The Myth that Jews were the Ethnic Group most Persecuted by the Soviet Regime: Part Two: The National Deportations and Special Settlement Regime.
The first part of this article dealt with the mass arrests and executions in the USSR from 1936-1938 and which natsional’nosty were most effected. It concluded that Poles, Latvians, Finns, and Germans were disproportionately arrested and sentenced to death by the NKVD during these years. Russians and Ukrainians were underrepresented among those arrested and executed in relation to their population size in the USSR. Jews were just barely over represented among arrests with 2.1% versus 1.8% of the Soviet population. There was no Jewish Operation so it is not possible to try and figure out how many Jews were executed at this time in the same manner as Poles, Latvians, Finns, and Germans. But, given what information we do have it was probably also just slightly higher than their percentage in the general population and far below that of the Poles, Latvians, Finns, and Germans.
This part of the article will deal with the mass internal deportations of targeted natsional’nosty as special settlers during the 1940s. During this time Jews born as Soviet citizens were not subject to any mass deportations. There is speculation that perhaps Stalin was thinking of such a mass deportation before he died and was not able to implement it. However, no documentation from any Soviet archives has surfaced regarding any planning or preparation for such an operation. In numerical terms the largest number of national deportees during the 1940s were ethnic Germans with 949,829 initially forcibly relocated and classified as special settlers. This was followed by North Caucasians consisting of Chechens, Ingush, Karachais, and Balkars at 608,749. Then Crimean Tatars, Bulgarians, Greeks, and Armenians with 228,392 (J. Otto Pohl, The Years of Great Silence: The Deportation, Special Settlement, and Mobilization into the Labor Army of Ethnic Germans in the USSR, 1941-1955. Stuttgart: Ibidem Verlag, 2022, 245). In total by October 1949, 88.9% of ethnic Germans with Soviet citizenship and still in the USSR had been subjected to forcible resettlement and special settlement restrictions (Pohl, 241). For other deported nationalities such as the Chechens and Crimean Tatars the percentage of those deported from their homelands to eastern areas of the USSR was considerably higher.
The only significant cohort of Jews forcibly relocated as special settlers by the Soviet regime were those that fled German occupied Poland into the Soviet controlled zone and refused Soviet citizenship after 1939. In June and July 1940 the NKVD deported these refugees eastward. An NKVD count on 1 April 1941 showed 58,582 such deportees as special settlers. This is in contrast to 96,592 Polish special settlers deported from eastern Poland (V.N. Zemskov, Spetsposlentsy v SSSR: 1930-1960. Moscow: Nauka, 2005, 89). On 12 August 1941 the Supreme Soviet ordered all Polish citizens freed from special settlement restrictions (Zemskov, 89-90). In 1942 many of them were evacuated out of the USSR through Iran. We do not have exact figures on deaths of Jews while special settlers. The mortality figures are divided between Settlers and Refugees not Poles and Jews. But, the first category was 82.6% Polish and the second one 84.4% Jewish (Zemskov, 87). Therefore it is reasonable to assume the vast majority of deaths among Settlers were Polish and those among Refugees Jewish. The deaths while under special settlement restrictions for Settlers was 10,557 vs. 1,762 for Refugees (Zemskov, 86). That is 9.8% for the Polish dominated Settler contingent and 2.5% for the Jewish dominated Refugees. That is it looks like Poles had a mortality rate of nearly four times that of Jews.
Just as Poles, Latvians, Finns, and Germans were the hardest hit nationalities in the Great Terror of 1936-1938, Germans, Chechens, Ingush, Karachais, Balkars, Kalmyks, Crimean Tatars, and Meskhetian Turks were the nationalities targeted for near total internal deportation from 1940-1949. Jews particular those that lived in the USSR before it expanded its borders in 1939 were not a group targeted for special persecution during the 1940s by the Stalin regime. So far the rumors of a pending mass internal deportation of Jews by the Soviet regime stopped only by Stalin’s death have failed to find any archival backing. At any rate such an operation was never implemented and Jews in the 1950s like in the 1930s remained the only large diaspora group in the USSR not subjected earlier to mass arrests or deportation by the Soviet government.