ON THIS DAY · 29 DECEMBER 1943

Deportation of the Kalmyks

28–29 Dec 1943 — In Operation Ulusy the NKVD deported about 93,000 Kalmyks to Siberia and abolished their republic, accusing the whole people of collaboration during the German occupation. Kalmyks serving in the Red Army were later withdrawn from the front and sent after them.

The moment in context

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.

From Stalin’s ethnic deportations, chapter 7 of The Soviet Union under Stalin, 1924–1953 (1944).

The place: Deportation of the Kalmyks — map and full story →

The atlas that shows it

The Soviet Union under Stalin, 1924–1953

12 CHAPTERS · AN INTERACTIVE SITUATION MAP