Population transfer in the Soviet Union

Between about 1930 and 1952, many people were foribly moved elsewhere in the Soviet Union.  Joseph Stalin ordered these deportations. The NKVD; under Lavrenty Beria helped the deportations, along (or on their way). People were moved, mostly because they belonged to a specific ethnic group. The destinatons of the migration were often sparely populated areas in Siberia, and Central Asia. Many of them were moved to Gulags. It has been estimated that, in their entirety, internal forced migrations affected at least 6 million people. Of this total, 1.8 million kulaks were deported in 1930–31, 1.0 million peasants and ethnic minorities in 1932–39, whereas about 3.5 million ethnic minorities were further resettled during 1940–52.

Soviet archives documented 390,000 deaths during kulak forced resettlement and up to 400,000 deaths of people deported to forced settlements during the 1940s; however, Nicolas Werth places overall deaths closer to some 1 to 1.5 million perishing as a result of the deportations. Contemporary historians classify these deportations as a crime against humanity and ethnic persecution. Two of these cases with the highest mortality rates have been described as genocides–the deportation of the Crimean Tatars was declared as genocide by Ukraine and several other countries, whereas the deportation of the Chechens and Ingush was declared as genocide by the European Parliament, respectively. On 26 April 1991 the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic, under its chairman Boris Yeltsin, passed the law On the Rehabilitation of Repressed Peoples with Article 2 denouncing all mass deportations as "Stalin's policy of defamation and genocide."

The Soviet Union also practiced deportations in occupied territories, with over 50,000 perishing from the Baltic States and 300,000 to 360,000 perishing during the expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe due to Soviet deportation, massacres, and internment and labour camps.Vertreibung und Vertreibungsverbrechen 1945–1978. Bericht des Bundesarchivs vom 28 Mai 1974. Archivalien und ausgewälte Erlebenisberichte, Bonn 1989, pp. 40–41, 46–47, 51–53

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Category:Deportations
Category:Forced migration
Category:History of the Soviet Union