Ethnic deportations in the USSR

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The Ingush parents Gasdijew at the deportation site in Kazakhstan in 1944 with their deceased daughter

Ethnic deportations in the USSR were the forced resettlements of Soviet citizens mostly at the time of Stalinism due to their ethnic affiliation to special settlements and gulags , mainly in Central Asia and Siberia . The deportations were one of the forms of political and collective oppression of their own citizens. The main features of these reprisals carried out by armed units of the NKVD were their extrajudicial and collective, area-wide character according to "national" affiliation, although the vast majority of the deportees did not commit political misconduct, as well as the movement of large numbers of people to a geographically remote area for they unusual, often risky habitat.

overview

Among other social groups of ten were people in the USSR completely deported: Russia Koreans , Russia German , Ingermanland - Finns , Karachai , Kalmyks , Chechens , Ingush , Balkars , Crimean Tatars and smaller minorities of the Crimea and meskhetische Turks . Seven of them lost their national territories. The Karachay, Balkars, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush and Crimean Tatars were accused in the Stalinist deportation decrees as a reason, the majority of the armed forces and other German occupation authorities collaborated to have. This blanket accusation has long been refuted in Eastern European history. In all cases, more ethnic members than Red Army soldiers or partisans fought against Nazi Germany than had collaborated with him. That is why many specialist historians today assume that further resistance to the Stalinist social order should be collectively “punished” by the deportations.

These repressions have a forerunner in the early Soviet times in the persecution and partial deportation of Cossacks after the Russian Civil War , in which the majority fought against the Red Army and which were still considered a separate nationality in the Russian Empire.

Decision of the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee of January 31, 1938 on so-called national operations (against “Poles, Latvians, Germans, Estonians, Finns, Greeks, Iranians, Harbinians , Chinese and Romanians”), signed “For Stalin , W. Molotow , Kaganowitsch , K. Voroshilov , A. Mikojan , W. Tschubar ”and the end date“ 1. Mai 1938 ”was handwritten three times by Stalin in“ 15. April "changed
Excerpt from one of the checked lists of names of the NKVD of the "Greek Operation" (January 1938) in the Donetsk Oblast with names of Greek deportation victims.

Many other ethnic groups of Soviet citizens were deported "prophylactically" at least partially, mostly from regions near the border, for political and geostrategic reasons. These deportation victims belonged to national minorities of the Soviet Union, which in hostile neighboring states also represented the ethnic state nation or an important population group, which is why collaboration was feared in the event of war, although they had never collaborated until then. These victims of deportations from areas near the border included Greeks and Italians , Poles , Romanians or Moldovans and Bulgarians (before Poland, Romania and Bulgaria became socialist countries after World War II), Lithuanians , Latvians and Estonians in the Soviet Union before World War II (before Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were annexed by the Soviets in 1939), Kurds , Assyrians , Chinese ( Dungans ), Iranians and Iranian Jews and others. The Ingermanland Finns, the Koreans from the Far East of Russia and the Turks from the Georgian border region to Turkey, Meshetia , were also deported for this reason, but all lived near the border and were therefore deported in full. The Russian Germans were deported from most regions near the border in 1938-41, after the German invasion of the Soviet Union from almost all settlement areas in the Soviet Union.

The “national deportations” of complete “peoples” was a separate section in Khrushchev's well-known secret speech on the XX. CPSU party congress in 1956 dedicated to “ On the personality cult and its consequences ”, at which the audience was surprised with the sentence “The Ukrainians escaped this fate simply because they are so numerous and there was no room to where they could be deported. “Since then they have been seen as another dark chapter of Stalinism, in addition to the forced collectivization in the Soviet Union with deculakization and the subsequent famine , the Stalinist purges and the like. a. Researching waves of repression. Since the years after 2005, the NKVD files in Russia have mostly ceased to be public in the FSB's secret archives , and research has stagnated. Especially about the number of fatalities in these deportations and about their share of the deportees there are still unexplained and contradicting calculations and estimates of around 10% to a quarter, sometimes even a third or more. The transport to the special settlements and gulags in exile, mostly in cattle wagons on the railway, was particularly devastating for old, weak and sick deportees and children, and accompanying NKVD units prevented some escape attempts by shooting. Mortality in the first few months of exile often depended on the organization of food, housing and medical care, and also differed between the various deportations. Whether the death of some of the deportees was desired is the subject of controversial scientific debates; some of the deportations were politically recognized as genocide in some countries .

In the course of the de-Stalinization initiated with Khrushchev's secret speech in 1956 , all deported ethnic groups were officially rehabilitated from the Stalinist allegations and as early as 1957 the Karachay, Balkar, Ingush, Chechen and Kalmyks were allowed to return and their autonomous areas were re-established. Some had started returning home on their own shortly beforehand after the Gulag uprisings. Because the de-Stalinization was quickly delayed by opposition from the party apparatus and stalled in 1961-64, the Koreans, Germans, Crimean Tatars and Turkish meshes were no longer allowed to return and they had to stay in Central Asia and South Siberia (outside the special settlements and Gulags) stay. Especially among the Crimean Tatars, a broad dissident movement formed under Mustafa Djemilev . The majority of Germans, Koreans, Greeks, etc. a. emigrated from the Soviet Union since the breakup period. After attacks and pogroms against members of the Turkish-Meschetan and Crimean Tatar minorities in Uzbekistan in the spring of 1989 , the Gorbachev government evacuated them from Central Asia by air and most of the Crimean Tatars and smaller Crimean minorities returned to the Ukrainian Crimea back. Because the nationalist Georgian government under Zviad Gamsakhurdia refused to return the Meshes, most of them now live under the name "Turks" in Azerbaijan and in the Russian North Caucasus . According to the Law on the Rehabilitation of Oppressed Peoples, passed on April 26, 1991 by the Supreme Council of the RSFSR , peoples (nations, nationalities or ethnic groups and other historically grown cultural and ethnic communities, for example Cossacks ) were recognized as oppressed if they were due to national or other affiliation to a state policy of defamation and genocide, accompanied by forced resettlement, the abolition of autonomous nation-states and their division and the creation of a terror and violent regime in special settlements and gulags.

Some authors also consider other resettlements with these ethnic deportations. Authors from the Baltic countries, Poland and Romania include the Stalinist deportations from Soviet-annexed areas after the 1939 Hitler-Stalin Pact , which, however, were not complete or regionally complete according to ethnic origin, but rather waves of social and political repression. This also applies to eastern Poland, where the upper classes persecuted in the “class struggle” (aristocrats, bourgeoisie) and politically persecuted layers loyal to the conquered Poland (politicians, military, civil servants, teachers, etc.), although far more often ethnic Poles than Ukrainians or Belarusians were, but here too the deportees and their persecutors came from many ethnic groups. Other authors consider arbitrary NKVD deportations after the Soviet conquest of Romania, Bulgaria and parts of Hungary from August to the winter of 1944, which were not selected according to ethnic criteria or were systematic at all. Sometimes called the expulsions in "to population exchange " between Poland and the Ukrainian SSR and Byelorussian SSR after World War II ( Polish population transfers and by Ukrainians and Belarusians in the opposite direction), or between the Armenian SSR and the Azerbaijan SSR with considered. However, these resettlements did not end in Stalinist gulags and special camps, but behind the established borders. Some authors in Russia in recent years also consider the kulak persecutions (a social group, not an ethnic one), the resettlement of mountain people of the Caucasus and Pamir in the foothills, or remote areas in more densely populated regions, but which were not selected according to ethnic criteria, and even the settlement of Russian skilled workers, settlers and officials in minority areas (often not forced, but voluntary) in this context. Regardless of the fact that all these events should also be researched historically, they blur the boundaries of this phenomenon in the numerous state repression, deportations and individual relocations and settlements of the Stalin era. Whether these authors want to reinforce the national victim myth or relativize the events, they are not only looking at the ethnic deportations, which contemporaries like Khrushchev perceived and condemned as a separate crime of Stalinism.

Systematic categorization proposals

Different concepts are used with regard to forced migrations in the Soviet era. For example, in her dissertation on forced migrations to the Kyrgyz SSR in 2013, the historian LN Djachenko made a distinction between the following concepts: "Forced deportations" in general and deportations "by nationality". Among the latter, she distinguished between “complete deportations” and partial deportations, and according to purpose she distinguished between “geopolitical deportations” and “repressive deportations”.

The terms were criticized by the well-known researcher for forced migrations to the USSR, Nikolai Bugai, as hardly useful in concrete terms. Bugai himself uses the concept of “forced deportation” in general, which he does not apply very selectively.

Participants in the international symposium "1937: Russian-Speaking Koreans - Past, Present and Future" ( Vladivostok , 2017) passed a special resolution stating that the term "deportation" did not apply to the forced relocation of the peoples of the USSR because it did because of their high number of victims as worse and therefore demanded that the rehabilitation decree of 1991 be supplemented by a further law that includes the classification as genocide .

Previous experience in pre-Soviet times

Exile and prison camp

Typical prison camp in Siberia, between 1908 and 1913

Banishes in remote areas east of the Urals go back to the 16th century. The system of katorga (forced labor in penal colonies) and exile (ссы́лка - 'ssýlka') to Siberia developed . Exiles were settled with little guard in remote villages, from which it was only possible to escape with considerable effort, more severe cases came in penal colonies on the island of Sakhalin or for the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway . From 1807 to 1863, an average of 8,213 people were deported to Siberia each year. 1807 marked the beginning of statistical surveys; such resettlements had already occurred before that. During this period, 336,737 people were deported to Siberia. In 1862 9,570 people were deported to Siberia, in 1863: 10,108 people. Between 1865 and 1881 the average annual rate of deportees to Siberia rose to 15,733 people. Between 1863 and 1880 there were mass deportations from Poland to Siberia as a result of the Polish uprisings, which culminated in the January uprising in 1863 . Siberia became synonymous with exile. There were also other places of exile in the Russian Empire.

But it was not until the 1930s and 1940s that the deportations in Russia took on a total character. Under Stalinism , the now millions army of exiled / resettled special settlers and Gulag prisoners served not only to punish legal and political offenses, which were often completely unjustly alleged, or to intimidate dissenters, but also the immense need for workers in the development, settlement and The industrialization of huge areas in a short period of time dictated the deportation quotas, which were often given to the NKVD .

Group resettlements and ethnic deportations

Forced relocations were already carried out in pre-Soviet Russia, but were not as frequent as in Soviet times. During the expansion of the Moscow Grand Duchy , Vasily III. In 1510 300 leading families were deported from Pskov to central Russia, Ivan IV. Around 1569 had 8000 families of the upper classes from Novgorod to Moscow and in return an equal number of loyal Moscow families to Novgorod. In the Livonian War in the 16th century, residents of Baltic cities were also forcibly relocated to Vladimir , Nizhny Novgorod and Moscow, where they served as bargaining grounds for the obedience of the new Baltic regions.

In the course of the imperial and colonial expansion of Tsarist Russia and the Russian Empire over parts of Europe and Asia, there was displacement and Russification of the pre-populations in some regions - especially in southern Russia and southern Siberia - but it is often emphasized that these events with the parallel complete Deportations and expulsions, especially in North America, Australia or some other regions of America and South Africa, were not comparable. While in North America the entire indigenous population was deported to Indian reservations at the end of the 19th century , in the USA in the Trail of Tears also to the regions west of the Mississippi, the ethnic groups of the pre-population of Russia mostly continued to live in their old, albeit sometimes reduced, settlement areas , always supplemented by civil servants, Cossacks and settlers.

Population of Crimea (total and in%) 18th century – 2014, light green: Crimean Tatars. The waves of flight after the Russian annexation in 1792, after the Crimean War , the victims of the Nazi occupation 1941–44 and shortly afterwards the Stalinist deportations are clearly visible .

The situation was more tense in the Black Sea region, where the Muslim- Sunni population had a long history of political loyalty to the Ottoman Empire , which was hostile to Russia , which was also underpinned by religious beliefs - the regionally dominant Sunni school of law of the Hanafis followed the claim of the Ottoman sultans as caliph ( religious-political head) of the Muslims. This is why there were regular revolts against Russian rule in the Black Sea region, especially during the Russian-Ottoman wars , after which many muhajirs fled Russia again and again after the crackdown . Between 1792 and 1922 over 80% of the Crimean Tatars left the Russian Crimea (not clearly visible in statistical figures due to the parallel population growth, only in comparison with the Crimean Tatar population of Anatolia). Among the nomads living to the north and east who belonged to the Nogaier associations , the proportion was even larger, but far lower in more distant regions.

Caucasian refugees. Contemporary representation.

An episode of regionally complete ethnic deportation also knows the history of Russian expansion. At the end of the protracted Caucasus War from approx. 1817 to 1864 for the Russian conquest of the Great Caucasus approx. 1860 / 62-64 / 65 the pre-population of the West Caucasus - mostly Circassians , also Abasins and after an uprising in 1866/67 finally also Abkhazians - was eliminated Deported completely to the mountain areas, the Abkhazians also from their capital Sukhumi and the surrounding area. In total, together with the resettlement of individual tribes from other areas of the Caucasus, around 500–700,000 people were affected, most of whom were resettled to the Ottoman Empire, and to a small extent also to the foothills of the mountains. Even then it became clear that deportations of entire populations claim many victims, a maximum of 100,000 deaths are estimated, which is why the genocide character is also discussed here . The resettlement was an organized deportation because the Russian army monitored the deportation trains and their completeness, organized and paid for the ships for the passage across the Black Sea, and negotiated the terms of settlement in Anatolia with the Ottoman Empire . The prohibitions for Circassians, Abkhazians and Abasins to even enter the mountain areas and the surrounding area of ​​Sukhumi existed until 1905 .

The memory of the Caucasus deportations, which were still vividly received in the 19th century, faded in the 20th century after the experiences of the First World War , when there were new nationalistically motivated deportations around this time, especially in neighboring countries . Hundreds of thousands of people were evacuated from the new nation states during the Balkan Wars , almost 100,000 Bulgarians and Turks alone between Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire, which was now ruled by Young Turks . In 1915 the Armenian genocide followed , described in contemporary sources as an extermination attempt disguised as resettlement, contrary to political denial attempts, and in 1922 the “population exchange” between Greece and Turkey of around 1.6 million people. During the World War, the Russian army also deported around 800,000 German and Jewish subjects from the western areas near the front, who were expected to have too much sympathy for the war opponents Austria-Hungary and the German Empire , and planned Polish deportations, which were no longer carried out. The reality of deportations and their consequences were well known to the early Soviet public and politicians.

Deportation story

Deportations within the Soviet Union

Reconstruction of an early emergency shelter for the deportees in gulags ; similar examples have come down to us from Central Asia. ( Rumšiškės Open Air Museum , Lithuania)

The first deportation in the history of the USSR for reasons of nationality related to the Finns . In 1935, the decision was made to expel the Finnish population from the border strips around Leningrad to the north-west. Tens of thousands of Finns were resettled in Vologda Oblast . This is one of the first in a series of operations to "clear" the borders and prepare for acts of war.

Romanian deportees in 1940 after the Soviet annexation of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina in the Hitler-Stalin Pact on their way to the rest of Romania. The ethnic deportations to Central Asia in open or closed freight wagons looked similar, but with less luggage and guarded by armed NKVD units.

Scheme and defining character of the deportations:

After the decision to relocate around 45,000 people from the border areas of Ukraine to Kazakhstan in April 1936, the so-called special resettlers were forcibly driven into train wagons and transported to Kazakhstan over a period of three to four months. Behind Kustanaj the trains stopped in the open steppe . The armed escorts jumped out of the trains, put up a red flag, threw a few tents out of the wagons and ordered a hundred people on the train to “live” there from now on. The train with the rest of the deportees then continued. This procedure was repeated every 15-20 kilometers. At least 100,000 deportees died in the Kazakh steppe in the first winter because of these inadequate supply structures, which were deliberately brought about by the state .

Seven peoples were exposed to total deportation during the years of the Great Patriotic War: Germans, Karachay , Kalmyks , Ingush , Chechens , Balkars and Crimean Tatars . The deportations were accompanied by the liquidation of their autonomy.

Although the repressions against these peoples had their specific characteristics, there were some similarities: the striving to assimilate people so that they forgot their language, their traditions and cease to honor their ancestors.

The Korjo-Saram , the 200,000-strong Korean minority in the Russian Far East, also fell victim to state reprisals in 1937. In the course of the deportations, the Koreans were loaded onto cattle wagons and also transported to Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan . At the special settlement sites they were used for forced labor and lived under conditions of restricted rights and freedoms. Most of them were previously rice farmers and fishermen and found it difficult to adapt to the dry Central Asian environment. It is estimated that up to 40,000 Koreans died in the first few years after deportation. The deported ethnic Koreans were not allowed to return to their homeland. There were special red stamps on the ID cards of the special resettlers. Korean schools and the use of the Korean language were banned.

In the years of the Great Patriotic War from 1941 onwards, the deportation of ethnic minorities reached its greatest extent. Whole peoples were collectively “punished”. The official reason for the kidnappings was regularly the general charge of “treason” of the Soviet system.

The repression against Germans was guided by state fears that the German-ethnic Soviet citizens would plan state infiltration, sabotage or uprisings. As a result, the mass deportation of Germans from the border and central industrial areas z. B. on the Volga in the hinterland, in the remote areas of Siberia, Kazakhstan, Chitas . The Volga German Republic was liquidated in August 1941. Men of draft age had to do forced labor in the forest industry, on construction sites or in pits. The care for these prisoners was deliberately poor and insufficient to survive. In addition, there was torture and mistreatment by the guards. People couldn't stand it and died by the thousands.

The Crimean Tatar village Üsküt (Russian Uskut), today Prywitne / Priwjetnoje, in the urban district of Alushta , taken in 1945 after the deportation of the residents.

As a result of the ethnic deportation of peoples from the North Caucasus and Crimea , around 870,000 people had to leave their homes. Together with the Germans, the number of citizens deported in the war years from 1941 to 1945 amounts to around 2.3 million people. The abandoned areas were colonized by other people, again under duress. This results in a total number of victims in the total ethnic deportations of around three million.

Since the post-war period, the deportations have lost their totalitarian character. After Stalin's death in 1953, the deported peoples began to return to their former residential areas.

In the third phase of the deportations, Germans were again recorded who had previously been brought to the Altreich as ethnic Germans by the Germans . The deportation to the east in 1945 affected between 290,000 and 300,000 Germans who had previously held Soviet citizenship and who now found themselves in the areas occupied by the Red Army . In the eyes of the Soviets, these people were regarded as “ traitors to the fatherland ”. In addition, there were another 300,000 contract resettlers who had never had citizenship but were now declared Soviet citizens in the course of the integration of the territories into the Soviet Union. The repatriates were not returned to their previous residential areas as promised. They too were resettled in special settlements.

It is estimated that 300,000 of those deported from 1941 to 1945 died in the course of the deportations.

Deportations to the Soviet Union

A special case is the deportation of groups of people to the Soviet Union between 1943 and 1947. As part of Operation Keelhaul , around two and a half million people who came from the territory of the Soviet Union were sent back there by the British and the Americans, often against their own Will in the course of a forced repatriation . Many of these people were killed, by executions or even by suicide. 520,000 German civilians from the eastern regions were then deported to Soviet labor camps for forced labor during the advance of the Red Army in 1945 . Around 80 percent of them were women between the ages of 15 and 45 who were also subjected to systematic rape .

The organization of the kidnapping of German civilians lay with the fronts (army groups) of the Red Army. It generally began two to three weeks after the occupation in the territories conquered. Each of the four Soviet fronts independently carried out the arrest and delivery of the Germans to transit and assembly camps in their area . The kidnapping was based less on a plan to deport certain people and groups of people, but rather on rounding up as many Germans as possible who were fit for work as quickly as possible. As a rule, penitentiaries and prisons, barracks or barracks served as reception camps . The circumstances of detention were generally similar. The able-bodied residents of an area were ordered to go to a reporting point on a fixed date. From there, the route to the next largest collection point began. From there they were transported to the main camp, where those to be deported were loaded onto freight trains. As a result of severe violence, inadequate food and illness, many hundreds of displaced persons died in the assembly camps. The transport trains took on an average of 2,000 displaced persons each. The drive to the labor camps in Russia took three to six weeks. During this time, the displaced were insufficiently supplied with food and water. The mortality on the journey was ten percent of the deportees. The labor camps to which the transports were directed were scattered across Russia. Usually the hardest physical work had to be done. Illnesses and deaths increased more and more in the course of 1945. The vast majority of the losses that occurred among the deported Germans occurred in the period from spring to autumn 1945. In individual camps, more than half of the forced laborers died (state concept of extermination through work ). After the first big wave of layoffs in 1945, the camp liquidations and repatriations to Germany dragged on until 1948. The last major repatriations took place in 1949, after four years of forced labor. Of the SMT convicts 19,450 prisoners were deported to the Soviet Union. The death rate of these groups of people in the labor camps was a factor of 5: 1 compared to the usual gulags . The number of German civilians without Soviet citizenship who was abducted to the Soviet Union in 1945 and afterwards is estimated at 185,000 people.

Other deportations:

chronology

  • May 1936: Deportation of 36,000 Poles to Kazakhstan
  • September – October 1937: Deportation of 172,000 Koreans to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan
  • September – November 1939: Deportation of 110,000 Poles to Siberia
  • June 1941: Deportation of 10,000 Lithuanians, 9,500 Latvians and 6,000 Estonians
  • November 1943: Deportation of 69,000 Karsayers to Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan
  • January 1944: 80,000 Kalmyks are deported to Siberia
  • February 1944: Deportation of 310,000 Chechens and 81,000 Ingush to Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan
  • March 1944: Deportation of 37,000 Balkars to Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.
  • May 1944: 200,000 Crimean Tatars are deported to Uzbekistan
  • June 1944: Deportation of 36,000 Bulgarians, Armenians and Greeks from the Crimea
  • July 1944: Deportation of 86,000 Meshet-Turks, Kurds and Chemshilen to Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan
  • 1948: Deportation of 40,000 Lithuanians to Siberia
  • March 1949: Deportation of 32,000 Lithuanians, 42,000 Latvians and 20,000 Estonians to Siberia
  • June 1949: Deportation of 15,000 Armenians to the Altai
  • 1949: Deportation of 95,000 Moldovans to Siberia
  • 1950: Deportation of 18,000 Lithuanians as kulaks

dead

  • Kulaks scale farmers 1930-1937: 389,521
  • Chechens: 100,000–400,000
  • Poland: 90,000
  • Koreans: 28,200-40,000
  • Estonians: 5400
  • Latvians: 17,400
  • Lithuanians: 28,000
  • Finns: 18,800
  • Hungary: 15,000-20,000
  • Karachay : 13,100-19,000
  • Russian Germans (with Soviet citizenship): 42,823–228,800
  • Kalmyks : 12,600-16,000
  • Ingush : 20,300-23,000
  • Balkars : 7600-11,000
  • Crimean Tatars : 34,300–195,471
  • Meskhetians : 12859-50000
  • Total: 835,903-1,548,992

Post rehabilitation of the victims

In the USSR

On January 17, 1956, a decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Council lifted the restrictions on the Poles expelled in 1936, on March 17, 1956 - by the Kalmyks, on March 27 - by the Greeks , Bulgarians and Armenians ; April 18, 1956 - by the Crimean Tatars, Balkars, Meskhetes Turks, Kurds and Hemshinli; on July 16, 1956, the legal restrictions on Chechens, Ingush and Karachay people were lifted (all without the right to return to their homeland).

Chechen residents of the village of Yurt-Auch (today in Dagestan ) before their return in 1957 at the Frunze train station (today Bishkek , capital of Kyrgyzstan )

In the years 1957-1958 the national autonomies of the Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Karachay and Balkar were restored. These peoples were allowed to return to their historical areas. The return of the oppressed peoples was not without difficulties, which then and subsequently led to national conflicts (e.g. there were clashes between returned Chechens and Russians who settled in Grozny Oblast during their displacement; Ingush in Prigorodny district, from Ossetians settled and relocated to the North Ossetian ASSR ).

However, a significant part of the oppressed peoples (Volga Germans, Crimean Tatars, Meskhetian Turks, Greeks, Koreans, etc.) were neither returned to national autonomies (if any) nor the right to return to their historical homeland.

On August 29, 1964, 23 years after the start of the deportation, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR with decree of August 29, 1964 No. 2820-VI lifted the indiscriminate allegations against the German population living in the Volga region and the decree where restrictions on freedom were completely removed, movement and confirmation of the right of Germans to return to the places from which they were deported was adopted in 1972.

Since the mid-1960s, the rehabilitation process for "punished peoples" has almost been stopped.

During the years of perestroika

The problems of the peoples accused during the years of Soviet complicity in the enemies of the Soviet state and deportation from their historical places of residence were only publicly discussed during the years of perestroika. One of the first steps in restoring historical justice to oppressed peoples was the adoption of the Declaration of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR dated November 14, 1989 “On Recognizing and Ensuring Illegal and Criminal Retaliation Against Peoples Subjected to Forced Relocation Rights ", according to which all displaced peoples were rehabilitated by the state level as illegal and criminal reprisals against them in the form of a policy of defamation , genocide , and forced resettlement, abolition of nation-state formations, creation of a terror and violent regime in places of special settlements recognized.

In modern Russia

On April 26, 1991 RSFSR Law No. 1107-I “On the Rehabilitation of Oppressed Peoples” was passed, which recognized the deportation of peoples as “the policy of defamation and genocide” (Article 2). The law recognized, among other things, the right of the oppressed peoples to restore the territorial integrity that existed before the unconstitutional policy of forcibly reshaping the borders, restoring nation-state formations that existed before their abolition, as well as compensating for the damage caused by the state.

Muharbek Didigov called the said law a triumph of historical justice. In his opinion, the fact that the state recognized repression as illegal, inhuman acts against innocent people, is an indicator of the development of democratic institutions that have a special moral value for deported peoples. According to him, the law creates confidence that this will not happen again.

In the course of drafting the Law “On the Rehabilitation of Oppressed Peoples”, a number of laws were passed, including the RF Forces Resolution of July 16, 1992 “On the Rehabilitation of the Cossacks”; Decree of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation of April 1, 1993 “On the Rehabilitation of Russian Koreans”; Order of the Government of the Russian Federation of January 24, 1992 on priority measures for the practical restoration of the legal rights of the oppressed peoples of the Assr in Dagestan; Decree of the RF Armed Forces of June 29, 1993 "On the Rehabilitation of Russian Finns" etc.

On September 24, 2012, United Russia MPs submitted a bill to the State Duma to provide additional support to representatives of oppressed peoples. The authors of the law suggested allocating 23 billion rubles from the federal budget to political prisoners. According to the authors, this money will be used for monthly payments and compensation for lost and found items in the amount of up to 35 thousand rubles.

genocide

Several historians, including the Russian historian Pavel Polian and the Lithuanian research assistant at Yale University Violeta Davoliūtė , rate the mass deportations of civilians as crimes against humanity . They are also often referred to as Soviet ethnic cleansing. The deportation of the Crimean Tatars and the deportation of the Chechens and Ingush have been recognized as genocide by Ukraine and three other countries . Fifteen years after their recognition in the USSR, in February 2004 the European Parliament also recognized the deportation of Chechens and Ingush in 1944 as genocide.

Historiography

In the 2010s, Russian historical revisionist historians such as Nikolai Bugai criticized the use of the concept of “deportation” for the forced relocation of Soviet citizens within the borders of the Soviet Union. Instead of the term “deportation”, Nikolai Bugai and others suggested using the term “forced relocation”.

literature

  • Nikolai Bugai: The Deportation of Peoples in the Soviet Union. New York 1996.
  • Terry Martin: The origins of Soviet ethnic cleansing. in: Journal of Modern History 70, No. 4, Harvard 1998, pp. 813-861.
  • Otto J. Pohl: Ethnic Cleansing in the USSR, 1937-1949. Santa Barbara / California 1999.
  • Pavel Polian : Against Their Will: The History and Geography of Forced Migrations in the USSR. Budapest 2004.
  • Gerhard Simon : Nationalism and Nationality Policy in the Soviet Union. From dictatorship to post-Stalinist society. Baden-Baden 1986, ISBN 3-7890-1249-1 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Записка Комиссии Политбюро ЦК КПСС по дополнительному изучению материалов, связиалов, связ,. Связалов, связ,. ( Memento of December 12, 2007 in the Internet Archive ). In: fontel.net, accessed on December 31, 2019. // Вестник Архива Президента Российской Федерации. 1995, No. 1, pp. 123-130; Хрестоматия по отечественной истории (1946–1995): Учебное пособие / Под ред. А. Ф. Киселёва, Э. М. Щагина. - М .: ВЛАДОС, 1996, pp. 310–323.
  2. ↑ П. М. Полян : Сталинские депортации. 1928-1953 . Депортации и этничность (=  Россия. XX век. Документы ). Международный фонд Демократия. Изд-во Материк, Мoscow 2005, ISBN 5-85646-143-6 , p. 5 .
  3. ^ The Volga Germans, Karachay, Kalmyks, Ingush, Chechens, Balkars and Crimean Tatars
  4. ↑ Депортация народов в СССР. Справка. In: RIA Novosti . November 14, 2009, accessed December 31, 2019 .
  5. ↑ Закон «О реабилитации репрессированных народов» (1991). Справка . РИА Новости. April 26, 2011. Archived from the original on March 21, 2013. Retrieved March 20, 2013.
  6. ↑ a b Н. Ф. Бугай: Защита состоялась, проблемы остаются… In: Приволжский научный вестник. 2014, № 7 (35), p. 123.
  7. ↑ a b Резолюция международного симпозиума "1937 год: корейцы Русскоязычные - прошлое, настоящее и будущее" приуроченный 80-летию принудительного переселения корейцев с Дальнего Востока в Центральную Азию
  8. ^ Andrew A. Gentes, The Mass Deportation of Poles to Siberia, 1863-1880. Springer, 2017, p. 6 f.
  9. ↑ Tatjana Bartsch, Jörg Meiner: Art - Context - History. Festival ceremony for Hubert Faensen on his 75th birthday. Lukas Verlag, 2003, p. 191 f.
  10. ↑ See e.g. B. Lynne Viola : The unknown Gulag. The lost world of Stalin's special settlements , Oxford a. a. 2007.
  11. ^ Andreas Kappeler: The history of Russia in the 16th and 17th centuries from the perspective of its regions. Otto Harrassowitz Verlag, 2004, p. 162.
  12. ↑ FHEW du Buy: The right to the home in the historical-political process. VZD-Verlag for Contemporary Documentation, 1974, p. 45.
  13. ↑ Johannes Hund: The Augustana Jubilee of 1830 in the context of church politics, theology and church life (= publications of the Institute for European History Mainz. Volume 242). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016, p. 525.
  14. ^ Brian Glyn Williams: The Crimean Tatars. The Diaspora and the Forging of a Nation. Leiden, Boston, Cologne 2001, pp. 139–171.
  15. ^ Austin Jersild: Orientalism and Empire. North Caucasus Mountain Peoples and the Georgian Frontier 1845-1917. London 2003, pp. 24-27.
  16. ↑ Irma Kreiten: A Colonial Experiment in cleansing: the Russian conquest of Western Caucasus 1856-65 . in: Journal of Genocide Research. 11: 2 (2009), pp. 213-241.
  17. ↑ Terry Martin , pp. 817-819.
  18. ↑ Jonathan Otto Pohl: Ethnic Cleansing in the USSR, 1937-1949. Greenwood, Westport CT / London 1999, ISBN 0-313-30921-3 , pp. 13-14.
  19. ^ Kerstin Armborst: Replacement from the Soviet Union. The emigration movement of Jews and Germans before 1987 (= work on the history of Eastern Europe. Volume 10). LIT Verlag, Münster 2001, p. 40.
  20. ^ Anna Kaminsky: Women in the GDR. Ch. Links Verlag, Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-86153-913-1 , p. 224, urn : nbn: de: 101: 1-201612014920 .
  21. ↑ The expulsion of the German population from the areas east of the Oder-Neisse. Edited by Theodor Schieder in connection with Adolf Diestelkamp , Rudolf Laun , Peter Rassow and Hans Rothfels . Edited by the Federal Ministry for Expellees, Refugees and War Victims . Volume I / 1: The expulsion of the German population from the areas east of the Oder-Neisse. Second section, chap. III: The forced deportation of East German civilians to the Soviet Union. Unchanged reprint of the 1954 edition, Bund der Vertrieben , Bonn ( zentrum-gegen-vertrieb.de [accessed on January 12, 2020]).
  22. ^ Jörg Morré: Special camp of the NKVD, Soviet internment camp in Brandenburg 1945–1950. (PDF; 781 kB) p. 9. In: Politik-bildung-brandenburg.de, accessed on January 12, 2020.
  23. ^ Rolf-Dieter Müller , Horst Boog , Jörg Echternkamp : The collapse of the German Reich 1945. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2008, p. 577.
  24. ^ Katrin Boeckh: Stalinism in the Ukraine. Reconstruction of the Soviet system after World War II. Otto Harrassowitz Verlag, 2007, p. 555 f.
  25. ↑ Jonathan Otto Pohl: Ethnic Cleansing in the USSR, 1937-1949. Greenwood Press, 1999, ISBN 0-313-30921-3 , p. 46.
  26. ↑ Jonathan Otto Pohl: Ethnic Cleansing in the USSR, 1937-1949. Greenwood Press, 1999, ISBN 0-313-30921-3 , pp. 97-99.
  27. ^ The Siberian Times reporter: 'Confusion, a lot of emotions inside. A bit of fear, concern and anticipation '. In: siberiantimes.com, July 22, 2012, accessed January 12, 2020.
  28. ↑ a b c d e f Cynthia J. Buckley, Blair A. Ruble, Erin Trouth Hofmann: Migration, Homeland, and Belonging in Eurasia. Woodrow Wilson Center Press / Johns Hopkins University Press, Washington, DC / Baltimore, Md. 2008, ISBN 978-0-8018-9075-8 , p. 207.
  29. ^ Norman Naimark: Stalin's Genocides (Human Rights and Crimes against Humanity). Princeton University Press, 2010, p. 131.
  30. ↑ А. В. Ястребов (Ed.): Репрессии народов СССР: последствия трагедии . Сборник материалов круглого стола. ГУСО ДДН, Самара 2007 ( samddn.ru ( Memento from March 27, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) [PDF; 247 kB ; accessed on January 2, 2020]).
  31. ↑ Закон РСФСР от 04/26/1991 № 1107-I «О реабилитации репрессированных народов».
  32. ↑ Мухарбек Дидигов: Закон "О реабилитации репрессированных народов" - торжество исторической справедливости . ingnews.ru. May 2, 2012. Archived from the original on March 21, 2013. Retrieved March 20, 2013.
  33. ↑ В Госдуму внесён законопроект о дополнительной помощи репрессированным народам . Взгляд.ru. September 24, 2012. Retrieved March 20, 2013.
  34. ↑ Terry Martin: The Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing. In: The Journal of Modern History . Volume 70, 1998, pp. 816 f., Doi: 10.1086 / 235168 ( harvard.edu [PDF; 318 kB]).
  35. ↑ P5_TA (2004) 0121: EU-Russia relations. Recommendation of the European Parliament to the Council on EU-Russia relations (2003/2230 (INI)) , accessed on January 2, 2020 , No. 15. In: Official Journal of the European Communities . CE, Volume 98, pp. 182-192.