70 years of Operation North - eyewitnesses and experts discuss the mass deportation of Jehovah's Witnesses in the USSR

"To evict forever." The government's order for the largest religious deportation in the USSR, which commenced in April of 1951, changed the lives of thousands of Jehovah's Witnesses forever. Men and women, the elderly and babies - about 10,000 individuals - were loaded onto freight trains and transported in inhumane conditions from the western regions of the country to the north without the right to return. They were deprived of their homes, property, and some even their lives for their faith in God, because it did not fit into the framework of Soviet ideology.

What did believers have to endure and what are the parallels with the events in modern Russia? The victims of the tragedy and experts talk about this in a video prepared for the 70th anniversary of the special operation, codenamed "North".