العربية
中国
Français
Deutsch
Ελληνική
हिन्दी
Italiano
日本語
Português
Русский
EspañolPOPULATION TRANSFER IN THE SOVIET UNION
''Not by Their Own Will...''
'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 |
| Deportations of social categories |
| Transfers of ethnicities |
| Labor force transfer |
| Timeline |
| See also |
| References |
| Wikisource |
| External links |
Deportations of social categories
Kulaks were the most numerous social category of deported by the Soviet Union. Resettlement of people officially designated as ''kulaks'' continued until early 1950, including several major waves.
Some ethnic deportations, e.g., of Poles after 1939 from annexed territories of what is now Western Belarus and Western Ukraine (but was then Eastern Poland), were also justified by political/social reasons.
A number of religions, most prominent being Jehovah's Witnesses, were declared anti-Soviet, and their members deported.
Transfers of ethnicities
The wholesale removal of potentially trouble-making ethnic groups was a technique used consistently by Joseph Stalin during his career: Romanians (1941 and 1944-1953) Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians (1941 and 1945-1949), Volga Germans (1941), Chechens, Ingushs (1944), Large numbers of kulaks regardless 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. It is estimated that between 1941 and 1949 nearly 3.3 million were deported to Siberia and the Central Asian republics. Approximately 50% of the resettled population died of diseases and malnutrition. Estimates of the total number of deported Poles vary between 400,000 and 1.6 million people.
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.[1]
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 and seven (overwhelmingly Turkic or non-Slavic) nationalities of the Crimea and the northern Caucasus were deported: the Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks, Chechens, 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 400,000 people were deported. The same followed in the Baltic Republics of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia (over 200,000 people were deported). Likewise, Romanians from Chernivtsi Oblast and Moldova had been deported in great numbers which range from 200,000 to 400,000. According to the last census in Russia and Kazakhstan, there are 20,000 Romanians in the latter while at least 180,000 exist in the former. The overwhelming majority of these deportees successfully made their trip to Central Asia. For example, out of 225,000 deported Crimeans, 193,000 or 86% were located in their appropriate settlements in October 1946. [1]
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. Of the 95,000 German POWs captured at Stalingrad, only 5,000 survived to return home. 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 German civilians 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).[2]
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 weere forcibly settled to the plain deserts in 1970s.
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).
When the war ended in May 1945, millions of former Russian citizens were forcefully repatriated (against their will) into the USSR.[3] On 11 February 1945, at the conclusion of the Yalta Conference, the United States and United Kingdom signed a Repatriation Agreement with the USSR.[4] 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 several 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.[5]
At the end of the World War II, there were more than 5 million "displaced persons" from the Soviet Union in the Western Europe. Nearly 2 million had been forced laborers (Ostarbeiter) in Germany and occupied territories. Millions of Soviet POWs and forced laborers transported to Nazi Germany were on their return to the USSR treated as traitors, cowards, and deserters. Many of them were executed or deported to the Soviet prison camps. The Soviet POWs and the Vlasov men were put under the jurisdiction of SMERSH (Death to Spies).[6] 60% of Soviet POWs died during the war.[7] Over 1.5 million surviving Red Army soldiers imprisoned by the Germans were sent to the Gulag (10 to 20 years was the usual term).[8]
Timeline
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
★ Evacuation of East Prussia
★ Forced labor of Germans in the Soviet Union
★ Soviet deportations from Estonia
★ Deportation of the Crimean Tatars
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. Alexander Statiev, "The Nature of Anti-Soviet Armed Resistance, 1942-44", ''Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History'' (Spring 2005) 285-318
2. Forced migration in the 20th century
3. ''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
4. Repatriation -- The Dark Side of World War II
5. Forced Repatriation to the Soviet Union: The Secret Betrayal
6. The Gulag: Communism's Penal Colonies Revisited
7. Soviet Prisoners-of-War
8. Joseph Stalin killer file
Wikisource
★ (See also Three answers to the Decree No. 5859ss)
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
★ Эдиев Д.М. Демографические потери депортированных народов СССР. Ставрополь, 2003
This article provided by Wikipedia. To edit the contents of this article, click here for original source.
psst.. try this: add to faves
