Deportation of Nationalities

How it differed from the national operations

The two measures share a premise: that a group with ties across the border is a potential fifth column. The procedure and the outcome differ.

The national operations of the NKVD were formally criminal proceedings, with arrest, investigation and sentence. Most sentences were death, and the families were left where they were. Deportation is the mirror image: there was no trial, the object was not an individual but a nationality on a list, and men, women and children were moved together into a special-settlement regime that stripped them of freedom of movement. Death came not from shooting but from the transport and from hunger and disease in the first years of resettlement.

How it proceeded

The first full case was the removal of the Koreans of the Far East under the Sovnarkom and Central Committee resolution of 21 August 1937. More than 170,000 people were moved to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The stated reason was to block Japanese intelligence penetration; no individual charges were presented.

The scale grew with the war. A decree of 28 August 1941 abolished the Volga German autonomous republic and moved its population to Siberia and Kazakhstan. In 1943 and 1944 the peoples of territories that had been under German occupation were deported in turn on charges of collaboration.

• Karachays: Supreme Soviet decree of October 1943, deported in November
• Kalmyks: decrees of 27 and 28 December 1943, deported at the end of December (Operation Ulusy)
• Chechens and Ingush: deported from 23 February 1944 (Operation Chechevitsa), more than 400,000 people
• Balkars: March 1944
• Crimean Tatars: 18 May 1944, more than 180,000 people
• Meskhetian Turks: November 1944

Greeks, Bulgarians and Armenians of Crimea and the Caucasus and Kurds of the Black Sea coast were moved as well. On Pavel Polian's count ten nations underwent total deportation, and seven of them also lost their autonomous units.

Mortality and rehabilitation

Estimates of mortality vary. There is broad agreement on excess deaths in the hundreds of thousands when the transports and the first years of special settlement are taken together; for the Crimean Tatars even NKVD records show nearly 20 per cent dead within eighteen months.

Under Khrushchev in 1956 and 1957 the Chechens, Ingush, Karachays, Balkars and Kalmyks were rehabilitated, their autonomous republics restored and return permitted. For the Crimean Tatars, Meskhetian Turks and Volga Germans the charges were annulled but neither return nor autonomy was allowed. That unresolved status became a leading issue for late-Soviet national movements, and the mass return of the Crimean Tatars came only after 1989.

The legal characterisation is contested. The Russian law on the rehabilitation of repressed peoples (1991) defined these measures as repression directed against nations, and a number of scholars, along with resolutions of the European Parliament, class the Crimean Tatar case as genocide. Others argue for a different category on the ground that the decisions aimed at isolation rather than extermination.