Why did a state that promoted nations later deport them?

The short answer

• 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.

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.