Population transfer in the Soviet Union
From 1930 to 1952, the government of the Soviet Union, on the orders of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin under the direction of the NKVD official Lavrentiy Beria, forcibly transferred populations of various groups. These actions may be classified into the following broad categories: deportations of "anti-Soviet" categories of population (often classified as "enemies of the people"), deportations of entire nationalities, labor force transfer, and organized migrations in opposite directions to fill ethnically cleansed territories. Dekulakization marked the first time that an entire class was deported, whereas the deportation of Soviet Koreans in 1937 marked the precedent of a specific ethnic deportation of an entire nationality.[9]
Population transfer in the Soviet Union
1930–1952
Kulaks, peasants, ethnic minorities, and occupied territory citizens
6,000,000 Soviet citizens deported to forced settlements in the Soviet Union
Russification,[7] colonialism,[8] cheap labor for forced settlements in the Soviet Union
In most cases, their destinations were underpopulated remote areas (see Forced settlements in the Soviet Union). 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.[6][10][11][12] 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.[12]
Soviet archives documented 390,000[13] deaths during kulak forced resettlement and up to 400,000 deaths of people deported to forced settlements during the 1940s;[14] however, Nicolas Werth places overall deaths closer to some 1 to 1.5 million perishing as a result of the deportations.[6] Contemporary historians classify these deportations as a crime against humanity and ethnic persecution. Two of these cases with the highest mortality rates were recognized as genocides–the deportation of the Crimean Tatars was declared as genocide by Ukraine and three other countries, whereas the deportation of the Chechens and Ingush was recognized as genocide by the European Parliament, respectively. On 26 April 1991 the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic, under its chairman Boris Yeltsin, passed the law On the Rehabilitation of Repressed Peoples with Article 2 denouncing all mass deportations as "Stalin's policy of defamation and genocide."[3]
The Soviet Union also practiced deportations in occupied territories, with over 50,000 perishing from the Baltic States and 300,000 to 360,000 perishing during the expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe due to Soviet deportation, massacres, and internment and labour camps.[15]
There were several notable campaigns of targeted non-penal workforce transfer.
Repatriation after World War II[edit]
When the war ended in May 1945, thousands of Soviet citizens were forcefully repatriated (against their will) into the USSR.[54] On 11 February 1945, at the conclusion of the Yalta Conference, the United States and United Kingdom signed a Repatriation Agreement with the USSR.[55]
The interpretation of this Agreement resulted in the forcible repatriation of all Soviet citizens regardless of their wishes. Allied 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 people who had left Russia and established different citizenships for up to decades prior. The forced repatriation operations took place from 1945 to 1947.[56]
At the end of World War II, more than 5 million "displaced people" from the Soviet Union survived in German captivity. About 3 million had been forced laborers (Ostarbeiter)[57] in Germany and occupied territories.[58][59]
Surviving POWs, about 1.5 million, repatriated Ostarbeiter, and other displaced people, totalling more than 4,000,000 people were sent to special NKVD filtration camps (not Gulag). 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 (226,127 out of 1,539,475 total) transferred to the NKVD, i.e. the Gulag.[60][61]
Rehabilitation[edit]
In the USSR[edit]
On 17 January 1956, a Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet was issued on lifting restrictions on the Poles evicted in 1936; on 17 March 1956 for the Kalmyks; 27 March for the Greeks, Bulgarians, and Armenians; 18 April for the Crimean Tatars, Balkars, Meskhetian Turks, Kurds, and Hemshins; 16 July for the Chechens, Ingush, and Karachais (all without the right to return to their homeland).
In February 1956, Nikita Khrushchev, in his speech "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences", condemned the deportations as a violation of Leninist principles: