1949. gada 25. mart‚ izvesto balsis

The Voices of the Deported,
25 March, 1949
The fate of some deported families
from Daugavpils and Il˚kste districts
in oral history sources and archival documents
Summary
The collection produced at the Oral History Centre of Daugavpils
University is the first joint publication of oral history sources and archival
documents in Latvia bearing evidence about the deportations in 1949. The
collection is focused on four families that were deported from Daugavpils
and Il˚kste districts of the Latvian SSR to the Siberia for special settlement
in Omsk district, Russian SFSR in March, 1949.
The aim in producing the collection was to introduce into wider research
history sources that contribute to extending and enriching the source base
for investigating the topic of deportations. The historiography of this topic
is dominated by research works based on sources drawn from the organs of
repression and other power structures of the USSR. This provides a quite
objective judgement of the intentions and activities of the organs of power,
but leaves in the shadow the individual experience of the people who were
at a momentís notice deported from their places of residence to an alien
land. The position of the deported people as the object of actions by the
authorities is mediated through the prism of power; hence sources of personal
origin are indispensable for a more comprehensive study of this topic.
The central corpus of the published texts comprises sources from the
archives of the Oral History Centre of DU ñ life-stories of the deported
people and their family members recorded during field research expeditions
to the Vabole and Saliena parishes of Daugavpils region of Latvia in 2003
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