On June 14, the victims of the Communist genocide will be mentioned throughout Latvia – more than 15,000 Latvian citizens who were sent to Siberia by the Soviet occupation regime in 1941. Since then, it is mostly the children of the repressed born in Russia's more remote areas who have remained alive. These people are also considered to be repressed in Latvia, but part has long failed to prove their status for various reasons.
Anonymous example: "I am Alberts Grosbergs' daughter, the Soviet authorities arrested my father on June 14, 1941, and sent the family to Russia. He was sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment for having been a guard."
The politically repressed daughter of Alberts Grosbergs asked not to mention her name on this record. Ten years ago, trying to settle the status of a repressed person, the Office of Citizenship and Migration Affairs rejected it because it was not verifiable whether her father had been subjected to Soviet repression at the time of her birth. Alberts' daughter was born on March 17 1951 in the Borodino village of the Rybinsk district of Krasnoyarsk.
Grosbergs' daughter appealed to the court, but there she also got a negative judgment on the granting of the status of a repressed person in three instances of the court. At the daughter's discretion, however, the decision was taken unfairly because both sides lacked concrete evidence: a document on the removal of her father from the register of the Soviet regime's specialized agency.
The lady said that the long years had caused her moral harm, trying to prove that she was born at a time when her father could not yet be free from the repression of the USSR. She concluded that it is a systemic problem in the country since many of the documents of the repressive authorities of that time cannot be obtained, but institutions often go with it without going into the case, and as a result, officials are acting against a person seeking justice.
In the meantime, the judgment of the Administrative District Court reads that no document indicates that Grosbergs would have been sent to the location of the special camp after the release of the sentence. Here Alberts' daughter argued to the court that, at the same time, there was no issue a document on the removal of her father from the list. She told the court that, after being released from the camp, her father was sent to Achinsk and had no freedom of choice to go.
Number of repressed persons has fallen sharply
Figures from the Office for Citizenship and Migration Affairs (PMLP) show that over the last five years, the repressed status has been requested by 70 persons and the status has been granted to 37. There have been two legal proceedings relating to the refusal of status to PMLP at this time.
The most common reasons for refusing status were explained by the administration's representative Madara Puķe:
"In principle, the main reason is that this person was born a year or later after the repressed parents were removed from the records of the specialized agency, or quite often we have applications where the parents have been sent away, but the child was born when they were already in Latvia, and it no longer complies with the law on the status of the politically repressed person. In principle, the documents submitted do not comply with the requirements of the law, but we operate within the limits of the law that we have, because otherwise, it is arbitrariness and anarchy, because each of the statuses requires the State budget."
Asked whether PMLP employees see problems with access to documents, for example, if they should be obtained from the Russian archive, Puķe said that there were no big problems with it.
“We are working with Latvian archives and also with foreign archives, and the information that PMLP needs to request is not about so many people as to not get it, it is not thousands,” said Puķe.
She also added that the administration is taking decisions along with the advisory board, which also includes repressed individuals.
On the example of Grosbergs' daughter outlined above, Puķe commented that the administration had carried out its task properly, as confirmed by the court's decision. On the other hand, in another court cases of the last few years concerning the refusal of the status of a repressed person, the court ruled in favor of the applicant because the person had obtained additional documents.
Member of the Board of the Latvian Political Repeated Alliance, lawyer, and member of the Bureau of the International Association of Former Political Prisoners and Victims of Communism, Pēteris Simsons, in his practice, has often faced similar cases. In his opinion, Alberts Grosbergs could not be considered to have been free on the basis of the information of early release.
“This is not the only time when a person is released from prison, he will have a child after a while, but he gains the right to return to Latvia only later. This is perhaps a unique case where he has been released due to his state of health and his lack of use in coerced work [..],” Simsons said.
“It is therefore now a question whether the responsible official who decides this issue is guided by the general practice that the Soviet Union had at the time and by what status this early release was at the time, or whether the official, specifically, if there is no evidence, orders the documents,” he continued.
There even cases where a person has been convicted in Latvia, for example, for tax evasion in 1948, sentenced to jail, and while they were in jail here, the rest of the family were sent away. “And when a man had done his time and had voluntarily left for his family to Siberia, he was not a free man, because he was immediately exposed to a specialized status with all the regular records and restrictions on movement,” Simsons summarized.
Documents often missing
The Latvian National Archives historian Gints Zelmenis also knows about Alberts Grosbergs and his daughter. He said there are often many different documents missing.
“In this case, it is clearly apparent that the Mrs's father has been arrested and imprisoned in Vyatlag in 1941. The indictment article even states him initially subjected to shooting but at that time there was such a practice that he could eventually change the sentence to 10 years imprisonment. And all the documents relating to Grosbergs' repression also ended, because everything else that is there is already the 1989 rehabilitation documents,” Zelmenis explained.
"And this is the problem that appears - what happened to that man from 1943 - is not exactly proof, but, logically, it is very unlikely that he was released in that 1943 as a completely free man," Zelmenis continued.
The Saeima Human Rights Committee has not recently had any draft or discussion on the agenda regarding the repressed procedures for granting status.
In 2018, the Committee looked at amendments to another related law on the rehabilitation of persons wrongfully repressed. At the time, Pēteris Simsons, who, as a Member of the Supreme Council of Latvia, also participated in the creation of the original law in 1992, submitted his views to the Saeima Committee on the situation of politically repressed persons in Latvia.
He concluded that, for 30 years, those deported to Siberia, their children born there or back in Latvia, had been facing judicial and executive confusion and dismissal in granting the status of a politically repressed person, in recovering the confiscated property and receiving compensation, and in repatriation.
“It is obviously the conviction of the Soviet person in us for the right treatment of the individual. See how difficult it is to appeal to the legislator because I made this report on the politically repressed situation a long time ago for the previous Saeima, but this issue has not moved on,” Simsons said. “There is no desire to correct anything, to amend anything.”
