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Who was deported and where?Deportations in the USSR were carried out on a huge scale. According to documents from the NKVD (the forerunner of the KGB), in the 1930-1950s about 3.5 million people were forced to leave their places of origin. In total, more than 40 ethnic groups were resettled. Deportations mainly took place from border areas into remote regions deep inside the country.
The first deportation targeted the Poles. In 1936, some 35,000 "politically unreliable elements" from the former Polish territories in western Ukraine were resettled to Kazakhstan. In 1939-41, over 200,000 more Poles were deported to the Far North, to Siberia and Kazakhstan.
People from other border territories were also forcibly resettled: in 1937, more than 171,000 ethnic Koreans were deported from the eastern borders of the USSR to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.
Starting in 1937, Stalin pursued a systematic policy of resettling ethnic Germans. With the outbreak of World War II, Germans became outcasts everywhere in the USSR. Many were denounced as spies and sent to the Gulag. By the end of 1941, about 800,000 ethnic Germans had been resettled inside the country, while for the duration of the war, the figure reached more than one million people. They were deported to Siberia, the Urals, Altai, and almost half a million Germans ended up in Kazakhstan.
The Soviet authorities also resettled people during the war. A huge number of people were deported from territories liberated from German occupation. Many peoples of the North Caucasus were evicted from their native land under the pretext of espionage and collaboration with the Germans: tens and hundreds of thousands of Karachays, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, and Kabardians were deported to Siberia and Central Asia. Similarly, Kalmyks, as well as some 200,000 Crimean Tatars, were accused of aiding the Germans and resettled. Smaller ethnic groups were also targeted, including Meskhetian Turks, Kurds, Greeks and others.
The inhabitants of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania resisted incorporation into the USSR - anti-Soviet militants operated in the Baltics - which gave the Soviet government an excuse to be particularly tough in deportation campaigns targeting the residents of the Baltic republics.
How were deportations conducted?People's Commissar of Internal Affairs, Lavrentiy Beria, personally signed detailed instructions for how deportations were to be organized. Furthermore, the instructions were different for each ethnic group. The deportations were carried out by local party bodies and Chekists dispatched to the relevant regions. They compiled lists of people to be deported, as well as prepared transport for taking them and their belongings to railway stations.
People were given very little time to pack. They were allowed to take their personal belongings, small household items and money. All in all, a family's baggage allowance could not exceed a ton. In effect, people could take only the most essential things.
Usually, each ethnic group was allocated several trains, with guards and medical personnel. Under escort, people were put into railway carriages, which were filled to capacity, and taken to their destination. According to the instructions, during the journey people were given bread and a cooked meal once a day.
A separate instruction set out in detail how life was to be organized in special settlements where the deported peoples were to live. Able-bodied settlers were involved in the construction of barracks, and later of more permanent residential buildings, schools and hospitals. Farming and cattle breeding could only be done in collective farms. Control and administrative functions were performed by NKVD officers. At first, settlers' life was very hard, food was scarce, and people suffered from diseases.
Deported peoples were forbidden from leaving their new place of residence on pain of imprisonment in the Gulag. Only after Stalin's death was the ban lifted and they were free to travel anywhere in the Soviet Union. In 1991, these actions of the Soviet authorities were declared unlawful and criminal, and - in relation to some ethnic groups - even recognized as genocide.
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