This article analyzes the mechanisms implemented during Stalin's deportations that affected the Western regions of the USSR annexed for the first time after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, then after the Second World War. It especially addresses the bureaucratic articulation, involving various bodies, repressive, political or administrative, which helps us to understand the scale of the process and its nature. This bureaucratic articulation, operating through processes of varied case-working, and following a repetitive and mechanical logic, combined with a quasi-military organization of forced displacements, since everything is planned on paper, produced the massive scale of these operations. These processes are discussed here because they lead to mass action and also because they involve specific links between the individual and the collective. They are studied on the example of a mass operation in Lithuania, called "Spring" by Soviet authorities, which begins by being prepared since mid-February 1948 and is completed during two days in mid-May of the same year. 12 000 families (about 40 000 people) are then deported to Siberia. This article uses various sources: archival documents, extremely precise and rich, helpful to understand the mechanisms, are combined with oral sources, a collection of testimonies from people who experienced these deportations. These testimonies have been collected in the frame of a large collective project devoted to all the Stalin's deportations carried out from Central and Eastern Europe and the Western territories of the USSR between 1939 and 1953. © Belin. Tous droits réservés pour tous pays.

Lithuania Stalinism Deportations Actors of repression Oral sources and archives Bureaucracy Political violence

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