Population transfer in the Soviet Union

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Population transfer in the Soviet Union may be classified into the following broad categories: deportations of "anti-Soviet" categories of population, often classified as "enemies of workers", deportations of nationalities, labor force transfer, and organized migrations in opposite directions to fill the ethnically cleansed territories. In most cases their destinations were underpopulated remote areas, see Involuntary settlements in the Soviet Union.

Contents 1 Deportations of social categories 2 Ethnic cleansing[4] 3 Labor force transfer 4 Repatriation after World War II 5 Timeline 6 See also 7 References 8 Wikisource 9 External links

[edit] Deportations of social categories

Kulaks were the most numerous social category of deported by the Soviet Union.^[1] Resettlement of people officially designated as kulaks continued until early 1950, including several major waves.^[2]

[edit] Ethnic cleansing^[4]

The partial removal of potentially trouble-making ethnic groups was a technique used consistently by Joseph Stalin during his career: Poles (1939-1941 and 1944-1945), Romanians (1941 and 1944-1953) Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians (1941 and 1945-1949), Volga Germans (1941), Chechens, Ingushs (1944), Large numbers of kulaks regardless of their nationality were resettled to Siberia and Central Asia. 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.[2] It is estimated that between 1941 and 1949 nearly 3.3 million were deported to Siberia and the Central Asian republics.^[5] By some estimates up to 43% of the resettled population died of diseases and malnutrition.^[6]

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 (so-called "Kresy") of the Second Polish Republic. During 1939-1941 1.45 million people inhabiting the region were deported by the Soviet regime, of whom 63.1% were Poles, and 7.4% were Jews.^[7] Previously it was believed that about 1.0 million Polish citizens died at the hands of the Soviets, ^[8] however recently Polish historians, based mostly on queries in Soviet archives, estimate the number of deaths at about 350,000 people deported in 1939-1945.^[9][10]

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.^[11]

The deportations started with Poles from Belarus, Ukraine and European Russia (see Polish minority in Soviet Union) 1932-1936. Koreans in the Russian Far East were deported in 1937. Volga Germans^[12] and seven (overwhelmingly Turkic or non-Slavic) nationalities of the Crimea and the northern Caucasus were deported: the Crimean Tatars,^[13] Kalmyks, Chechens,^[14] Ingush, Balkars, Karachays, and Meskhetian Turks. Other minorities evicted from the Black Sea coastal region included Bulgarians, Greeks, and Armenians. From the newly conquered Eastern Poland 1.5 million people were deported.^[15] The same followed in the Baltic Republics of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.^[16] 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 Gulag. 10% of the entire adult Baltic population was deported or sent to labor camps.^[17][18] Likewise, Romanians from Chernivtsi Oblast and Moldova had been deported in great numbers which range from 200,000 to 400,000.^[19] All Crimean Tatars were deported en masse, in a form of collective punishment, on 18 May 1944 as special settlers to Uzbek SSR and other distant parts of the Soviet Union. Nearly 20% died in exile during the year and a half by the NKVD datas and nearly 46% according to data from the Crimean Tatar activists.^[20][21]

In February 1956, Nikita Khrushchev in his speech On the Personality Cult and its Consequences condemned the deportations as a violation of Leninist principles, asserting that the Ukrainians avoided such a fate "only because there were too many of them and there was no place to which to deport them." His government reversed most of Stalin's deportations, although it was not until as late as 1991 that the Crimean Tatars, Meskhs and Volga Germans were allowed to return en masse to their homelands. The deportations had a profound effect on the non-Russian peoples of the Soviet Union and they are still a major political issue - the memory of the deportations played a major part in the separatist movements in Chechnya and the Baltic republics.

After World War II, the German population of the Kaliningrad Oblast, former East Prussia was replaced by the Soviet one, mainly by Russians. Between 1941 and 1952, almost a million German POWs died in the camps.^[22] Of the 91,000 German POWs captured at Stalingrad, only 6,000 survived to return home.^[23] The Red Army occupation led to the deportation to Siberia of more than 200,000 ethnic Germans of Romania (around 75,000 Transylvanian Saxons), Hungary and Yugoslavia. Most of them died in prison camps. Forced labor of Germans in the Soviet Union was considered by the Soviet Union to be part of German war reparations. The reported death rate was 39% among “arrested internees” from Upper Silesia and East Prussia.

Poland and Soviet Ukraine conducted population exchanges - Poles that resided east of the established Poland-Soviet border were deported to Poland (c.a. 2 100 000 persons) 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 (ca. 450,000 persons). Some Ukrainians (ca. 200,000 persons) left southeast Poland more or less voluntarily (between 1944 and 1945).^[24]

Some peoples were deported after Stalin's death: in 1959, Chechen returnees were supplanted from the mountains to the Chechen plain. The mountaineers of Tajikistan, such as Yaghnobi people were forcibly settled to the plain deserts in 1970s.

[edit] Labor force transfer

Punitive transfers of population transfers handled by Gulag and the system of involuntary 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. (Their large scale has led to a controversial opinion in the West that the economic growth of the Soviet Union was largely based on the slave labor of Gulag prisoners.) At the same time, on a number of occasions the workforce was transferred by non-violent means, usually by means of "recruitment" (вербовка). 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. (As a note of historical comparison, in Imperial Russia the mining workers at state mines (bergals, "бергалы", from German Bergauer) were often recruited in lieu of military service which, for a certain period, had a term of 25 years ).

There were several notable campaigns of targeted workforce transfer.

• Twenty-five-thousanders
• Labor Army#Russian Germans
• Virgin Lands Campaign
• Baku oil industry workers transfer: During the Great Patriotic 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 (the "Second Baku" area (Volga-Ural oil field), Kazakhstan and Sakhalin), in face of the potential German threat (Germany failed to seize Baku, though).

[edit] Repatriation after World War II

When the war ended in May 1945, millions of former Soviet citizens were forcefully repatriated (against their will) into the USSR.^[25] On 11 February 1945, at the conclusion of the Yalta Conference, the United States and United Kingdom signed a Repatriation Agreement with the USSR.^[26]

The interpretation of this Agreement resulted in the forcible repatriation of all Soviets 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 (some of whom collaborated with the Germans), including numerous persons who had left Russia and established different citizenship many years before. The forced repatriation operations took place from 1945-1947.^[27]

At the end of the World War II, there were more than 5 million "displaced persons" from the Soviet Union in the Western Europe. About 3 million had been forced laborers (Ostarbeiters)^[28] in Germany and occupied territories.^[29][30]

The Soviet POWs and the Vlasov men were put under the jurisdiction of SMERSH (Death to Spies). Of the 5.7 million Soviet prisoners of war captured by the Germans, 3.5 million had died while in German captivity by the end of the war.^[31][32]

The survivors on their return to the USSR were treated as traitors (see Order No. 270).^[33][34]

Over 1.5 million surviving Red Army soldiers imprisoned by the Germans were sent to the Gulag.^[35][36]

[edit] Timeline

Date of transfer	Targeted group	Approximate numbers	Place of initial residence	Transfer destination	Stated reasons for transfer
April 1920	Russians, Terek Cossacks	45,000	North Caucasus	Ukrainian SSR, northern Russian SFSR	"Decossackization", stopping Russian colonisation of North Caucasus
1921	Russians, Semirechye Cossacks		Semirechye	Extreme North, concentration camps	"Decossackization", stopping Russian colonisation of Turkestan
September 1922	"Socially dangerous elements"	18,000	Western border regions of Ukraine and Byelorussia	Western Siberia, Far East	Social threat
1930–1936	Kulaks	2,323,000	"Regions of total collectivization", most of Russia, Ukraine, other regions	Northern Russian SFSR, Ural, Siberia, North Caucasus, Kazakh ASSR, Kyrgyz ASSR	Collectivization
November–December 1932	Peasants	45,000	Krasnodar Krai (Russia)	Northern Russia	Sabotage
1933	Nomadic Kazakhs	200,000	Kazakh SSR	China, Mongolia, Iran, Afghanistan, Turkey
February–May 1935	Ingrian Finns	30,000	Leningrad Oblast (Russia)	Vologda Oblast, Western Siberia, Kazakh SSR, Tajik SSR
February–March 1935	Germans, Poles	412,000	Central and western Ukrainian SSR	Eastern Ukrainian SSR
May 1935	Germans, Poles	45,000	Border regions of Ukrainian SSR	Kazakh SSR
July 1937	Kurds	2,000	Border regions of Georgian SSR, Azerbaijan SSR, Armenian SSR, Turkmenian SSR, Uzbek SSR, and Tajik SSR	Kazakh SSR, Kyrgyz SSR
September–October 1937	Koreans	172,000	Far East	Northern Kazakh SSR, Uzbek SSR
September–October 1937	Chinese, Harbin Russians	9,000	Southern Far East	Kazakh SSR, Uzbek SSR
1938	Persian Jews	6,000	Mary Province (Turkmen SSR)	Deserted areas of northern Turkmen SSR
January 1938	Azeris, Persians, Kurds, Assyrians	n/a	Azerbaijan SSR	Kazakh SSR	Iranian citizenship
February–June 1940	Poles (including refugees from Poland)	276,000	Western Ukrainian SSR, western Byelorussian SSR	Northern Russian SFSR, Ural, Siberia, Kazakh SSR, Uzbek SSR
July 1940	"Foreigners" / "Other ethnicities"	n/a	Murmansk Oblast (Russia)	Karelo-Finnish SSR and Altai Krai (Russia)
May–June 1941	"Counter-revolutionaries and nationalists"	107,000	Ukrainian SSR, Byelorussian SSR, Moldavian SSR, Estonian SSR, Latvian SSR, Lithuanian SSR	Siberia, Kirov (Russian SFSR), Komi (Russian SFSR), Kazakh SSR
September 1941 – March 1942	Germans	More than 780,000	Povolzhye, the Caucasus, Crimea, Ukraine, Moscow, central Russia	Kazakhstan, Siberia
September 1941	Ingrian Finns, Germans	91,000	Leningrad Oblast (Russia)	Kazakhstan, Siberia, Astrakhan Oblast (Russia), Far East
1942	Ingrian Finns	9,000	Leningrad Oblast (Russia)	Eastern Siberia, Far East
April 1942	Greeks, Romanians, etc.	n/a	Crimea, North Caucasus	n/a
June 1942	Germans, Romanians, Crimean Tatars, Greeks with foreign citizenship	n/a	Krasnodar Krai (Russia)	n/a
August 1943	Karachais	70,500	Karachay-Cherkessia	Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, other	Banditism, other
December 1943	Kalmyks	93,000	Kalmykia	Kazakhstan, Siberia
February 1944	Chechens, Ingushes, Balkars	522,000	North Caucasus	Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan
February 1944	Kalmyks	3,000	Rostov Oblast (Russia)	Siberia
March 1944	Kurds, Azeris	3,000	Tbilisi (Georgia)	Southern Georgia
May 1944	Balkars	100	Northern Georgia	Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan
May 1944	Crimean Tatars	182,000	Crimea	Uzbekistan
May–June 1944	Greeks, Bulgarians, Armenians, Turks	42,000	Crimea	Uzbekistan (?)
May–July 1944	Kalmyks	26,000	Northeastern regions	Central Russia, Ukraine
June 1944	Kalmyks	1,000	Volgograd Oblast (Russia)	Sverdlovsk Oblast (Russia)
June 1944	Kabardins	2,000	Kabardino-Balkaria	Southern Kazakhstan	Collaboration with the Nazis
July 1944	Russian True Orthodox Church adherers	1,000	Central Russia	Siberia
August–September 1944	Poles	30,000	Ural, Siberia, Kazakhstan	Ukraine, European Russia
November 1944	Meskhetian Turks, Kurds, Hamshenis, Karapapaks	92,000	Southwestern Georgia	Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan
November 1944	Lazes and other inhabitants of the border zone	1,000	Ajaria (Georgia)	Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan
December 1944	Members of the Volksdeutsche families	1,000	Mineralnye Vody (Russia)	Siberia (according to other sources Tajikistan)	Collaboration with the Nazis
January 1945	"Traitors and collaborators"	2,000	Mineralnye Vody (Russia)	Tajikistan	Collaboration with the Nazis
May 1948	Kulaks	49,000	Lithuania	Eastern Siberia	Banditism
June 1948	Greeks, Armenians	58,000	The Black Sea coast of Russia	Southern Kazakhstan	For Armenians: membership in the nationalist Dashnaktsutiun Party
June 1948	"Spongers" ("тунеядцы")	16,000	n/a	n/a	"Social parasitism"
October 1948	Kulaks	1,000	Izmail Oblast (Ukraine)	Western Siberia
January 1949	Kulaks	94,000	Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia	Siberia, Far East	Banditism
May–June 1949	Armenians, Turks, Greeks	n/a	The Black Sea coast (Russia), South Caucasus	Southern Kazakhstan	Membership in the nationalist Dashnaktsutiun Party (Armenians), Greek or Turkish citizenship (Greeks), other
July 1949 – May 1952	Kulaks	78,400	Moldavia, the Baltic States, western Byelorussia, western Ukraine, Pskov Oblast (Russia)	Siberia, Kazakhstan, Far East	Banditism, other
March 1951	Basmachis	3,000	Tajikistan	Northern Kazakhstan
April 1951	Jehova's Witnesses	3,000	Moldavia	Western Siberia

[edit] See also

• National operations of NKVD
• Involuntary settlements in the Soviet Union
• Kalmyk deportations of 1944
• Nazi-Soviet population transfers
• Russification
• Population transfer
• Betrayal of the Cossacks
• Occupation of Baltic states
• Soviet deportations from Estonia
• Evacuation of East Prussia
• Forced labor of Germans in the Soviet Union
• Deportation of the Crimean Tatars
• Polish areas annexed by the Soviet Union
• Repatriation of Poles

[edit] References

• Martin, Terry. 1998. "The Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing," Journal of Modern History 70 (December): 813-861.
• Polian, Pavel (Павел Полян), Deportations in the USSR: An index of operations with list of corresponding directives and legislation, Russian Academy of Science.
• Павел Полян, Не по своей воле... (Pavel Polyan, Not by Their Own Will... A History and Geography of Forced Migrations in the USSR), ОГИ Мемориал, Moscow, 2001, ISBN 5-94282-007-4
• 28 августа 1941 г. Указ Президиума Верховного Совета СССР "О выселении немцев из районов Поволжья".
• 1943 г. Указ Президиума Верховного Совета СССР "О ликвидации Калмыцкой АССР и образовании Астраханской области в составе РСФСР". *Постановление правительства СССР от 12 января 1949 г. "О выселении с территории Литвы, Латвии и Эстонии кулаков с семьями, семей бандитов и националистов, находящихся на нелегальном положении, убитых при вооруженных столкновениях и осужденных, легализованных бандитов, продолжающих вести вражескую работу, и их семей, а также семей репрессированных пособников и бандитов"
• Указ Президиума Верховного Совета СССР от 13 декабря 1955 г. "О снятии ограничений в правовом положении с немцев и членов их семей, находящихся на спецпоселении".
• 17 марта 1956 г. Указ Президиума Верховного Совета СССР "О снятии ограничений в правовом положении с калмыков и членов их семей, находящихся на спецпоселении".
• 1956 г. Постановление ЦК КПСС "О восстановлении национальной автономии калмыцкого, карачаевского, балкарского, чеченского и ингушского народов".
• 29 августа 1964 г. Указ Президиума Верховного Совета СССР "О внесении изменений в Указ Президиума Верховного Совета СССР от 28 августа 1941 г. о переселении немцев, проживающих в районах Поволжья".
• 1991 г: Laws of Russian Federation: "О реабилитации репрессированных народов", "О реабилитации жертв политических репрессий".

1. ^ What Were Their Crimes?
2. ^ Liquidation of the Kulaks
3. ^ The Gulag Collection: Paintings of Nikolai Getman.
4. ^ Otto Pohl, Ethnic Cleansing in the USSR, 1937-1949, Greenwood Publishing Group 1999, ISBN 0313309213
5. ^ The Stalin Era
6. ^ Soviet Transit, Camp, and Deportation Death Rates
7. ^ Poland's Holocaust, Tadeusz Piotrowski, 1998 ISBN 0-7864-0371-3, P.14
8. ^ Franciszek Proch, Poland's Way of the Cross, New York 1987 P.146
9. ^ Project In Posterum [1](go to note on Polish Casualties by Tadeusz Piotrowski)
10. ^ Piotr Wrobel. The Devil's Playground: Poland in World War II
11. ^ Alexander Statiev, "The Nature of Anti-Soviet Armed Resistance, 1942-44", Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History (Spring 2005) 285-318
12. ^ Deportation
13. ^ Deportation of Crimean Tatars by Stalin
14. ^ Remembering Stalin's deportations
15. ^ The scale and nature of German and Soviet repression and mass killings
16. ^ Soviet Mass Deportations from Latvia
17. ^ The Baltic States
18. ^ Communism and Crimes against Humanity in the Baltic states
19. ^ Russification and Ethnic Consciousness of Romanians in Bessarabia
20. ^ 60 Years After: For Victims Of Stalin's Deportations, War Lives On
21. ^ Crimean Tatars mark wartime deportations
22. ^ German POWs and the Art of Survival
23. ^ The Great Patriotic War: 55 years on
24. ^ Forced migration in the 20th century
25. ^ The United States and Forced Repatriation of Soviet Citizens, 1944-47 by Mark Elliott Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 88, No. 2 (Jun., 1973), pp. 253-275
26. ^ Repatriation -- The Dark Side of World War II
27. ^ Forced Repatriation to the Soviet Union: The Secret Betrayal
28. ^ Final Compensation Pending for Former Nazi Forced Laborers
29. ^ Forced Labor at Ford Werke AG during the Second World War
30. ^ The Nazi Ostarbeiter (Eastern Worker) Program
31. ^ Soviet Prisoners of War: Forgotten Nazi Victims of World War II
32. ^ Soviet Prisoners-of-War
33. ^ The warlords: Joseph Stalin
34. ^ Remembrance (Zeithain Memorial Grove)
35. ^ Patriots ignore greatest brutality
36. ^ Joseph Stalin killer file

[edit] Wikisource

• State Defense Committee Decree No. 5859ss: On Crimean Tatars (See also Three answers to the Decree No. 5859ss)

[edit] External links

• Polian's index online
• Ethnic Cleansing in the USSR, 1937-1949 by J.Otto Pohl. Books.google.com
• These Names Accuse (Soviet Deportations in Latvia)
• Baltic Deportation Order No 001223 — Full text, English
• DEPORTATIONS Revelations from the Russian Archives at the Library of Congress
• Chechnya: European Parliament recognises the genocide of the Chechen People in 1944
• The scale and nature of German and Soviet repression and mass killings, 1930-45
• Эдиев Д.М. Демографические потери депортированных народов СССР. Ставрополь, 2003