Deportations

DEPORTATIONS

The term deportation does not have an exact Russian equivalent (vyselenie is the most common, with deportatsiya also coming into use in the twentieth century). The term refers to the forced removal of a defined group from a certain territory. The largest cases of mass deportation occurred during the two world wars and were linked in many ways to the practices of ethnic cleansing and nationalist politics that swept through Europe during the dark years of the first half of the century.

But the practice can also be traced to precedents in earlier Russian history. Some of the best-known early attempts to use deportation as an official policy involved repressions of elites after conquest of new regions or in the aftermath of rebellions. After the conquest of Novgorod in the late fifteenth century, the Prince of Muscovy expropriated the

Major Ethnic Deportations, 1937–1944
Nationality	Number Deported	Date of Deportation	Place of Resettlement
SOURCE: Based on Pohl, J. Otto. (1999). Ethnic Cleansing in the USSR, 1937–1949. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Koreans	171,781	8/21/37–10/25/37	Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan
Finns	89,000	8/31/41–9/7/41	Kazakhstan
Germans	749,613	9/3/41–10/15/41	Kazakhstan, Siberia
Kalmyks	93,139	12/28/43–12/29/43	Siberia, Kazakhstan
Karachais	69,267	11/6/43	Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan
Chechens	387,229	2/23/44–2/29/44	Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan
Ingush	91,250	2/23/44–2/29/44	Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan
Balkars	37,713	3/8/44–3/9/44	Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan
Crimean Tatars	183,155	5/18/44–5/20/44	Uzbekistan, Molotov
Crimean Greeks	15,040	6/27/44–6/28/44	Uzbekistan, Mari ASSR
Meskhetian Turks, Kurds, and Khemshils	94,955	5/11/44–11/26/44	Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan
Total 1,982,142

lands of leading boyars and forcibly took them to Moscow. When Russia conquered the Crimea, there was a mass exodus of Tatars in which the role of Russian officials remains in dispute among historians. During the conquest of the Caucasus in the nineteenth century, the regime turned to extremely violent methods of driving the entire population from given regions, and encouraged mass emigrations of Adygy, Nogai, and other predominantly Muslim and Turkic groups. In the aftermath of both the 1831 and 1861 rebellions the authorities confiscated estates and deported thousands of Polish gentry it accused of participating to Siberia and the Caucasus.

Another important precedent for the twentieth-century deportations was the Russian punitive system, which relied heavily upon the exile of individuals to Siberia and other locations and thereby created a template for officials to apply to entire groups in extraordinary circumstances. Likewise, the myriad of regulations on Jewish rights of residence resulted in a constant stream of forced expulsions of Jews from areas declared off-limits, including the mass expulsion of Jews from Moscow in 1891–1892.

Important as these precedents were, the mass deportations of the period from 1914 to 1945 stand in a category apart. The first major deportations of this period occurred during World War I. In the first months of the war, the regime interned enemy citizen males to prevent them from departing the country to serve in enemy armies. By the end of 1915, the regime had expanded these operations to include large numbers of women, children, and elderly, and by 1917, over a quarter million enemy citizens had been deported to the Russian interior. In a series of other operations, the army extended the mass deportations to Russian subjects. The largest of these operations resulted in the deportation of roughly 300,000 Germans and the expulsion of a half million Jews from areas near the front. In addition to these groups, ten thousand Crimean Tatars and several thousand Adzhars, Laz, gypsies, and others were swept up in the operations.

The motives and explanations for these operations include many different variables, of which two stand out. First were security concerns: The deported groups were accused of disloyalty or potential disloyalty if allowed to fall under enemy occupation. The second was economic nationalism. Demands among local populations to expropriate the lands and businesses of the foreigners, Germans, and Jews resonated with more general campaigns led by Russians during the war to nationalize and nativize the economy. As the war dragged on, security motives tended to give way to the nationalist ones. This was reflected in a series of administrative and legal decisions in 1915 that effectively ensured that the ownership of properties of deported groups would be permanently transferred to Russians, to other favored nationalities, or to the state.

deportations under the bolsheviks

After 1917, the Bolshevik regime attempted to use deportation to achieve revolutionary aims. The practice of deporting criminals to Siberia greatly expanded, and several campaigns resulted in attempts to deport entire social population categories. Most dramatic was the 1919–1920 "decossackization" campaign during the civil war, and the

1930–1933 deportation of kulaks (in theory, the relatively affluent peasants in each village).

The next wave of mass deportations was closely linked to World War II, and the international tensions that preceded its outbreak. Fears of foreign influence, hostility toward foreign capitalist states, and insecurity about the loyalty of certain ethnic groups that straddled the border led the Bolsheviks to turn to mass ethnic deportations. Already in 1934, operations to clear the border regions of "unreliable elements" began with a deportations of Finns, Latvians, Estonians, Germans, and Poles from Leningrad, which was considered to be a strategic border city. In February and March 1935, authorities deported more than 40,000 "unreliables" (mostly ethnic Germans and Poles) from Ukrainian border regions. This was the first of a series of mass deportations from border areas, including about 30,000 Finns sent from the Leningrad border regions in 1936 and 170,000 Koreans deported from the Far East to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The latter was the first ethnic cleansing of an entire nationality.

During the Great Purge of 1937–1938, deportation to the Siberian camps was a major part of the operations, which targeted former kulaks, criminals, "anti-Soviet elements," and in a separate set of "national operations," a series of ethnic groups, including: Koreans, Poles, Germans, Greeks, Finns, Latvians, Estonians, Afghans, and Iranians. In all, according to Terry Martin (1998, p. 858), approximately 800,000 individuals were arrested, deported, or executed in the national operations from 1935 to 1938. The regime seems to have been motivated in this wave of peacetime mass ethnic deportations by an attempt to secure the border zones in preparation for war, and by the failure of its attempt to spread revolution beyond the Soviet Union by granting wide cultural autonomy and support to ethnic groups that were divided by the Soviet border. Recognition of the failure of this latter strategy led the regime to turn in the opposite direction, toward prophylactic strikes to remove the same groups from border areas to prevent their own attraction to their co-ethnics abroad.

World War II brought mass deportations on an even greater scale. First, the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states (Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia) and parts of Poland and Rumania as a result of the Nazi-Soviet agreement of August 1939 was followed by mass deportations of the cultural, political, and economic elites of these states. The scale of the arrests and deportations was remarkable. Pavel Polian estimates that 380,000 people were deported in these operations from early 1940 to June 1941.

After the German invasion of June 1941, Joseph Stalin ordered the mass deportation of entire nationalities. Thirteen national groups in all were rounded up by special police units and deported by train to Central Asia in operations that lasted only a few days each. The first operations occurred in August and September 1941, when 89,000 Finns and 749,613 Germans were deported to Kazakhstan and Siberia. Hitler made no secret of his plans to use the German minority in the Soviet Union as a building block for his new racial order in the East, and his mass evacuation of ethnic Germans from the Baltic states to Germany in 1939 on the eve of the Soviet invasion of those states set the tone for Stalin's deportations of Germans. As in World War I, the regime deported ethnic Germans from the western and southern parts of the empire, but this time added the large German population in the middle Volga region. Germans accounted for nearly half of the wartime ethnic deportations. The Finns were deported largely from the Leningrad region in August 1941 as the Finnish Army was advancing toward the city.

From November 1943 to November 1944, the Kalmyks, Karachai, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Crimean Tatars, Crimean Greeks, Meskhetian Turks, Kurds, and Khemshils were all deported en masse to Central Asia. These deportations were accompanied by accusations of collaboration while under German occupation, but the long histories of resistance among some of these groups to Russian rule doubtless was an important factor as well. This was particularly true in Chechnya, where an insurgency formed during the war and conducted raids and assassinations against Soviet officials.

In the final analysis, of course, there can be no rational explanation for the mass deportation of entire nationalities. The deportations were recognized as early as the 1950s as one of Stalin's greatest crimes. The conditions of the deported groups were improved and restrictions on their movement were partially lifted between 1954 and 1956. The easing of conditions from 1954 to 1956 led to major unsanctioned return journeys of many of the Caucasus nationalities. This was a factor in the government's decisions from 1956 to 1958 to allow the Karachai, Balkars, Kalmyks, Chechens, and Ingush to return and to restore their local national governmental autonomy. But official rehabilitation for the Germans came only in 1964 and for the Crimean Tatars in 1967, and in neither case were their national autonomous governments restored, nor were these groups given permission to return to their homelands until the late 1980s and early 1990s. The mass deportations of the twentieth century left a bitter legacy that contributed to the determination of national movements from the Baltics to Chechnya to acquire full independence from Moscow.

See also: nationalities policies, soviet; nationalities policies, tsarist; pale of settlement; world war i; world war ii

bibliography

Lohr, Eric. (2003). Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The Campaign against Enemy Aliens during World War I. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Martin, Terry. (1998). "The Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing." The Journal of Modern History 70(4): 813–861.

Nekrich, Aleksandr M. (1978). The Punished Peoples: The Deportation and Fate of Soviet Minorities at the End of the Second World War. New York: Norton.

Eric Lohr