Evacuation in the Soviet Union

Last updated
The front lines of fighting between the Wehrmacht and the Soviets in the first six months after Operation Barbarossa Eastern Front 1941-06 to 1941-12.png
The front lines of fighting between the Wehrmacht and the Soviets in the first six months after Operation Barbarossa

Evacuation in the Soviet Union was the mass migration of western Soviet citizens and its industries eastward as a result of Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia launched by Nazi Germany in June 1941 as part of World War II. Nearly sixteen million Soviet civilians and over 1,500 large factories were moved to areas in the middle or eastern part of the country by the end of 1941. [1]

Contents

Along with the eastern exodus of civilians and industries, other unintended consequences of the German advance saw the execution of previously held western civilians by Soviet NKVD units, [2] [3] the removal of Lenin's body from Moscow to Tyumen, and the relocation of the Hermitage Museum collection to Sverdlovsk. Kuybyshev was chosen as the alternative capital of the Soviet Union if Moscow fell to the invading Germans. During the summer of 1943, everything was moved back to Moscow. Soviet towns and cities inland or in the east received the bulk of the new refugees and high-priority war factories, with locations such as the Siberian city of Novosibirsk receiving more than 140,000 refugees and many factories due to its location away from the front lines.

Despite early German successes in seizing control of large swaths of western USSR territory throughout 1943 and sketchy contingency plans by the Soviets for mobilization in the east, Soviet industries eventually outpaced the Germans in arms production; a total of 73,000 tanks, 82,000 aircraft and nearly 324,000 artillery pieces were distributed to the Red Army in their fight against the Axis powers by 1945. [4]

Government policy

Stalin and the Communist Party's Central Committee knew that Hitler would eventually turn on the Soviet Union; plans were made before Operation Barbarossa, and were launched to begin the evacuation as a precaution. Vasilii Prokhorovich Pronin, a Moscow party member on the city's evacuation committee, submitted a plan (rejected by Stalin) which would have removed about one million Muscovites. Not until the actual invasion did the party enact a real evacuation plan. [5]

Two days after the German invasion, on June 24, 1941, the Party created an evacuation council in an attempt to develop a procedure for the evacuation of Soviet citizens living near the Eastern Front. It identified cities on major train routes from which people could be removed and brought east. By September, three months after the start of the invasion, the evacuation council had 128 centers identified and operating. Major cities which received evacuated citizens (as well as other resources and industry) included Kirov, Iaroslavl, Gorky, Ufa, Sverdlovsk, Cheliabinsk, and Kuibyshev. [5]

Further measures were enacted by the party to help dispersed evacuees settle into life in their new location. Upon their arrival in a new city, they were instructed to contact local authorities so they could be accounted for. After this, they received certificates declaring their evacuee status which allowed them to receive lodging, food rations, and temporary employment. Evacuees were told that they were allowed to bring personal belongings with them as long as they did not hinder the ability of authorities to get them from the evacuated site to the refugee centre. Family members' belongings could not exceed 40 kilograms in weight. [5]

Another instruction from the Central Committee in August and September was for regional governments to build temporary housing for the newcomers if there was not enough in that region already. This preceded a measure, enacted in November, in which the party established an evacuation administration; this removed power from regional authorities and centralized it within the Communist Party. Party offices popped up throughout the evacuation cities and regions to better regulate and look after the dispersed evacuees. Their agents were in charge of ensuring that the evacuees were well taken care of in their new locations and their concerns (including housing, employment, food, health care and child care) were being met. By early 1942, still less than a year since the start of the invasion, the Moscow government had already spent three billion rubles on the evacuation. [5]

Deportation as part of evacuation

Crimea before the war, with the percentage of Tatars in each region Crimean Tatar 1939-num.png
Crimea before the war, with the percentage of Tatars in each region

A large number of Soviet civilians who were evacuated were classified as deportees instead of evacuees, particularly those whom the party feared would switch loyalties and fight on the German side. This trend, which began with a 1941 decree dealing with the removal of Volga Germans to Siberia and Kazakhstan, eventually grew to affect as many as 3.3 million people and 52 nationalities. The rest of the evacuation of supposedly-disloyal nationalities took place later in the war, between 1943 and 1944. [6] Because the Volga Germans were one of two deported nationalities (the other was the Crimean Tatars) who were never returned to their homeland after the war ended, modern historians interpret this as ethnic cleansing. [7]

The Crimean Tatars were an exception to the party rule which assumed that suspected nationalities would be pro-German; the Tatars were a Muslim minority, and the party suspected that they would choose religion over state. [8] Historians often trace the Soviet persecution and elimination of the Tatars in Crimea to the inter-war years, after the establishment of the Soviet state. It is reported that from 1917 to 1933, an estimated half of the Crimean Tatar population was eliminated by death or relocation. [9]

The deported nationalities generally came from regions near the Eastern Front, and were settled in Kazakhstan and Central Asia during the war. [7] In 1956, over a decade after the end of the World War II, all the groups except the Volga Germans and the Crimean Tatars were resettled in their native lands. Nikita Khrushchev absolved all blame from the Germans during his time leading the Communist Party. It is believed that the Volga Germans were not permitted to be resettled because the area had already been settled by other Soviet civilians since the end of the war. [6] The same belief is held about why the Crimean Tatars were not granted resettlement as a part of the 1956 order. The Crimean Tatar National Movement Organization, organized during perestroika in the 1980s, finally received word from the Soviet government that their people could return to Crimea. [10] After the collapse of the Soviet Union, about 250,000 Crimean Tatars returned and settled in Crimea (which was part of Ukraine until its 2014 annexation by the Russian Federation). Major wartime deportations were:

Evacuation of industry

The speed of the initial German advance threatened not only Soviet territories and factories (civilian and military), but the wholesale collapse of the nation's civilian economy. [12] Even with 1930s contingency plans and the formation in 1941 of evacuation committees such as the Council for Evacuation and the State Department Committee (GKO), most evacuations were handled by local Soviet organizations which dealt with industrial movements just ahead of impending German attacks.

Short-sighted preparation in the overall mobilization of the Western front led many in these councils to scour Moscow libraries for resources pertaining to evacuations during the First World War. [12] [4] Local committees eventually used a five-year-plan structure, with 3,000 agents controlling movement. Evacuation of industrial plants began in August 1941, and continued until the end of the year. [13] [12]

The GKO oversaw the relocation of more than 1,500 plants of military importance to the Urals, Siberia, and Central Asia. These areas offered safety to their inhabitants due to their isolated locations (out of reach of damaging Axis airstrikes), and they offered Soviet industries a massive quantity of resources for the factories and plants associated with the war effort. The Urals, in central Russia, developed an impressive array of iron and steel factories as well as agriculture and chemical plants. Siberian industries relied on the coal mines and copper deposits in the Kuznetzk coal basin to support the Soviet war machine. [14]

Some evacuations and the transfer of machine tools and skilled workers to "shadow factories" in the east began much earlier. The U.S. military attaché reported significant transfers of machinery and men from the Moscow area to the east in late 1940 and early 1941. The rapid growth in production early in 1942 suggests that the evacuation began in 1940. [13]

Evacuation of civilians

In 1941, the word "evacuation" (эвакуация, evakuatsiia) was a new word which was not used by everyone. "Refugee" (bezhenets) was far too familiar, however, given the country's history of war. During World War II, the word "refugee" was replaced by "evacuee"; the shift in wording indicated government resignation to the displacement of its citizens. Reasons for controlling the displaced population varied. [15] Despite some preference for considering themselves evacuees, the term referred to different individuals. Some were privileged elites, such as scientists, specialized workers, artists, writers and politicians, who were evacuated to the interior of the country. Other evacuees were viewed with suspicion. The evacuation process, despite best Soviet efforts, was far from organized; the state considered most of those heading east as suspicious. Since most were self-evacuating, they had not been assigned a location for displacement. Officials feared that disorder made it easy for deserters to flee. Evacuees who did not fall into the "privileged elite" category were seen as potentially contaminating the rest of the population, epidemically and ideologically. [16]

Since the beginning of the 20th century, Russia had been engulfed in wars. [17] If this war-bred society learned anything, it was the importance of mobilizing its industry and its civilian population. [18] The Russian Civil War and World War I gave the Bolsheviks experience which shaped their future evacuation strategies. [19] Preparation for future war began during the early 1920s, but it was not until the war scare of 1927 that the Soviets began developing defensive measures (including evacuation policies). These policies were not developed for humanitarian reasons, but as a way for the country to defend itself. They needed to avoid past issues such as hindered military movement, communicable disease, demoralization of units, and strains on the economy. [20] The Council of Labor and Defense and other Soviet administrations were in charge of drafting these policies. [21]

Evacuation card Ru-Kurlenkovy-evac-kartochka.jpg
Evacuation card

Operation Barbarossa displaced millions of Russians. The exact number is hard to pinpoint, since many evacuated themselves. [22] Some put the number at about sixteen and a half million. [23] One of the most welcome sights for refugees during the evacuations was Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, which eventually housed tens of thousands of refugees. Due to the large number of refugees, train stations were overcrowded and the distribution of train tickets could take days. [24] Even with the war drawing to an end, evacuees who were desperate to go back home were not granted permission. The repatriation policy was written around those not working in industry; those citizens lost residency in their city of origin, and were not part of the repatriation process. Anybody who tried to return without consent faced imprisonment. Despite many roadblocks and other issues, the Soviet Union evacuated millions of its citizens to safety in the rear. [25]

With a shortage of labor, the Commissariat of Justice and the Council of People's Commissars forced evacuees to work in enterprises, organizations and on collective farms to help the war effort. Those chosen for the labor force were those deemed socially unproductive. People who did not work for a set wage, such as artists, writers and artisans, were excluded from this new decree. Problems arose with worker motivation; some were unhappy with their wages when they returned to their homes, saying that the government paid almost as much in subsidies as they would earn from working. [26]

As winter approached and the war intensified around Moscow, the Moscow Oblast committee of the Communist Party and the executive committee of the Moscow Oblast Council found it very important to evacuate women and children from the suburbs. They asked the Evacuation Council of the Soviet Council of People's Commissariats to evacuate 300,000 people via the People's Commissariat of Transportation. [27] [28]

Jewish families

Internal passport issued to a Lithuanian Jew in 1941; the holder was later evacuated to Kuybyshev (Samara). 1941 Soviet occupational internal-passport issued in Latvia, shortly before the German invasion.jpg
Internal passport issued to a Lithuanian Jew in 1941; the holder was later evacuated to Kuybyshev (Samara).

The Soviet Union had added nearly 2,000,000 Jews to its population between 1939 and 1940 [29] from recently invaded Poland and other areas. After the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, the USSR and Germany took over large portions of Eastern Europe (including Poland, the Baltic region, and parts of Romania). The USSR occupied and annexed eastern Romania, including Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina (where an estimated 250,000 Jews lived at the time), but also the Hertsa region. [30] Another 120,000 Jews migrated into newly annexed Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina from the remainder of Romania. [30] By the late spring of 1941, as many as 415,000 Jews lived in Soviet-annexed Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina. Around 10,000 of these newly-Soviet Jews were deported to the interior for a variety of reasons, many ending up in the Red Army. [30] The creation of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee is evidence that the Soviet government made some effort to incorporate displaced Jewish citizens into Soviet society. [29] Many Jews living in Romania and Nazi-occupied Poland were reluctant to move to Russia, whose policies toward religion did not favor them. Many underestimated the dangers of the impending Nazi war machine, and were murdered; Jews who fled to Russia from Germany, however, said "better Stalin than Hitler". [29] During World War II, an estimated 700,000 to 3,000,000 Jews were killed in the Nazi-occupied territories of the Soviet Union by the Einsatzgruppen. [29]

When Germany invaded Russia in 1941, most Jewish citizens were murdered by the Nazis; some Jewish families, however, fled east into Russia. Although the Soviet Union did not keep records specifically related to Jews, an estimated 300,000 people were deported from the territories annexed from Romania into locations such as Kazakhstan; [30] it is unknown how many were Jewish. In February 1942, as many as 45,000 displaced Jewish citizens from these territories lived in Uzbekistan. [30] An estimated 80,000 to 85,000 Jews from these territories were moved to other Soviet states by early 1942. [30]

Stalin and the Politburo

During the first ten days of the invasion, Stalin invited Yevgenia "Zhenya" Zemlyanitsyn (the wife of Pavel Alliluyev  [ ru ], the brother of Stalin's second wife Nadezhda Alliluyeva) to the Kuntsevo Dacha. He asked her to take his daughter, Svetlana, and the other children to his dacha in Sochi (far from the fighting). She refused, and they never saw each other again. Svetlana and the other children instead travelled to Sochi with Anna Redens (Nadezhda's sister), where they remained until the front approached them. [31]

Stalin remained in Moscow during the invasion, uncertain whether the Politburo should stay to defend the city or evacuate. He read history books (including a biography of Mikhail Kutuzov, who had abandoned Moscow during the French invasion of Russia in 1812) and consulted those close to him. His housekeeper, Valentina (his mistress, according to historian Simon Sebag Montefiore), supported Moscow's defence when he asked for her opinion in front of other Politburo members, and Svetlana wrote a letter to him which could be interpreted as also encouraging defence. Stalin asked General Georgy Zhukov, who was in charge of the Russian army, whether Moscow could be held; Zhukov answered in the affirmative. [32]

At a meeting from which Stalin was absent, Lavrentiy Beria argued that they should be evacuated beyond the Volga. Georgy Malenkov agreed, but Vyacheslav Molotov disagreed. When Stalin called a meeting of Politburo members and generals at which the final decision was made, however, they all said that the city should be defended. [32] During the German approach to Moscow, the Politburo spent a great deal of time working underground in the Moscow Metro. [32]

Lenin's body

In the face of the German advance and amidst the evacuations of industry and civilians, the Politburo decided to evacuate the embalmed body of Vladimir Lenin from the mausoleum in Red Square where it had been on display since 1924. [33] [34] Lenin's body was removed in secret and sent far from the front lines, away from industrial areas threatened by German bombers. The city of Tyumen, about 2,500 kilometers east of Moscow, was the chosen destination. In June 1941, his body was encased in paraffin and placed in a wooden coffin which was nested inside a larger wooden crate. With the body were sent chemicals and implements necessary for its continued preservation. The crate was placed on a dedicated train, secured by a select group of Kremlin guards. The body, in a private car, was guarded around the clock. Additional soldiers were posted along the tracks and stations on the train's route east. [35]

On arrival in Tyumen, the body was housed in a dilapidated building on the campus of the Tyumen Agricultural Institute. Conditions necessitated additional chemicals and distilled water from Omsk, 600 kilometers east of Tyumen. [36] Lenin's body was returned to Moscow in April 1945. [37]

See also

Notes and references

  1. ↑ Manley, Rebecca, and Rebecca Manley. To the Tashkent Station: Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War. Cornell University Press, 2009, pp. 7-8.
  2. ↑ (in Polish) Encyklopedia PWN, Zbrodnie Sowickie W Polsce Archived 2006-05-21 at the Wayback Machine : After the outbreak of the German-Soviet war, in June 1941, thousands of prisoners have been murdered in mass executions in prisons (among others in Lviv and Berezwecz) and during the evacuation (so-called death marches)
  3. ↑ Gottfried Schramm; Jan T. Gross; Manfred Zeidler; et al. (1997). Bernd Wegner (ed.). From Peace to War: Germany, Soviet Russia and the World, 1939-1941. Berghahn Books. pp. 47–79. ISBN   1-57181-882-0.
  4. 1 2 Freeze, Gregory L. Russia, A History. Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 330.
  5. 1 2 3 4 Holmes, Larry E. Stalin's World War II Evacuations: Triumph and Troubles in Kirov. University of Kansas Press. ISBN   9780700623969.
  6. 1 2 McCauley, Martin (2003). Stalin and Stalinism, Third Edition. Pearson Education. p. 132.
  7. 1 2 "Deportation of Minorities". Seventeen Moments in Soviet History. 2015-06-18. Retrieved 2018-04-16.
  8. ↑ "Orthodox Patriarch Appointed". Seventeen Moments in Soviet History. 2015-06-18. Retrieved 2018-04-16.
  9. ↑ "The Crimean Tatars: A Primer". The New Republic. Retrieved 2018-04-18.
  10. ↑ "Institutional Development of the Crimean Tatar National Movement". www.iccrimea.org. Retrieved 2018-04-18.
  11. ↑ McCauley, Martin (2003). Stalin and Stalinism, Third Edition. Pearson Education. pp. 72–73.
  12. 1 2 3 Harrison, Mark. Soviet and East European Studies, Soviet Planning in Peace and War 1938-1945, Cambridge University Press, 1985, p.79
  13. 1 2 Dunn, Walter S. Jr., The Soviet Economy and the Red Army 1930-1945, Praeger Publishers, 1995, p.32
  14. ↑ Gregory L. Russia, A History, Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 330.
  15. ↑ Manley, Rebecca. To the Tashkent Station: Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War. Cornell University Press, 2009, pp. 7-8.
  16. ↑ 18. Manley, Rebecca. "The Perils of Displacement: The Soviet Evacuee between Refugee and Deportee." Contemporary European History, vol. 16, no. 04, November 2007, pp. 499-500, doi : 10.1017/s0960777307004146.
  17. ↑ Manley, Rebecca. To the Tashkent Station: Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War. Cornell University Press, 2009, p. 13.
  18. ↑ Geyer, Michael et al. "Ch 9/State of Expectation". Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared. Cambridge University Press, 2009, p. 362. War by any means.
  19. ↑ M. M. Gorinov, V. N. Parkhachev and A. N. Ponomarev, eds. Moskva prifrontovaia, 1941 1942: Arkhivnye dokumenty imaterialy. (Moscow: Izdatel stvo ob edineniia Mosgorarkhiv, 2001), p. 254.
  20. ↑ 5. Manley, Rebecca, and Rebecca Manley. "To the Tashkent Station Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War." To the Tashkent Station Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War, Cornell University Press, 2009, p.13
  21. ↑ 6. Manley, Rebecca, and Rebecca Manley. "To the Tashkent Station Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War." To the Tashkent Station Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War, Cornell University Press, 2009, p.13
  22. ↑ 15. Harrison, Mark. Soviet planning in peace and war, 1938-1945. Cambridge [U.K.]; Cambridge University Press, c1985. hdl : 2027/heb.05435.0001.001 . pg 71-72
  23. ↑ 16. Manley, Rebecca. "The Perils of Displacement: The Soviet Evacuee between Refugee and Deportee." Contemporary European History, vol. 16, no. 04, Nov. 2007, p. 495., doi : 10.1017/s0960777307004146.
  24. ↑ To the Tashkent Station. Evacuation and survival in the Soviet Union at war, by Rebecca Manley, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 2009
  25. ↑ 20. Manley, Rebecca. "The Perils of Displacement: The Soviet Evacuee between Refugee and Deportee." Contemporary European History, vol. 16, no. 04, Nov. 2007, p. 509., doi : 10.1017/s0960777307004146
  26. ↑ Manley, Rebecca. "The Perils of Displacement: The Soviet Evacuee between Refugee and Deportee". Contemporary European History, vol. 16, no. 04, November 2007, pp. 504-505., doi : 10.1017/s0960777307004146
  27. ↑ M. M. Gorinov, V. N. Parkhachev, and A. N. Ponomarev, eds. Moskva prifrontovaia, 1941 1942: Arkhivnye dokumenty i materialy. (Moscow: Izdatel stvo ob edineniia Mosgorarkhiv, 2001), p. 254.
  28. ↑ M. M. Gorinov, V. N. Parkhachev, and A. N. Ponomarev, eds. Moskva prifrontovaia, 1941 1942: Arkhivnye dokumenty i materialy. (Moscow: Izdatel stvo ob edineniia Mosgorarkhiv, 2001), p. 161.
  29. 1 2 3 4 Asher, Harvey (14 November 2003). "The Soviet Union, the Holocaust, and Auschwitz". Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History. 4 (4): 886–912. doi:10.1353/kri.2003.0049. S2CID   159670251.
  30. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Kaganovitch, A. (2013). "Estimating the Number of Jewish Refugees, Deportees, and Draftees from Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina in the Non-Occupied Soviet Territories". Holocaust and Genocide Studies. 27 (3): 464–482. doi:10.1093/hgs/dct047.
  31. ↑ Sebag Montefiore, Simon (2003). Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. Great Britain: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. p. 377. ISBN   978-1-4746-1481-8.
  32. 1 2 3 Sebag Montefiore, Simon (2003). Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. Great Britain: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. pp. 405–411. ISBN   978-1-4746-1481-8.
  33. ↑ Braithwaite, Rodric (2007). Moscow 1941 : a city and its people at war (Rev. and updated paperback ed.). London: Profile Books. p. 94. ISBN   9781861977748.
  34. ↑ Sebag Montefiore, Simon (2003). Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (Footnote). Great Britain: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. p. 377. ISBN   978-1-4746-1481-8.
  35. ↑ Braithwaite, Rodric (2007). Moscow 1941 : a city and its people at war (Rev. and updated paperback ed.). London: Profile Books. p. 94. ISBN   9781861977748.
  36. ↑ Braithwaite, Rodric (2007). Moscow 1941 : a city and its people at war (Rev. and updated paperback ed.). London: Profile Books. pp. 94–95. ISBN   9781861977748.
  37. ↑ Leick, Gwendolyn (2013). Tombs of the great leaders : a contemporary guide. London: Reaktion Books, Limited. p. 42. ISBN   9781780232003.

Related Research Articles

The German minority population in Russia, Ukraine, and the Soviet Union stemmed from several sources and arrived in several waves. Since the second half of the 19th century, as a consequence of the Russification policies and compulsory military service in the Russian Empire, large groups of Germans from Russia emigrated to the Americas, where they founded many towns. In 1914, an estimate put the remaining number of ethnic Germans living in the Russian Empire at 2,416,290. During World War II, ethnic Germans in the Soviet Union were persecuted and many were forcibly resettled to other regions such as Central Asia. In 1989, the Soviet Union declared to have an ethnic German population of roughly 2 million. By 2002, following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, many ethnic Germans had emigrated and the population fell by half to roughly 1 million. 597,212 Germans self-identified as such in the 2002 Russian census, making Germans the fifth-largest ethnic group in the Russian Federation. There were 353,441 Germans in Kazakhstan and 21,472 in Kyrgyzstan (1999); while 33,300 Germans lived in Ukraine.

Mass evacuation, forced displacement, expulsion, and deportation of millions of people took place across most countries involved in World War II. A number of these phenomena were categorised as violations of fundamental human values and norms by the Nuremberg Tribunal after the war ended. The mass movement of people – most of them refugees – had either been caused by the hostilities, or enforced by the former Axis and the Allied powers based on ideologies of race and ethnicity, culminating in the postwar border changes enacted by international settlements. The refugee crisis created across formerly occupied territories in World War II provided the context for much of the new international refugee and global human rights architecture existing today.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Population transfer in the Soviet Union</span> Transfer and deportation of people in the Soviet Union

From 1930 to 1952, the government of the Soviet Union, on the orders of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin under the direction of the NKVD official Lavrentiy Beria, forcibly transferred populations of various groups. These actions may be classified into the following broad categories: deportations of "anti-Soviet" categories of population, deportations of entire nationalities, labor force transfer, and organized migrations in opposite directions to fill ethnically cleansed territories. Dekulakization marked the first time that an entire class was deported, whereas the deportation of Soviet Koreans in 1937 marked the precedent of a specific ethnic deportation of an entire nationality.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Deportation of the Kalmyks</span> 1943 forced resettlement of the Kalmyk minority within the Soviet Union

The Kalmyk deportations of 1943, codename Operation Ulusy was the Soviet deportation of more than 93,000 people of Kalmyk nationality, and non-Kalmyk women with Kalmyk husbands, on 28–31 December 1943. Families and individuals were forcibly relocated in cattle wagons to special settlements for forced labor in Siberia. Kalmyk women married to non-Kalmyk men were exempted from the deportations. The government's official reason for the deportation was an accusation of Axis collaboration during World War II based on the approximately 5,000 Kalmyks who fought in the Nazi-affiliated Kalmykian Cavalry Corps. The government refused to acknowledge that more than 23,000 Kalmyks served in the Red Army and fought against Axis forces at the same time.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ivan Serov</span> Soviet military officer and head of KGB

Ivan Alexandrovich Serov was a Soviet intelligence officer who served as Chairman of the KGB from March 1954 to December 1958 and Director of the GRU from December 1958 to February 1963. Serov was NKVD Commissar of the Ukrainian SSR from 1939 to 1941 and Deputy Commissar of the NKVD under Lavrentiy Beria from 1941 to 1954.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Crimea in the Soviet Union</span> Status of Crimea in the Soviet Union

During the existence of the Soviet Union, different governments existed within the Crimean Peninsula. From 1921 to 1936, the government in the Crimea was known as the Crimean Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic and was an Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic within the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic; from 1936 to 1945, the name was slightly altered to the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Special settlements in the Soviet Union</span> Method of political repression in the Soviet Union

Special settlements in the Soviet Union were the result of population transfers and were performed in a series of operations organized according to social class or nationality of the deported. Resettling of "enemy classes" such as prosperous peasants and entire populations by ethnicity was a method of political repression in the Soviet Union, although separate from the Gulag system of penal labor. Involuntary settlement played a role in the colonization of virgin lands of the Soviet Union. This role was specifically mentioned in the first Soviet decrees about involuntary labor camps. Compared to the Gulag labor camps, the involuntary settlements had the appearance of "normal" settlements: people lived in families, and there was slightly more freedom of movement; however, that was permitted only within a small specified area. All settlers were overseen by the NKVD; once a month a person had to register at a local law enforcement office at a selsoviet in rural areas or at a militsiya department in urban settlements. As second-class citizens, deported peoples designated as "special settlers" were prohibited from holding a variety of jobs, returning to their region of origin, attending prestigious schools, and even joining the cosmonaut program. Due to this special settlements have been called by J. Otto Pohl a type of apartheid.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rehabilitation (Soviet)</span> Post-1953 Soviet exoneration of victims of repression

Rehabilitation was a term used in the context of the former Soviet Union and the post-Soviet states. Beginning after the death of Stalin in 1953, the government undertook the political and social restoration, or political rehabilitation, of persons who had been repressed and criminally prosecuted without due basis. It restored the person to the state of acquittal. In many cases, rehabilitation was posthumous, as thousands of victims had been executed or died in labor camps.

The Crimea Germans were ethnic German settlers who were invited to settle in the Crimea as part of the Ostsiedlung.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Soviet war crimes</span> War crimes and crimes against humanity committed by the Soviet Union

The war crimes and crimes against humanity which were perpetrated by the Soviet Union and its armed forces from 1919 to 1991 include acts which were committed by the Red Army as well as acts which were committed by the country's secret police, NKVD, including its Internal Troops. In many cases, these acts were committed upon the orders of the Soviet leaders Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin in pursuance of the early Soviet government's policy of Red Terror. In other instances they were committed without orders by Soviet troops against prisoners of war or civilians of countries that had been in armed conflict with the USSR, or they were committed during partisan warfare.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Islam in the Soviet Union</span> Overview of the countrys Muslim demographic (1922–1991)

After it was established on most of the territory of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union remained the world's largest country until it collapsed in 1991. It covered a large part of Eastern Europe while also spanning the entirety of the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Northern Asia. During this time, Islam was the country's second-largest religion; 90% of Muslims in the Soviet Union were adherents of Sunni Islam, with only around 10% adhering to Shia Islam. Excluding the Azerbaijan SSR, which had a Shia-majority population, all of the Muslim-majority Union Republics had Sunni-majority populations. In total, six Union Republics had Muslim-majority populations: the Azerbaijan SSR, the Kazakh SSR, the Kyrgyz SSR, the Tajik SSR, the Turkmen SSR, and the Uzbek SSR. There was also a large Muslim population across Volga–Ural and in the northern Caucasian regions of the Russian SFSR. Across Siberia, Muslims accounted for a significant proportion of the population, predominantly through the presence of Tatars. Many autonomous republics like the Karakalpak ASSR, the Chechen-Ingush ASSR, the Bashkir ASSR and others also had Muslim majorities.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Deportation of the Crimean Tatars</span> 1944 Soviet ethnic cleansing and genocide

The deportation of the Crimean Tatars or the Sürgünlik ('exile') was the ethnic cleansing and the cultural genocide of at least 191,044 Crimean Tatars which was carried out by the Soviet authorities from 18 to 20 May 1944, supervised by Lavrentiy Beria, chief of Soviet state security and the secret police, and ordered by the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. Within those three days, the NKVD used cattle trains to deport the Crimean Tatars, mostly women, children, and the elderly, even Communist Party members and Red Army members, to the Uzbek SSR, several thousand kilometres away. They constituted one of the several ethnicities which were subjected to Stalin's policy of population transfer in the Soviet Union.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Semyon Lipkin</span> Russian writer, poet and literary translator

Semyon Izrailevich Lipkin was a Russian writer, poet, and literary translator.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Evacuation of Polish civilians from the USSR in World War II</span>

Following the Soviet invasion of Poland at the onset of World War II, in accordance with the Nazi-Soviet Pact against Poland, the Soviet Union acquired more than half of the territory of the Second Polish Republic or about 201,000 square kilometres (78,000 sq mi) inhabited by more than 13,200,000 people. Within months, in order to de-Polonize annexed lands, the Soviet NKVD rounded up and deported between 320,000 and 1 million Polish nationals to the eastern parts of the USSR, the Urals, and Siberia. There were four waves of deportations of entire families with children, women, and elderly people aboard freight trains from 1940 until 1941. The second wave of deportations by the Soviet occupational forces across the Kresy macroregion, affected 300,000 to 330,000 Poles, sent primarily to Kazakhstan.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Azerbaijan in World War II</span>

The Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic entered World War II with the Soviet Union after the German declaration of war on June 22, 1941. Azerbaijan's oilfields were enticing to the Germans due to the USSR's heavy dependency on Caucasus oil – setting the scene for German campaigns attempting to capture and seize the oilfields in Baku during the Battle of the Caucasus. Azerbaijan’s oil was very decisive for Soviet victory. More than 600,000 people from Azerbaijan were conscripted to the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army during World War II from 1941 to 1945.

Soviet leaders and authorities officially condemned nationalism and proclaimed internationalism, including the right of nations and peoples to self-determination. The Soviet Union claimed to be supportive of self-determination and rights of many minorities and colonized peoples. However, it significantly marginalized people of certain ethnic groups designated as "enemies of the people", pushed their assimilation, and promoted chauvinistic Russian nationalistic and settler-colonialist activities in their lands. Whereas Vladimir Lenin had supported and implemented policies of korenization, Joseph Stalin reversed much of the previous policies, signing off on orders to deport and exile multiple ethnic-linguistic groups brandished as "traitors to the Fatherland", including the Balkars, Crimean Tatars, Chechens, Ingush, Karachays, Kalmyks, Koreans and Meskhetian Turks, with those, who survived the collective deportation to Siberia or Central Asia, were legally designated "special settlers", meaning that they were officially second-class citizens with few rights and were confined within small perimeters. After the death of Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev criticized the deportations based on ethnicity in a secret section of his report to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, describing them as "rude violations of the basic Leninist principles of the nationality policy of the Soviet state". Soon thereafter, in the mid- to late 1950s, some deported peoples were fully rehabilitated, having been allowed the full right of return, and their national republics were restored — except for the Koreans, Crimean Tatars, and Meskhetian Turks, who were not granted the right of return and were instead forced to stay in Central Asia. The government subsequently took a variety of measures to prevent such deported peoples from returning to their native villages, ranging from denying residence permits to people of certain ethnic groups in specific areas, referring to people by incorrect ethnonyms to minimize ties to their homeland, arresting protesters for requesting the right of return and spreading racist propaganda demonizing ethnic minorities.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yuri Osmanov</span> Soviet-Ukrainian scientist, human rights activist, and Crimean Tatar leader (1941–1993)

Yuri Bekirovich Osmanov was a scientist, engineer, Marxist–Leninist, and Crimean Tatar civil rights activist. He was one of the co-founders of the National Movement of Crimean Tatars, which sought full right of return of the Crimean Tatar people to their homeland and restoration of the Crimean ASSR.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Deportation of the Karachays</span> Forced transfer by the Soviet government of the entire Karachay population

The Deportation of the Karachays, codenamed Operation Seagull, was the Soviet government's forcible transfer of the entire Karachay population from the North Caucasus to Central Asia, mostly to the Kazakh and Kyrgyzstan SSRs, in November 1943, during World War II. The expulsion was ordered by NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria, after it was approved by Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin. Nearly 70,000 Karachays of the Caucasus were deported from their native land. The crime was a part of a Soviet forced settlement program and population transfer that affected several million members of non-Russian Soviet ethnic minorities between the 1930s and the 1950s.

Decree No. 493 "On citizens of Tatar nationality, formerly living in the Crimea" was issued by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet on 5 September 1967 proclaming that "Citizens of Tatar nationality formerly living in the Crimea" [sic] were officially legally rehabilitated and had "taken root" in places of residence. For many years the government claimed that the decree "settled" the "Tatar problem", despite the fact that it did not restore the rights of Crimean Tatars and formally made clear that they were no longer recognized as a distinct ethnic group.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">German occupation of Crimea during World War II</span> 1941–1944 military occupation of the Crimean peninsula by Nazi Germany

During World War II, the Crimean Peninsula was subject to military administration by Nazi Germany following the success of the Crimean campaign. Officially part of Generalbezirk Krym-Taurien, an administrative division of Reichskommissariat Ukraine, Crimea proper never actually became part of the Generalbezirk, and was instead subordinate to a military administration. This administration was first headed by Erich von Manstein in his capacity as commander of the 11th Army and then by Paul Ludwig Ewald von Kleist as commander of Army Group A.

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.