The Rehabilitation of the Deported Peoples

Why only some nations returned

The restoration of 1957 did not cover every deported nation. The five that returned were populations of the Caucasus highlands and the Volga steppe, and their lands had for the most part not been resettled on a scale that could not be undone.

The three that did not return were different cases. Crimea had already received settlers from Russia and Ukraine, and in 1954 it had been transferred to the Ukrainian republic. The Meskhetian Turks' home lay on the border with Turkey. The territory of the Volga German republic had been absorbed into the neighbouring provinces. The criterion, in other words, was not the scale of the injury but the administrative and political cost of reversing it.

The demands that followed

The Crimean Tatar movement organised through petitions and mass signature campaigns from the 1960s; a decree of 5 September 1967 annulled the charge of treason while still barring return. Large-scale return began only after 1989. The Volga Germans obtained annulment in 1964 and the lifting of movement restrictions in 1972, but their republic was never restored, and from the late 1980s many emigrated to Germany.

The legal settlement

On 14 November 1989 the Supreme Soviet adopted a declaration calling the deportations unlawful and criminal, and on 26 April 1991 the Russian republic passed a law on the rehabilitation of repressed peoples that set out restitution, territorial restoration included. Carrying out the territorial clause promptly produced new conflict, as in the fighting over the Prigorodny district between Ingushetia and North Ossetia in 1992.

The case shows that rehabilitation does not end with a document. Reversing measures that had taken days to carry out took decades, and some of it was still unsettled when the Soviet Union itself was gone.