The Deported

21 Aug 1937

One order, one people. The resolution of 21 August 1937, signed by Molotov and Stalin, gave its reason as preventing “the penetration of Japanese espionage” and ordered every Korean in the border districts of the Far East moved to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan by 1 January 1938. It also said Koreans who wished to go abroad should not be obstructed, and added 3,000 border troops; ADC Memorial writes that escape abroad was impossible because the border was so strongly guarded. A second decree on 28 September covered the rest of the Far East, and Ezhov reported 171,781 people moved. ADC, citing the demographer Dalkhat Ediev, counts 28,200 dead, a birth deficit of 17,300 and 45,500 lost in all, 26.4 percent of those deported.

Dec 1937

The steppe was already a place of exile. The first people forcibly sent to Akmola in northern Kazakhstan, the historian Michaela Pohl writes, were the victims of dekulakization and collectivization in 1929-31, then Poles and Koreans in 1936-37. Qalam, a Kazakhstani outlet, and the Kazakhstan history portal both say local Kazakhs shared scarce food with the arrivals. In Uzbekistan, J. Otto Pohl writes, the Uzbeks met the Crimean Tatars with hostility and in some cases stoned them.

6 Jan 1938

Wives of “traitors”. Not a deported people but the same machinery: in December 1937 a camp was built in a village near today’s Astana, and from 6 January 1938 it held women whose husbands had been arrested. Its official name was the Akmola special unit of the Karaganda camp system of the NKVD; the prisoners coined “ALZHIR”. Accounts differ: one says more than 18,000 women were arrested under the NKVD decree and about 8,000 held here, another that over 18,000 were sent here and about 8,000 served a full sentence.

28 Aug 1941

28 August 1941. The Party’s Central Committee and the Council of People’s Commissars decided on 26 August to deport the Volga Germans; the Presidium decree of the 28th, signed by Kalinin and Gorkin, gave the reason. As J. Otto Pohl translates it, military authorities reported “thousands and tens of thousands of diversionists and spies” among them, and to avoid bloodshed the whole German population would be resettled, in Novosibirsk, Omsk, Altai and Kazakhstan. The U.S. ambassador wrote on 9 September that he had “no means of judging” how far disaffection existed, that the decree had not yet appeared in the Soviet press, and that thousands of innocent people would suffer; Pohl says two Volga newspapers printed it on 30 August.

What the Germans lost. NKVD records, as the historian Eric Schmaltz gives them, show 438,000 to 444,000 Germans removed from the Volga republic and two neighbouring provinces by 20 September 1941. The Labor Army then drafted German men and women: 120,000 ordered in January 1942, 123,500 more, 52,700 of them women, in October. For all Soviet Germans, Schmaltz cites Samuel Sinner’s calculation of 200,000 to 300,000 dead from deportation and the Labor Army in 1941-49; the NKVD’s own Kazakhstan count was 19,501, or 8.9 percent of the Germans there. They were released from special settlement in December 1955 with no right to go home, partly rehabilitated in 1964, and since the early 1990s more than two million have left for Germany.

2 Nov 1943

2 November 1943. Arrests began at 02:00 and over three days more than 68,000 Karachays were gathered, the Norwegian Helsinki Committee writes. It counts 68,614 deported and estimates 13,000 to 19,000 dead; Soviet statisticians recorded 56,869 in exile by 1948. Caucasian Knot, reporting on the same anniversary, gives 79,000 deported and more than 43,000 dead; the sources here do not explain the gap. Khrushchev put the deportation at the end of 1943, when the front had turned, and said it was not dictated by military considerations; the Illinois project’s essay says the peoples were charged collectively with treason for collaborating with the German occupiers.

28 Dec 1943

27 December 1943. The Presidium abolished the Kalmyk republic on the 27th, and the next day all Kalmyks were given twelve hours to pack. They were sent to Siberian provinces including Omsk, Altai and Novosibirsk: about 93,000 people, of whom about 1,400 died in transit, according to the Norwegian Helsinki Committee, which says 13,000 were estimated dead by early 1945, the official Soviet rate was 17 percent and unofficial sources give more. Beria counted 650,000 Chechens, Ingush, Kalmyks and Karachays together for the three operations. A Kalmyk pensioner says almost a third of the nation was lost.

23 Feb 1944

23 February 1944. Beria approved the instructions on 29 January, and a State Defense Committee decree of 31 January, which did not name the Chechens or Ingush, provided for 400,000 special settlers in Kazakhstan. The operation began at dawn, and by 11 a.m. Stalin had Beria’s first report: 94,741 people removed from their villages. Beria counted the force at 19,000 special troops plus up to 100,000 NKVD officers and soldiers. Saktaganova and the Illinois project both write that those who resisted, or could not be moved, were killed; Beria’s July report counts 602,193 people moved from the North Caucasus, 496,460 of them Chechens and Ingush, and 477,809 settled in Kazakhstan.

8 Mar 1944

8 March 1944. Beria arrived in Nalchik on 2 March and the deportation began six days later, the Norwegian Helsinki Committee writes: 37,713 Balkars loaded onto 14 trains for Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. It says over 500 died in transport and estimates 7,600 died in all; Soviet figures, it says, indicate almost 20 percent of the group perished in exile. Beria had called the Balkar operation “forthcoming” in his report of 7 March; Khrushchev dated it to April, one of several places where his dates differ from the others. They were allowed back in 1957.

The charge, and what became of it. The Presidium decree of 7 March 1944, marked not for publication, came two weeks after the Chechen and Ingush operation began and gave wartime betrayal as its ground. The NKVD’s report of 5 September 1944 added armed risings in 1930 and 1932 and, between July 1941 and April 1942, more than 1,500 desertions from the Red Army and labor battalions. Khrushchev told the Party in 1956 that making whole nations answer for “the hostile acts of individual persons” was indefensible; Saktaganova writes that gangs, sabotage and some collaboration did exist but were not more widespread there than elsewhere. In 1957, the Illinois essay says, the government revoked the accusation of Nazi collusion.

Counting the dead. For the Chechens and Ingush the figures run from the NKVD’s 1,361 dead in transit (0.27 percent) to D. Khodzhaev’s 200,000 Chechens and 30,000 Ingush dead, which Saktaganova says it is difficult to judge; Michaela Pohl notes the transit tallies are undercounts. An NKVD report on excess deaths in Kazakhstan puts 1944-49 at 125,564 of 760,642 special settlers (16.5 percent) and 101,036 (23.3 percent) for Chechens, Ingush, Balkars and Karachays together, in Kazakhstan only. From arrivals and the 1949 census Pohl estimates about 23,700 dead in Akmola: about 35 percent of the Chechens and Ingush and 49 percent of the Balkars there.

Exile. Beria reported 429 special commandants watching the settlers, and the regime, dating from the 1929-31 campaign against the kulaks, was codified for the deported peoples on 8 January 1945. A decree of 26 November 1948 made the exile permanent, with 20 years of hard labor for leaving. Michaela Pohl sets two readings side by side: the Russian historian Nikolai Bugai, who, “without minimizing in any way the brutality and injustice of deportation itself”, argues the settlers were mobilized into the labor force and improved their position, and J. Otto Pohl, who calls the deportations “acts of ethnically motivated murder”. A Chechen deportee, Muskhadzhi Khaidiev, said the Soviet government “did not send us to Kazakstan to live, but to die”.

18 May 1944

11 May 1944. A top-secret decree of the State Defense Committee, signed by Stalin, ordered “all Tatars” banished from Crimea to Uzbekistan and put Beria in charge. It allowed each family 500 kilograms of food; J. Otto Pohl writes that families had 15 to 20 minutes and most took nothing near that. The NKVD counted 180,014 deported by 20 May and revised it to 183,155 on 4 July; Pohl totals 194,155 removed with those taken for labor (2000), and 191,044 (2024). A resolution the next day diverted 31,551 to the Urals and other regions of Russia.

The accusation. Beria’s report of 10 May 1944 claimed that over 20,000 Crimean Tatars had deserted the Red Army in 1941 and joined the Germans; the decree repeated the charge without the numbers. J. Otto Pohl, who builds on Soviet archive records, writes that close to 20,000 Crimean Tatars served in German-organized self-defense battalions, formed from prisoners of war, and that an equally large number fought in the Red Army, eight winning the Hero of the Soviet Union. Crimean Tatars were also the second largest group in the partisans, and most of those left in Crimea in 1944 were women and children. The Presidium rescinded the charge of treason in 1967 but kept the ban on returning.

The Crimean count. The figures measure different things. NKVD records show 13,592 dead in Uzbekistan by 1 January 1945, 9.1 percent of those sent there, and J. Otto Pohl adds 1945 to reach 17.8 percent of those exiled to Uzbekistan by January 1946. An MVD report of April 1953 gives 44,887 dead, 19.6 percent, for Crimean Tatars, Greeks, Armenians and Bulgarians together to mid-1948. Michael Rywkin, adjusting for natural deaths, calculates 42,000 Crimean Tatar deaths by May 1949; activists cite 100,000, 46 percent of the 1939 population. In transit the NKVD recorded 191 deaths; Pohl says over 6,000 vanished, and Brian Williams and Rywkin give 7,000 and 7,900.

14 Nov 1944

14 November 1944. Emil Payin writes that within 24 hours over 100,000 Meskhetian Turks were forced from their homes and that 17,000 died on the way and in the first four months. They were evicted, he says, under the pretense of “fortifying strategically vulnerable borders”, and the supposition at the time was that the Soviet Union planned to attack Turkey. The Akhaltsikh district became a frontier zone they could not visit; the restrictions were lifted in 1989 but Georgian officials objected. In June 1989 in the Fergana Valley, he reports, 97 died by official and probably low figures, over 1,000 were wounded and 752 houses burned, and Uzbekistan’s Turks fell from about 100,000 to under 20,000. His 1992 article cannot say what followed.

A reason from abroad? J. Otto Pohl’s 2000 paper reads the deportations of peoples with ties to Turkey as “in preparation for” Soviet pressure on Turkey. He dates that pressure from March 1945, when Molotov said the neutrality treaty would not be renewed, and on 7 July 1945 Molotov asked for bases in the Straits and the cession of Kars and Ardahan. The deportations came in 1943-44, before any of it, and Pohl writes the real reason “appears to be” Soviet foreign policy; the decrees give collaboration. His 2024 article, built on Soviet archives, does not repeat the argument. It is his reading, and the chapter shows it as his.

25 Feb 1956

25 February 1956. Khrushchev told the Twentieth Congress that the mass deportations “of entire nations” were acts “whose initiator was Stalin”, and named the Karachays, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush and Balkars, with dates that differ from the others’. He added that Ukrainians “avoided meeting this fate only because there were too many of them”. His passage does not name the Koreans, the Volga Germans, the Crimean Tatars or the Meskhetian Turks; Schmaltz notes that he “made no mention” of the Germans.

16 Jul 1956

Free, but not home. The Crimean Tatars were freed on 28 April 1956 together with Balkars, Turks, Kurds and Hemshils, and barred from returning; Chechens, Ingush and Karachays were released on 16 July and told to sign that they knew return was forbidden. They did not sign quietly: Michaela Pohl writes that leaders organized against it, more than 7,000 of 17,032 adults in Akmola refused, and others simply left, until a Central Committee resolution in December “giving in to the pressure from below” prepared an orderly return. No release date for the Kalmyks appears in the sources here.

Who went home. In January 1957 the Chechens, Kalmyks and others had their autonomous regions restored; the Ingush found their home region split, and in Grozny returnees and the Russians who had moved there clashed. Karachays and Balkars went back too. The Crimean Tatars petitioned from 1957, were cleared of treason in 1967 but described only as “citizens of Tatar nationality who had been living in the Crimea”, and were kept out; after a demonstration in Chirchik in 1968 the struggle went on until 1989, and then nearly 250,000 returned in a little over four years, J. Otto Pohl writes. The Meskhetian Turks and the Germans did not go back to their homelands.

26 Apr 1991

1989 and 1991. On 14 November 1989 the USSR Supreme Soviet adopted a declaration whose title, in J. Otto Pohl’s English, speaks of “Illegal and Criminal Repressive Acts” against peoples subjected to forcible resettlement; Schmaltz says it named the Balkars, Ingush, Kalmyks, Crimean Tatars, Chechens, Meskhetian Turks, Greeks, Koreans, Kurds, Karachays and Germans and called the acts “criminal” and “illegal”. On 26 April 1991 the Russian republic passed a law that, Schmaltz writes, acknowledged a policy of “genocide” and “slander”. Beksultan Seinaroev, a doctor of law who helped draft it, said twenty years later that Article 6 on territorial rehabilitation was still unfulfilled.

Genocide? Who says what. On 26 February 2004 the European Parliament, in a recommendation to the Council on EU-Russia relations, said it “Believes” the deportation of “the entire Chechen people” was an act of genocide; the Ingush are not named. Ukraine’s parliament ruled on 12 November 2015 to declare the Crimean Tatar deportation a genocide. J. Otto Pohl argues the Crimean Tatar case meets the UN Convention’s definition. Michaela Pohl writes that the singling out of the Chechens and Ingush by “slander and genocide” is undeniable in the 1991 law’s own language, yet warns that an exclusive emphasis on genocide does not explain what happened in exile. No court judgment is among these, and the sources here hold no state or scholar rejecting the word.

31 May 2007

Who remembers, and where. Kalmykia marks 28 December as a day of mourning; Ukraine’s parliament made 18 May a day of commemoration; Kazakhstan opened the ALZHIR museum on 31 May 2007 on President Nazarbayev’s initiative, as the Kazakhstan history portal reports.

21 Apr 2014

Crimea, 2014. On 27 March 2014 the UN General Assembly adopted, by a recorded vote of 100 to 11 with 58 abstentions, a non-binding resolution holding that the 16 March referendum in Crimea had no validity and calling on states not to recognize any change in its status. Ukraine’s foreign minister told the Assembly that part of his country had been forcibly annexed; Russia’s ambassador, Vitaly Churkin, said Crimea had been reunified with Russia after the referendum and asked all to respect that choice. On 21 April Putin announced a decree rehabilitating the Crimean Tatar, Armenian, German and Greek populations of Crimea and all who suffered in Stalin’s repressions. J. Otto Pohl reports that nearly 250,000 Crimean Tatars returned after 1989; RIA Novosti, a Russian state news agency, adds that they could not reclaim their former land.