Stalin’s Soviet Union · CHAPTER 7 ·
Stalin’s ethnic deportations
Chapter 7 of The Soviet Union under Stalin, 1924–1953: “Nations and Deportations”
Between 1937 and 1944 Stalin’s state deported entire peoples to Kazakhstan, Central Asia and Siberia, reversing the 1920s policy of promoting national minorities. The Koreans of the Far East went first in 1937, followed by the Volga Germans, Karachays, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars and Crimean Tatars.
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The map above is the world of The Soviet Union, May 1944 — Chechens, Ingush and Crimean Tatars deported.
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BRIEF EXPLANATION — THE ESSENTIAL ARGUMENT
Stalin’s state came to treat whole nations as suspects, and between 1937 and 1944 it deported entire peoples from their homelands to Kazakhstan, Central Asia and Siberia. This reversed the policy of the 1920s, when the Soviet Union had promoted its national minorities through korenizatsiia (“taking root”), a policy of schools, newspapers and officials in local languages that worked something like a modern affirmative-action programme. In the 1930s fear of war turned that logic around, so that a nationality with a homeland or relatives abroad came to look like a security risk. In 1937 the Koreans of the Far East became the first whole people to be deported. The arrows on the map trace them and the nations that followed: the Volga Germans in 1941, the Karachays and Kalmyks in 1943, and the Chechens, Ingush, Balkars and Crimean Tatars in 1944. A state that had sorted its citizens by nation could now remove them by nation.
Two waves of deportation followed two kinds of fear. The Nazi–Soviet Pact of August 1939, a non-aggression treaty in which Hitler and Stalin secretly divided Eastern Europe between them, gave the Soviet Union eastern Poland, the Baltic states and Bessarabia (today Moldova). By May 1944, the moment this map shows, most of them were still under German occupation, the tan zone in the west. The NKVD, the political police and forerunner of the KGB, which also ran the camps, removed hundreds of thousands of their people as “anti-Soviet elements”. During the war the state accused entire peoples of collaborating with the German invaders, though many of their men were serving in the Red Army, the Soviet armed forces, and the NKVD moved them east within days. The pale hatching marks the homelands abolished afterwards. Around 3 million people were deported as members of suspect nations, and tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands died in transit and in the first years of exile. The deportations show a state that had learned to punish people for who they were as well as for what they had done.
The full story
The shift from promoting nations to deporting them began on the borders, where nationality and foreign policy met. Soviet planners worried that minorities with homelands abroad, such as Poles, Germans, Finns and Koreans, could serve an enemy in war. In 1936 tens of thousands of Poles and Germans were moved from Ukraine’s western border zone to Kazakhstan. In August 1937 a decree ordered the removal of all Koreans from the Far East, where Japan threatened from Manchuria, and in September and October about 172,000 people were loaded onto trains for Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, as the longest arrow on the map shows. The “national operations” of the Great Terror, the mass arrests and shootings of 1937–38, targeted minorities suspected of spying for a foreign state, and the Polish operation alone shot about 111,000 people. A whole people could now be treated as guilty by association, and that logic drove every deportation that followed.
The Nazi–Soviet Pact of August 1939, the non-aggression treaty whose secret protocol divided Eastern Europe between Hitler and Stalin, brought new territories and new deportations, and on this 1944 map those lands lie inside the tan zone the Germans still held. The Red Army, the Soviet armed forces, entered eastern Poland on 17 September 1939, the Baltic states were occupied in June 1940 and annexed in August after staged elections, and Romania was forced to cede Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. To secure these lands, the NKVD, the political police and a forerunner of the KGB, deported Polish settlers, officials and their families in four waves in 1940–41. On the night of 14 June 1941 it deported more than 40,000 people from the Baltic republics, most of them women, children and the elderly. In the spring of 1940 the NKVD also shot about 22,000 captured Polish officers and officials at Katyn and other sites, a crime the Road to War atlas marks. Annexation was presented as liberation, but it arrived with mass removals of anyone who might resist.
The war turned suspicion into collective punishment. In August 1941, as German armies advanced, a decree accused the Volga Germans of hiding saboteurs and abolished their republic; about 440,000 were deported from the Volga, and by 1942 some 900,000 Soviet Germans had been moved east. After the Red Army retook the North Caucasus and Crimea in 1943–44, the NKVD deported the Karachays, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars and Crimean Tatars, accusing whole peoples of collaboration that only some individuals had committed. Operation Lentil moved about 496,000 Chechens and Ingush in a week from 23 February 1944, and about 191,000 Crimean Tatars followed in May. The deportees lived as “special settlers”, confined to their assigned villages much as prisoners on parole are confined to a district, and the hatched homelands on the map were renamed and resettled. Punishing a nation for the acts of some of its members turned citizenship itself into a matter of ancestry.
DEEP EXPLANATION — EVIDENCE & INTERPRETATION
From “affirmative action” to “enemy nations”
The same habit of classifying citizens by nation that built national cultures in the 1920s made whole nations easy to deport in the 1940s, as Terry Martin argues in The Affirmative Action Empire (2001). In the 1920s the party created thousands of national territories, from union republics down to national villages, and promoted local languages and officials, believing this would win non-Russian peoples to socialism. Martin shows that the records created for promotion became lists for removal when suspicion grew. Nationalities with homelands across the border, which he calls “diaspora nationalities”, were seen as potential agents of foreign states. From 1934–36 Poles, Germans, Finns and Koreans were removed from border zones, and in 1937–38 they were shot and deported in national operations that turned them into what Martin calls “enemy nations”. Other historians, such as Francine Hirsch, stress that Soviet ethnographers and planners saw nations as stages of development to be managed. Either way, the deportations of the war grew from categories the regime itself had created and recorded in every internal passport.
Counting the deported and the dead
The NKVD counted deportees carefully, so the numbers moved are well documented, while deaths are harder to establish. Pavel Polian’s Against Their Will (2004) counts about 3 million people deported as members of suspect nationalities between 1936 and 1952, within some 6 million forced migrants of all kinds. The NKVD’s own records show about 172,000 Koreans in 1937, roughly 900,000 Germans by 1942, about 69,000 Karachays, 93,000 Kalmyks, 496,000 Chechens and Ingush, 37,000 Balkars and 191,000 Crimean Tatars in 1943–44. Mortality in transit and in the first years of exile was very high, because deportees arrived in winter to settlements without housing or food. NKVD-based figures suggest that a fifth to a quarter of Crimean Tatars died within two years, and that between 100,000 and 200,000 Chechens and Ingush died, at least a quarter of those deported. Community surveys of Crimean Tatars after their return put their losses closer to half. The gap reflects incomplete registration and the different years counted, and the honest answer is a range.
Collaboration and collective guilt
The regime justified the wartime deportations by citing collaboration, and historians accept that some members of these peoples did cooperate with the Germans. Some Crimean Tatars served in German-organised self-defence battalions, a Kalmyk cavalry corps fought for the Germans, and an armed insurgency against Soviet rule operated in Chechnya in 1940–44. Yet the same peoples sent tens of thousands of men to the Red Army, and the deportations fell on soldiers’ families, party members and Red Army veterans alike; Kalmyk and Chechen soldiers were later withdrawn from the front and sent after their relatives. Other nationalities, including Russians and Ukrainians, produced far larger numbers of collaborators without being deported. Norman Naimark, in Stalin’s Genocides (2010), argues that the deportation of the Chechens and Ingush meets the definition of genocide, and the European Parliament recognised it as such in 2004; Ukraine’s parliament recognised the deportation of the Crimean Tatars as genocide in 2015. Others prefer the term ethnic cleansing, meaning the forced removal of a people from a territory. All agree that the state assigned guilt by nationality alone, which is what makes these deportations a distinct crime.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
Fear of foreign enemies on the borders. The Soviet Union faced Japan in Manchuria from 1931 and Nazi Germany in the west from 1933, and in 1936 the two powers signed the Anti-Comintern Pact against communism. Planners assumed that minorities with kin across the border, Koreans near Japanese-ruled Korea and Poles and Germans near Poland, would side with an invader. Clearing border zones of suspect nationalities seemed a reasonable security measure to leaders who already saw enemies everywhere, and it became the first step towards deporting whole peoples.
The habit of classifying people by nationality. Soviet policy had registered every citizen’s nationality since the 1920s, and from 1932 it was written into internal passports on a line of its own; children of mixed marriages had to choose one parent’s nationality at sixteen. The state therefore knew who was Korean, German or Chechen, which made deporting a whole people an administrative task the NKVD could organise in days. The categories created to promote national cultures became tools for removing nations.
The Nazi–Soviet Pact brought hostile new lands. The Pact of August 1939 gave the Soviet Union eastern Poland, the Baltic states and Bessarabia, populations that had not lived under Soviet rule and included officers, officials, landowners and priests, as well as the settlers Poland had placed on the land after 1921. The NKVD treated these groups as anti-Soviet by definition. Deporting them in 1940–41 was meant to secure the new borders before the war that both Stalin and Hitler expected.
War made collective punishment seem justified. The German invasion of 1941 and the occupation of the North Caucasus and Crimea in 1942–43 gave Stalin’s suspicion a pretext. Real cases of collaboration were generalised to whole peoples, and wartime urgency silenced objections. The NKVD, experienced in mass deportations, could move hundreds of thousands of people in days, as Operation Lentil in February 1944 showed. No court examined anyone’s individual guilt, because guilt had been assigned to the nation as a whole.
THE TURNING POINT
The Korean deportation, September 1937. The removal of about 172,000 Koreans from the Far East in the autumn of 1937 is the hinge of the turn from promoting nations to deporting them. It was the first time the Soviet state deported an entire nationality, including party members and Red Army soldiers, purely for who they were. Earlier deportations had targeted classes, such as kulaks, or border residents. The Korean operation established the method later used against the Volga Germans, Chechens and Crimean Tatars: a decree naming a people, an NKVD timetable, sealed trains and special settlements in Central Asia. Once a nation could be deported, any nation could be.
What it changed
Homelands abolished and resettled. The Volga German, Kalmyk and Chechen-Ingush republics and the Karachay region were abolished and their territory divided among neighbours, and the Crimean republic was downgraded to a province in 1945. Russian and Ukrainian settlers moved into emptied villages, and place names were changed, as the pale hatching on the map recalls. Because their land had been divided among neighbours, the borders of these homelands are still disputed in the Caucasus.
Life as special settlers. Deported peoples lived under a special-settlement regime that forbade them to leave their villages without permission, required regular registration and, from 1948, threatened twenty years of hard labour for escape. Their children could not study at universities in many fields, and their national schools and newspapers disappeared. Restrictions were lifted only from 1955–56, so a generation of children grew up as suspects in their own country.
Rehabilitation, partial and late. Rehabilitation came late and unequally for the deported peoples. In 1957 the Chechens, Ingush, Kalmyks, Karachays and Balkars were allowed to return and their autonomies were restored. The Volga Germans were cleared of collective guilt in 1964 but never regained their republic, and the Crimean Tatars were allowed home only in 1989. The unequal treatment shaped relations between these peoples and the Soviet and post-Soviet states for decades.
A model for postwar repression. The methods tested on whole peoples were used again after 1945 against the populations of the annexed borderlands. The NKVD and its successor deported about 76,000 people from western Ukraine in October 1947 and about 95,000 from the Baltic states in March 1949 to deprive armed resistance of support. These operations broke the armed resistance by removing the villages that fed it.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — Why did a state that promoted national cultures in the 1920s deport whole nations in the 1940s?
The contradiction is smaller than it looks, because both policies rested on the same assumption that nationality was a fixed, recorded identity that the state should manage. In the 1920s the regime believed that promoting national languages and officials would bind minorities to socialism. From the early 1930s, as war with Japan and Germany loomed, the same records identified diaspora nationalities as potential fifth columns, and the Terror’s national operations of 1937–38 treated them as enemies. The war then provided both opportunity and pretext, as real collaboration by some individuals was used to condemn whole peoples. Historians weigh these factors differently: Terry Martin stresses the logic of the nationalities system, Naimark stresses Stalin’s willingness to destroy peoples, and others emphasise wartime security panic. A strong answer shows how a policy of classification made a policy of deportation possible. The transferable lesson is that states which sort citizens by ethnicity create tools that can be turned against them when fear rises.
An interesting fact
Some of the deported Koreans carried their culture with them and kept it alive in exile. The Korean theatre founded in Vladivostok in 1932 was moved with its actors to Kzyl-Orda in Kazakhstan in 1937, and it still performs in Almaty today as the State Korean Theatre of Musical Comedy, one of the oldest Korean-language theatres anywhere outside Korea. The Korean newspaper Lenin Kichi (“Lenin’s Banner”) was also published in Kazakhstan for decades. The descendants of the deportees, who call themselves Koryo-saram, number several hundred thousand across Central Asia and Russia.
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