet Union, where nearly half of them later perished. Of the 32,100 Estonian men who were forcibly relocated to Russia under the pretext of mobilisation into the Soviet army after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, nearly 40 percent died within the next year in the so-called "labour battalions" through hunger, cold and overworking. During the first Soviet occupation of 1940-41 about 500 Jews were deported to Siberia Estonian graveyards and monuments were destroyed. Among others, the Tallinn Military Cemetery had the majority of gravestones from 1918–1944 destroyed by the Soviet authorities, and this graveyard became reused by the Red Army. Other cemeteries destroyed by the authorities during the Soviet era in Estonia include Baltic German cemeteries established in 1774 Kopli cemetery, Míµigu cemetery and the oldest cemetery in Tallinn, from 16th century, Kalamaja cemetery. Many countries including the United States did not recognize the seizure of Estonia by the USSR. Such countries recognized Estonian diplomats and consuls who still functioned in many countries in the name of their former governments. These aging diplomats persisted in this anomalous situation until the ultimate restoration of Baltic independence.

As the Soviet Union had occupied Estonia in 1940 and retaken it from Nazi Germany again in 1944, tens of thousands of Estonia's citizens suffered deportation in the 1940s. Deportations were predominantly to Siberia and Kazakhstan by means of railroad cattle cars, without prior announcement, while deported were given few night hours at best to pack their belongings and separated from their families, usually also sent to the east. The procedure was established by the MGB Order â„– 001223 of January 21, 1941. Estonians residing in Leningrad Oblast had already suffered deportation since 1935.The first repressions in Estonia affected Estonia's national elite. On July 17, 1940, Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces Johan Laidoner (died in 1953 in Vladimir prison) and his family, and on July 30, 1940, President Konstantin Päts (died in 1956 in a psikhushka in Kalinin Oblast) and his family were deported to Penza and Ufa, respectively. In 1941 they were arrested. The country political and military leadership was deported almost entirely, including 10 of 11 ministers and 68 of 120 members of parliament.
[edit] June deportation of 1941
As well as on other territories annexed by the Soviet Union in 1939-1940, in Estonia the first large scale deportation of ordinary citizens was carried out by the local operational headquarters of the NKGB of the Estonian SSR under Boris Kumm (chairman), Andres Murro, Aleksei Shkurin, Veniamin Gulst and Rudolf James according to the top secret joint decree No 1299-526ss "Directive on the Deportation of the Socially Alien Element from the Baltic Republics, Western Ukraine, Western Belorussia and Moldavia" by the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (bolsheviks) and the Council of People's Commissars of the Soviet Union of May 14, 1941. On June 14, 1941, and the following two days, 9,254-10,861 people, mostly urban, of them over 5,000 women and over 2,500 children under 16, 439 Jews (more than 10 percent of the Estonian Jewish population) were deported, mostly to Kirov Oblast, Novosibirsk Oblast or prisons. There hundred were shot. Only 4,331 persons have ever returned to Estonia. 11,102 people were to be deported from Estonia according to the order of June 13, but some managed to escape[6]. The opertation affected Latvia and Lithuania at the same time. Few weeks later, approximately 1,000 people were arrested on Saaremaa for deportation, but the Great Patriotic War started for the Soviet Union and a considerable part of the prisoners were freed by the advancing German forces. During the first year of Soviet rule nearly 54,000 Estonian citizens were executed, deported or mobilized into the Red Army. Under the pretext of conscription to the Red Army, following the German attack against the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, in early July, 33,000 Estonian men were mobilized into the Soviet army. On July 10, 1941, the conscripts from the annexed territories were declared not reliable and sent to labor camps, where many died. 5,600 more were drafted, but defected soon. ". Also in 1944 at least 30,000 were mobilized for labour service in other parts of the Soviet Union. In August 1945, 407 persons, most of them of German descent, were transferred from Estonia to Perm Oblast.

Continuous deportation
Outside the main waves, individuals and families were continually deported on smaller scale from the start of the first occupation in 1940 up to the Khrushchev Thaw of 1956 when destalinisation led Soviet Union to switch its tactic of terror from mass repressions to individual repressions. The Soviet deportations only stopped for three years in 1941-1944 when Estonia was occupied by Nazi Germany. Only in 1956, during Khrushchev Thaw, were some survived deportees allowed to return to Estonia.