NKVD

People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR

many of whom had previously participated in operations to resettle the Karachai and Kalmyks, and in addition will participate in the forthcoming operation to resettle Balkarians

19 thousand special troops of the NKVD and SMERSH participated in the operation and up to 100 thousand NKVD officers and soldiers, drawn from a variety of regions

As a result of the three operations, 650 thousand Chechens, Ingush, Kalmyks and Karachai were relocated to the eastern regions of the USSR.

The operation to gather all ethnic Balkars for deportation was implemented by Lavrenti Beria of the NKVD (present-day FSB). Joseph Stalin approved it. Beria arrived in Nalchik on 2 March 1944, and the deportation began six days later.

The entire Balkar ethnic group, a total of 37,713 individuals, were rounded up and loaded into 14 cattle wagons headed for Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.

In fulfillment of the decree of the State Defense Committee, the NKVD moved 602,193 residents of the Northern Caucasus, among them 496,460 Chechens and Ingushetians, 68,327 Karachaevs, and 37.406 Balkirs to permanent residence in the Kazakh and Kirghiz SSRs from February through March 1944.

The operation began at dawn on 23 February 1944. By 11 a.m., Stalin had received the first report from Lavrentiy Beria: 94,741 people have been removed from populated localities of the republic

The harshest measures were applied to those unable to move—the disabled, the elderly, the sick—as well as to those who resisted: they were simply killed.

According to M. Kuznetsov, colonel of State Security and head of the NKVD Special Settler Department, 1,361 people (0.27 per cent) died en route, and 1,070 were hospitalized.

Approximately 200,000 Chechens and 30,000 Ingush died during the deportation. One in every two or three Chechens and Ingush perished.

It is difficult to determine how objective these estimates are.

On a single night in February 1944 tens of thousands of NKVD troops assembled and deported at one hour’s notice the vast majority of the Chechen and Ingush populations, killing the most recalcitrant and those too ill to be moved.

The NKVD rounded up close to 200,000 Crimean Tatars during those three days and sent them by train eastward towards Central Asia.

On 4 July 1944, they revised this figure to 183,155.

In a mere three days, the Soviet government forcibly removed 194,155 Crimean Tatars from the Crimea.

The Crimean Tatar families had only 15 to 20 minutes to attempt to gather up the 500 kg allowed by GKO resolution N5859ss. Most did not take anything near 500 kg of belongings with them into exile.

This resolution diverted 31,551 of the 183,155 Crimean Tatars destined for special settlements in Uzbekistan

Kalmyks were relocated to various provinces of Siberia, including Omsk, Altai, and Novosibirsk. Out of the 93,000 deportees, about 1400 died in transit and a similar number became gravely ill.

In early 1945, it was estimated that 13,000 of the original 93,000 Kalmyks had died. Official Soviet records show a 17% mortality rate, unofficial sources even higher. All figures in this article are necessarily based on Soviet figures, which may or may not be correct.

"Over the years of exile we lost almost a third of our nation; the genetic pool of the nation was undermined; and it weakened further generations," said pensioner Sergey Manzhikov.

On the night of 2 November 1943, arrests began at 02:00 in the morning.

Out of the initial 68,614 people who were deported to Central Asia, it is estimated that somewhere between 13,000 and 19,000 people died.

By 1948, five years after the deportation, the population of Karachays in exile was recorded by Soviet statisticians as 56,869.

Many died during the transport.

In total, 79,000 Karachay people were deported. Most of those repressed – more than 43,000 people – died on the road and in resettlement places.

To propose to the Far Eastern Territorial Party Committee (Bolsheviks) and the NKVD of the Far Eastern Territory to evict all Korean population of the border regions of the Far East and relocate to the South Kazakhstan region, to the Aral Sea and Balkhash and the Uzbek SSR.

NKVD records revealed that between roughly 365,000 to 371,000 Germans were removed from the Volga German ASSR, along with more than 46,000 from Saratov Oblast and more than 26,000 from Stalingrad Oblast, for a total of approximately 438,000 to 444,000.

The brutal Nazi-Soviet war and the period of forced resettlements and hard labor in the east resulted in the death of about 300,000 Soviet Germans (Volga and others) between 1941 and 1949.

Another 200,000 to 300,000 perished as a result of the deportations and the Labor Army (trudarmiia) in exile from 1941 to 1949.

the resolution of the State Defense Committee (GKO) “Concerning the Kind of Use for German Evacuees of Conscript Age from 17 to 50 Years”; it called for the labor conscription of 120,000 Germans then living in the eastern territories.

GKO Order 2383 expanded Labor Army conscription to all ethnic German men aged 15 to 55 and all ethnic German women aged 16 to 45 who held Soviet citizenship; as a result, 123,500 additional Germans, including 52,700 women, were inducted into the Labor Army.

The name “ALZHIR” – “Akmola camp of the wives of traitors to the motherland” – was actually coined by the prisoners themselves, while the official name was the Akmola special unit of the Karaganda camp system of the NKVD.

From the Report of the NKVD Department of Special Settlements. September 5, 1944