A Very Short Overview of Ethnic Cleansing inside the USSR from 1937 to 1944
A Very Short Overview of Ethnic Cleansing inside the USSR from 1937 to 1944
By
J. Otto Pohl
The Soviet Union internally deported the vast majority of the members of eight whole nationalities between 1937 and 1944. In total these deportees numbered over 2.5 million people and they suffered more than 500,000 excess premature deaths by 1952. These nationalities were in the chronological order of their forced resettlement from their homelands to Siberia, Kazakhstan and Central Asia; the Koreans in the Russian Far East, the ethnic Germans west of the Urals, Kalmyks, Karachais, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Crimean Tatars, and Meskhetian Turks. These nationalities fell into two broad categories. The first category were diaspora nationalities like the Koreans, Germans, and Meskhetian Turks that had ancestral homelands and ethno-cultural connections outside the USSR that were deemed potentially disloyal to Moscow on this basis. The second were nationalities that had a long history of conflict with the Russian Empire and USSR that had only been finally conquered in the 18th and 19th centuries. The Second World War provided cover for the Soviet state to permanently solve problems with these nationalities by forcibly dispersing them eastward and eliminating their compact areas of settlement.
The first nationality deported in almost its entirety from their traditional areas of settlement were the Korean immigrants and their descendants that had settled in the Russian Far East. This forced resettlement took place in fall 1937. It involved the internal deportation of 172,597 ethnic Koreans. The official reason given was to prevent the infiltration of ethnic Koreans from the Japanese Empire into the region that could blend in among the local Korean population. The NKVD (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs) rounded up the Koreans, loaded them onto trains and shipped them to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan where unlike later deported nationalities they were placed under administrative exile rather than special settlement restrictions. This meant that they could not move from their assigned areas of residence like special settlers but unlike them they did not have to register with the NKVD each month. The Koreans and all later deportees suffered from severe shortages of adequate housing, food, clothing, and medicine resulting in large numbers of premature deaths.
The next and largest nationality subjected to large scale internal deportation were the ethnic Germans. This ethnic cleansing was officially justified as a measure to prevent them from collaborating with the advancing German military although no evidence was ever found that this might be an actual threat. This series of deportations started on 3 September 1941 and lasted until the end of the year. It involved the ethnic cleansing of the Volga region, eastern Ukraine, northern Caucasus, Moscow, and other areas of the European USSR of Germans. The NKVD counted 799,459 Germans arriving alive in their new areas of settlement. The largest single group of Germans deported were the Volga Germans, particularly from the Volga German ASSR. This administrative territory accounted for 371,164 of the deportees. The NKVD deported most of them by train, but a significant number made part of the trip into internal exile by ship, both by river and across the Caspian to Gur’ev Kazakhstan. The destination points of the German deportees were Kazakhstan and the Siberian regions of Altai Krai, Krasnoiarsk Krai, Omsk Oblast, and Novosibirsk Oblast. In 1942 and 1943 the NKVD again forcibly resettled 80,000 deportees and many Germans living in these regions before 1941 to fishing camps in the Far North and 315,000 to labor army detachments mostly in the Urals. At the end of the war many of those Germans that escaped deportation due to being saved by the Wehrmacht were forcibly repatriated to the USSR by US and British soldiers. In addition to Kazakhstan and Siberia a fair number of the repatriates ended up in the Urals and Tajikistan. They worked on cotton kolkhozes (collective farms) cultivating cotton in this latter territory. The Soviet government lifted the special settlement restrictions from the Germans on 13 December 1955. It did not allow them to return home, however. The Soviet government never restored the Volga German ASSR and very few of the deported Germans and their descendents were ever able to return to their former homelands in the USSR. Most emigrated to Germany after the end of the Soviet Union. By 2005 over 2.3 million ethnic Germans had left the former USSR to live in Germany. The World War II ethnic cleansing of German settlements in the western USSR was largely successful.
Following the Soviet victory at Stalingrad the Red Army began to advance westward and the Stalin regime ethnically cleansed the Karachais, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Karachais, and Crimean Tatars under the pretext that they had collaborated in large numbers with the German occupation forces. Although in reality these nationalities had not collaborated in any larger numbers given their population than other groups such as the Russians or Ukrainians. The first nationality deported in their near entirety was a punitive measure were the Karachais on 2 November 1943. This was followed by the Kalmyks on 27-28 December 1943, Chechens and Ingush 23-29 February 1944, Balkars 8-9 March 1944, and Crimean Tatars 18-20 May 1944. The NKVD deported 608,749 Karachais, Chechens, Ingush, and Balkars to Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. They sent 91,919 Kalmyks to Siberia and 183,155 Crimean Tatars to Uzbekistan and the Urals, Siberia, and Kazakhstan. These groups had very high excess mortality rates from 1944 to 1948. Official Soviet records recorded 144,704 deaths (23.7%) among the deported North Caucasians in four and a half years. In 1956 they were freed from the special settlement restrictions and in 1957-1958 the the Soviet government restored the autonomous territories of the North Caucasians and Kalmyks and allowed them to return home. The Crimean Tatars remained confined largely to Uzbekistan until the late 1980s. The deported North Caucasians, Kalmyks, and Crimean Tatars are often referred to as the Punished Peoples.
The last nationality subjected to full scale ethnic cleansing were the Meskhetian Turks along with a small number of Kurds and Khemshins (Armenian speaking Muslims) from the regions of Georgia bordering the Turkish Republic. The NKVD carried out this operation from 15 to 26 November 1944. This ethnic cleansing involved the removal of 94,955 people. This deportation like the earlier Korean and German ones was a prophylactic one to remove them as a potential asset for Turkey in the advent of a future war against Ankara. The NKVD deported them to Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan as special settlers. They were also released from the special settlement restrictions in 1956. But, like the Germans and Crimean Tatars not allowed to return home during the Soviet era. Most still remain scattered across Central Asia and Russia.
Soviet ethnic cleansing during the Stalin era involved the forcibly uprooting of over two million people from their homes and their relocation in remote areas with few spare resources to support their survival due solely to their ethno-racial identity. Hundreds of thousands of people thus perished as a direct result of these evictions. The survivors suffered the loss of their personal and collective property and endured great hardships and trauma.