Population transfer in the Soviet Union
Population transfer in the Soviet Union was the forced transfer of various groups from the 1930s up to the 1950s ordered by Joseph Stalin. It may be classified into the following broad categories: deportations of "anti-Soviet" categories of population, deportations of entire nationalities, labor force transfer, and organized migrations in opposite directions to fill the ethnically cleansed territories. Dekulakization marked the first time that an entire class was deported, whereas the deportation of the Soviet Koreans in 1937 marked the first instance of an ethnic deportation of an entire nationality.
In most cases, their destinations were underpopulated remote areas. This includes deportations to the Soviet Union of non-Soviet citizens from countries outside the USSR. It has been estimated that, in their entirety, internal forced migrations affected at least 6 million people. Of this total, 1.8 million kulaks were deported in 1930–31, 1.0 million peasants and ethnic minorities in 1932–39, whereas about 3.5 million ethnic minorities were further resettled during 1940–52.
Soviet archives documented 390,000 deaths during kulak forced resettlement and up to 400,000 deaths of persons deported to forced settlements during the 1940s; however, Steven Rosefield and Norman Naimark put overall deaths closer to some 1 to 1.5 million perishing as a result of the deportations – of those deaths, the deportation of the Crimean Tatars and the deportation of the Chechens and Ingush were recognized as genocides by Ukraine and the European Parliament respectively.
Deportation of social groups
s were a group of relatively affluent farmers and had gone by this class system term in the later Russian Empire, Soviet Russia, and early Soviet Union. They were the most numerous group deported by the Soviet Union. Resettlement of people officially designated as kulaks continued until early 1950, including several major waves.Large numbers of kulaks regardless of their nationality were resettled to Siberia and Central Asia. According to data from Soviet archives, which were published in 1990, 1,803,392 people were sent to labor colonies and camps in 1930 and 1931, and 1,317,022 reached the destination. Deportations on a smaller scale continued after 1931. The reported number of kulaks and their relatives who had died in labour colonies from 1932 to 1940 was 389,521. It is estimated that 15 million kulaks and their families were deported by 1937, during the deportation many people died, but the full number is not known.
Ethnic operations
During the 1930s, categorisation of so-called enemies of the people shifted from the usual Marxist–Leninist, class-based terms, such as kulak, to ethnic-based ones. The partial removal of potentially trouble-making ethnic groups was a technique used consistently by Joseph Stalin during his government; between 1935 and 1938 alone, at least ten different nationalities were deported. Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union led to a massive escalation in Soviet ethnic cleansing.The Deportation of Koreans in the Soviet Union, originally conceived in 1926, initiated in 1930, and carried through in 1937, was the first mass transfer of an entire nationality in the Soviet Union. Almost the entire Soviet population of ethnic Koreans were forcefully moved from the Russian Far East to unpopulated areas of the Kazakh SSR and the Uzbek SSR in October 1937.
Looking at the entire period of Stalin's rule, one can list: Poles, Kola Norwegians, Romanians, Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians, Volga Germans, Ingrian Finns, Finnish people in Karelia, Crimean Tatars, Crimean Greeks and Caucasus Greeks, Kalmyks, Balkars, Italians of Crimea, Karachays, Meskhetian Turks, Karapapaks, Far East Koreans, Chechens and Ingushs. Shortly before, during and immediately after World War II, Stalin conducted a series of deportations on a huge scale which profoundly affected the ethnic map of the Soviet Union. It is estimated that between 1941 and 1949 nearly 3.3 million were deported to Siberia and the Central Asian republics. By some estimates, up to 43% of the resettled population died of diseases and malnutrition.
The deportations started with Poles from Byelorussia, Ukraine and European Russia between 1932 and 1936. Koreans in the Russian Far East were deported in 1937.
Western annexations and deportations, 1939–1941
After the Soviet invasion of Poland following the corresponding German invasion that marked the start of World War II in 1939, the Soviet Union annexed eastern parts of the Second Polish Republic, which since then became western parts of the Belarusian SSR and the Ukrainian SSR. During 1939–1941, 1.45 million people inhabiting the region were deported by the Soviet regime. According to Polish historians, 63.1% of these people were Poles and 7.4% were Jews. Previously it was believed that about 1.0 million Polish citizens died at the hands of the Soviets, but recently Polish historians, based mostly on queries in Soviet archives, estimate the number of deaths at about 350,000 people deported in 1939–1945.The same followed in the Baltic republics of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. More than 200,000 people are estimated to have been deported from the Baltic in 1940–1953. In addition, at least 75,000 were sent to the Gulag. 10% of the entire adult Baltic population was deported or sent to labor camps. In 1989, native Latvians represented only 52% of the population of their own country. In Estonia, the figure was 62%. In Lithuania, the situation was better because the migrants sent to that country actually moved to the former area of Eastern Prussia which, contrary to the original plans, never became part of Lithuania.
Likewise, Romanians from Chernivtsi Oblast and Moldovia had been deported in great numbers which range from 200,000 to 400,000.
World War II, 1941–1945
During World War II, particularly in 1943–44, the Soviet government conducted a series of deportations. Some 1.9 million people were deported to Siberia and the Central Asian republics. Treasonous collaboration with the invading Germans and anti-Soviet rebellion were the official reasons for these deportations. Out of approximately 183,000 Crimean Tatars, 20,000 or 10% of the entire population served in German battalions. Consequently, Tatars too were transferred en masse by the Soviets after the war. Vyacheslav Molotov justified this decision saying "The fact is that during the war we received reports about mass treason. Battalions of Caucasians opposed us at the fronts and attacked us from the rear. It was a matter of life and death; there was no time to investigate the details. Of course innocents suffered. But I hold that given the circumstances, we acted correctly." Historian Ian Grey writes "Towards the Moslem peoples, the Germans pursued a benign, almost paternalistic policy. The Karachai, Balkars, Ingush, Chechen, Kalmucks, and Tatars of the Crimea all displayed pro-German sympathies in some degree. It was only the hurried withdrawal of the Germans from the Caucasus after the battle of Stalingrad that prevented their organizing the Moslem people for effective anti-Soviet action. The Germans boasted loudly, however, that they had left a strong "fifth column" behind them in the Caucasus."Volga Germans and seven nationalities of the Crimea and the northern Caucasus were deported: the Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Karachays, and Meskhetian Turks. All Crimean Tatars were deported en masse, in a form of collective punishment, on 18 May 1944 as special settlers to Uzbekistan and other distant parts of the Soviet Union. According to NKVD data, nearly 20% died in exile during the following year and a half. Crimean Tatar activists have reported this figure to be nearly 46%.
Other minorities evicted from the Black Sea coastal region included Bulgarians, Crimean Greeks, Romanians and Armenians.
Post-war expulsion and deportation
After World War II, the German population of the Kaliningrad Oblast, former East Prussia was expelled and the depopulated area resettled by Soviet citizens, mainly by Russians.Poland and Soviet Ukraine conducted population exchanges; Poles who resided east of the established Poland–Soviet border were deported to Poland and Ukrainians that resided west of the established Poland-Soviet Union border were deported to Soviet Ukraine. Population transfer to Soviet Ukraine occurred from September 1944 to April 1946. Some Ukrainians left southeast Poland more or less voluntarily.
, Lithuania
Post-Stalin policy on deportation
In February 1956, Nikita Khrushchev in his speech On the Personality Cult and its Consequences condemned the deportations as a violation of Leninist principles. His government reversed most of Stalin's deportations.Some peoples were deported after Stalin's death: in 1959, Chechen returnees were supplanted from the mountains to the Chechen plain. The mountain peoples of Tajikistan, such as the Yaghnobi people, were forcibly settled to the desert plains in the 1970s.
According to a secret Soviet ministry of interior report dated December 1965, for the period 1940–1953, 46,000 people were deported from Moldova, 61,000 from Belarus, 571,000 from Ukraine, 119,000 from Lithuania, 53,000 from Latvia and 33,000 from Estonia.
Labor force transfer
Punitive transfers of population transfers handled by the Gulag and the system of forced settlements in the Soviet Union were planned in accordance with the needs of the colonization of the remote and underpopulated territories of the Soviet Union. At the same time, on a number of occasions the workforce was transferred by non-violent means, usually by means of "recruitment". This kind of recruitment was regularly performed at forced settlements, where people were naturally more willing to resettle. For example, the workforce of the Donbass and Kuzbass mining basins is known to have been replenished in this way..There were several notable campaigns of targeted workforce transfer.
- Twenty-five-thousanders
- NKVD labor columns
- Virgin Lands Campaign
- Baku oil industry workers transfer: During the German-Soviet War, in October 1942, about 10,000 workers from the petroleum sites of Baku, together with their families, were transferred to several sites with potential oil production, in face of the potential German threat, although Germany failed to seize Baku.
Repatriation after World War II
The interpretation of this Agreement resulted in the forcible repatriation of all Soviet citizens regardless of their wishes. British and U.S. civilian authorities ordered their military forces in Europe to deport to the Soviet Union millions of former residents of the USSR, including numerous persons who had left Russia and established different citizenship many years before. The forced repatriation operations took place from 1945–1947.
At the end of World War II, more than 5 million "displaced persons" from the Soviet Union survived in German captivity. About 3 million had been forced laborers in Germany and occupied territories.
Surviving POWs, about 1.5 million, repatriated Ostarbeiter, and other displaced persons, totally more than 4,000,000 people were sent to special NKVD filtration camps. By 1946, 80% civilians and 20% of PoWs were freed, 5% of civilians, and 43% of PoWs re-drafted, 10% of civilians and 22% of PoWs were sent to labor battalions, and 2% of civilians and 15% of the PoWs transferred to the NKVD, i.e. the Gulag.
Modern views
Several historians, including Russian historian Pavel Polian and Lithuanian Associate Research Scholar at Yale University Violeta Davoliūtė consider these mass deportations of civilians a crime against humanity. They are also often described as Soviet ethnic cleansing. Terry Martin of Harvard University observes:Other academics and countries go farther to call the deportations genocide. Raphael Lemkin, a lawyer of Polish-Jewish descent who initiated the Genocide Convention and coined the term genocide himself, assumed that genocide was perpetrated in the context of the mass deportation of the Chechens, Ingush, Volga Germans, Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks and Karachay. Professor Lyman H. Legters argued that the Soviet penal system, combined with its resettlement policies, should count as genocidal since the sentences were borne most heavily specifically on certain ethnic groups, and that a relocation of these ethnic groups, whose survival depends on ties to its particular homeland, "had a genocidal effect remediable only by restoration of the group to its homeland". Soviet dissidents Ilya Gabay and Pyotr Grigorenko both classified the population transfers as genocide. Historian Timothy Snyder included it in a list of Soviet policies that "meet the standard of genocide". French historian and expert on communist studies Nicolas Werth, German historian Philipp Ther, Professor Anthony James Joes, American journalist Eric Margolis, Canadian political scientist Adam Jones, professor of Islamic History at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Brian Glyn Williams, scholars Michael Fredholm and Fanny E. Bryan also considered the population transfers genocides. German investigative journalist Lutz Kleveman compared the deportations to a "slow genocide".
On 12 December 2015, the Ukrainian Parliament issued a resolution recognizing the deportation of Crimean Tatars as genocide and established 18 May as the "Day of Remembrance for the victims of the Crimean Tatar genocide." The parliament of Latvia recognized the event as an act of genocide on 9 May 2019. The Parliament of Lithuania did the same on 6 June 2019. Canadian Parliament passed a motion on 10 June 2019, recognizing the Crimean Tatar deportation of 1944 as a genocide perpetrated by Soviet dictator Stalin, designating 18 May to be a day of remembrance. The deportation of Chechens and Ingush was acknowledged by the European Parliament as an act of genocide in 2004:
Experts of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum cited the events of 1944 for a reason of placing Chechnya on their genocide watch list for its potential for genocide. The separatist government of Chechnya also recognized it as genocide. Some academics disagree with the classification of deportation as genocide. Professor Alexander Statiev argues that Stalin's administration did not have a conscious genocidal intent to exterminate the various deported peoples, but that Soviet "political culture, poor planning, haste, and wartime shortages were responsible for the genocidal death rate among them." He rather considers these deportations an example of Soviet assimilation of "unwanted nations." According to Professor Amir Weiner, "...It was their territorial identity and not their physical existence or even their distinct ethnic identity that the regime sought to eradicate." According to Professor Francine Hirsch, "although the Soviet regime practiced politics of discrimination and exclusion, it did not practice what contemporaries thought of as racial politics." To her, these mass deportations were based on the concept that nationalities were "sociohistorical groups with a shared consciousness and not racial-biological groups". In contrast to this view Jon K. Chang contends that the deportations had been in fact based on ethnicity; and that "social historians" in the west have failed to champion the rights of marginalized ethnicities in the Soviet Union.
Death toll
The number of deaths attributed to deported people living in exile is considerable. The causes for such demographic catastrophe lie in harsh climates of Siberia and Kazakhstan, disease, malnutrition, work exploitation which lasted for up to 12 hours daily as well as any kind of appropriate housing or accommodation for the deported people.| Group of peoples | Estimated number of deaths | References |
| Kulaks 1930–1937 | 389,521 | |
| Chechens | 100,000–400,000 | |
| Poles | 90,000 | |
| Koreans | 28,200–40,000 | |
| Estonians | 5,400 | |
| Latvians | 17,400 | |
| Lithuanians | 28,000 | |
| Finns | 18,800 | |
| Hungarians | 15,000–20,000 | |
| Karachais | 13,100–19,000 | |
| Soviet Germans | 42,823–228,800 | |
| Kalmyks | 12,600–16,000 | |
| Ingush | 20,300–23,000 | |
| Balkars | 7,600–11,000 | |
| Crimean Tatars | 34,300–195,471 | |
| Meskhetian Turks | 12,859–50,000 | |
| TOTAL | 835,903– 1,548,992 |
Timeline
| Date of transfer | Targeted group | Approximate numbers | Place of initial residence | Transfer destination | Stated reasons for transfer |
| April 1920 | Cossacks, Terek Cossacks | 45,000 | North Caucasus | Ukraine, northern Russian SFSR | "Decossackization", stopping Russian colonisation of North Caucasus |
| 1930–1931 | Kulaks | 1,679,528- 1,803,392 | "Regions of total collectivization", most of Russian SFSR, Ukraine, other regions | Northern Russian SFSR, Ural, Siberia, North Caucasus, Kazakh ASSR, Kirghiz ASSR | Collectivization |
| 1930–1937 | Kulaks | 15,000,000 | "Regions of total collectivization", most of Russian SFSR, Ukraine, other regions | Northern Russian SFSR, Ural, Siberia, North Caucasus, Kazakh ASSR, Kirghiz ASSR | Collectivization |
| November–December 1932 | Peasants | 45,000 | Krasnodar Krai | Northern Russia | Sabotage |
| May 1933 | People from Moscow and Leningrad who had been unable to obtain an internal passport | 6,000 | Moscow and Leningrad | Nazino Island | "cleanse Moscow, Leningrad and the other great urban centers of the USSR of superfluous elements not connected with production or administrative work, as well as kulaks, criminals, and other antisocial and socially dangerous elements." |
| February–May 1935; September 1941; 1942 | Ingrian Finns | 420,000 | Leningrad Oblast, Karelia | Vologda Oblast, Western Siberia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Siberia, Astrakhan Oblast; Finland | |
| February–March 1935 | Germans, Poles | 412,000 | Central and western Ukraine | Eastern Ukraine | |
| May 1936 | Germans, Poles | 45,000 | Border regions of Ukraine | Ukraine | |
| July 1937 | Kurds | 1,325 | Border regions of Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan | Kazakhstan, Kirghizia | |
| September–October 1937 | Koreans | 172,000 | Far East | Northern Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan | |
| September–October 1937 | Chinese, Harbin Russians | 9,000 | Southern Far East | Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan | |
| 1938 | Persian Jews | 6,000 | Mary Province | Deserted areas of northern Turkmenistan | |
| January 1938 | Azeris, Persians, Kurds, Assyrians | 6,000 | Azerbaijan | Kazakhstan | Iranian citizenship |
| January 1940 – 1941 | Poles, Jews, Ukrainians | 320,000 | Western Ukraine, western Byelorussia | Northern Russian SFSR, Ural, Siberia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan | |
| July 1940 to 1953 | Estonians, Latvians & Lithuanians | 203,590 | Baltic states | Siberia and Altai Krai | |
| September 1941 – March 1942 | Germans | 855,674 | Povolzhye, the Caucasus, Crimea, Ukraine, Moscow, central Russian SFSR | Kazakhstan, Siberia | |
| August 1943 | Karachais | 69,267 | Karachay–Cherkess AO, Stavropol Krai | Kazakhstan, Kirghizia, other | Banditism, other |
| December 1943 | Kalmyks | 93,139 | Kalmyk ASSR, | Kazakhstan, Siberia | |
| February 1944 | Chechens, Ingush | 478,479 | North Caucasus | Kazakhstan, Kirghizia | 1940-1944 insurgency in Chechnya |
| April 1944 | Kurds, Azeris | 3,000 | Tbilisi | Southern Georgia | |
| May 1944 | Balkars | 37,406–40,900 | North Caucasus | Kazakhstan, Kirghizia | |
| May 1944 | Crimean Tatars | 191,014 | Crimea | Uzbekistan | |
| May–June 1944 | Greeks, Bulgarians, Armenians, Turks | 37,080 | Crimea | Uzbekistan | |
| June 1944 | Kabardins | 2,000 | Kabardino-Balkarian ASSR, | Southern Kazakhstan | Collaboration with the Nazis |
| July 1944 | Russian True Orthodox Church members | 1,000 | Central Russian SFSR | Siberia | |
| November 1944 | Meskhetian Turks, Kurds, Hamshenis, Pontic Greeks, Karapapaks, Lazes and other inhabitants of the border zone | 115,000 | Southwestern Georgia | Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kirghizia | |
| November 1944 – January 1945 | Hungarians, Germans | 30,000–40,000 | Transcarpathian Ukraine | Ural, Donbass, Byelorussia | |
| January 1945 | "Traitors and collaborators" | 2,000 | Mineralnye Vody | Tajikistan | Collaboration with the Nazis |
| 1944–1953 | Families of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army | 204,000 | Western Ukraine | Siberia | |
| 1944–1953 | Poles | 1,240,000 | Kresy region | postwar Poland | Removal of indigenous population from the new territory acquired by Soviet Union |
| 1945–1950 | Germans | Tens of thousands | Königsberg | West or Middle Germany | Removal of indigenous population from the new territory acquired by Soviet Union |
| 1945–1951 | Japanese, Koreans | 400,000 | Mostly from Sakhalin, Kuril Islands | Siberia, Far East, North Korea, Japan | Removal of indigenous population from the new territory acquired by Soviet Union |
| 1948–1951 | Azeris | 100,000 | Armenia | Kura-Aras Lowland, Azerbaijan | "Measures for resettlement of collective farm workers" |
| May–June 1949 | Greeks, Armenians, Turks | 57,680 | The Black Sea coast, South Caucasus | Southern Kazakhstan | Membership in the nationalist Dashnaktsutiun Party, Greek or Turkish citizenship, other |
| March 1951 | Basmachis | 2,795 | Tajikistan | Northern Kazakhstan | |
| April 1951 | Jehovah's Witnesses | 8,576–9,500 | Mostly from Moldavia and Ukraine | Western Siberia | Operation North |
| 1920 to 1951 | Total | ~20,296,000 |