During the World War II expulsions and shortly after the war, the Soviet Union, during its struggle to establish the People's Republic of Poland, forcibly resettled many Poles, who lived in the Lithuanian SSR and were seen as enemies of the state and were sent into Siberia. After the war, in 1945–1948, the Soviet Union allowed 197,000 Poles to leave to Poland; in 1956-1959, another 46,600 were able to leave. In the 1950s the remaining Polish minority was a target of several attempted campaigns of Lithuanization by the Communist Party of Lithuania, which tried to ban any teaching in the Polish language; those attempts, however, were vetoed by Moscow, which saw them as too nationalistic. The Soviet census of 1959 showed 230,100 Poles concentrated in the Vilnius region (8.5% of the Lithuanian SSR's population). The Polish minority increased in size, but more slowly than other ethnic groups in Lithuania; the last Soviet census of 1989 showed 258,000 Poles (7.0% of the Lithuanian SSR's population). The Polish minority, subject in the past to massive, often voluntary Russification and Sovietization, and recently to voluntary processes of Lithuanization, shows many and increasing signs of assimilation with Lithuanians.