Examples of deportation of peoples. What peoples were deported by Stalin in the Great Patriotic War. Current state of affairs

November 14, 2009 marks 20 years since the day when the Supreme Soviet of the USSR adopted the Declaration on the recognition of illegal and criminal acts of repression against the peoples subjected to forced resettlement.

Deportation (from Lat. Deportatio) - exile, exile. In a broad sense, deportation refers to the forced expulsion of a person or category of persons to another state or other locality, usually under an escort.

The historian Pavel Polyan in his work "Not of his own free will ... The history and geography of forced migrations in the USSR" indicates: "cases when not part of a group (class, ethnic group, confession, etc.) is subjected to deportation, but almost all of it, called total deportation. "

According to the historian, ten peoples were subjected to total deportation in the USSR: Koreans, Germans, Ingermanland Finns, Karachais, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Crimean Tatars and Meskhetian Turks. Seven of them - Germans, Karachais, Kalmyks, Ingush, Chechens, Balkars and Crimean Tatars - lost their national autonomies as well.

To one degree or another, many other ethnic, ethno-confessional and social categories of Soviet citizens were subjected to deportations in the USSR: Cossacks, "kulaks" of various nationalities, Poles, Azerbaijanis, Kurds, Chinese, Russians, Iranians, Iranian Jews, Ukrainians, Moldovans. , Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Greeks, Bulgarians, Armenians, Kabardians, Hemshins, “Dashnak” Armenians, Turks, Tajiks, etc.

According to Professor Bugai, the overwhelming majority of the migrants were sent to Kazakhstan (239,768 Chechens and 78,470 Ingush) and Kyrgyzstan (70,097 Chechens and 2,278 Ingush). Akmola, Pavlodar, North Kazakhstan, Karaganda, East Kazakhstan, Semipalatinsk and Alma-Ata regions became the areas of concentration of Chechens in Kazakhstan, and in Kyrgyzstan - Frunzenskaya (now Chui) and Osh regions. Hundreds of special settlers who worked at home in the oil industry were sent to fields in the Guryev (now Atyrau) region of Kazakhstan.

On February 26, 1944, Beria issued an order for the NKVD "On measures to evict from the KB of the ASSR Balkar population ". On March 5, the State Defense Committee issued a decree on eviction from the KB of the ASSR. The day of the beginning of the operation was established on March 10, but it was carried out earlier - on March 8 and 9. On April 8, 1944, the Decree of the PVS was issued on renaming the Kabardino-Balkarian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic into the Kabardian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic.

The total number of those deported to places of resettlement was 37,044 people sent to Kyrgyzstan (about 60%) and to Kazakhstan.

In May-June 1944, forced resettlement affected Kabardians... On June 20, 1944, about 2,500 family members of “active German henchmen, traitors and traitors” from among the Kabardians and, in a small proportion, Russians, were deported to Kazakhstan.

In April 1944, immediately after the liberation of Crimea, the NKVD and NKGB began to "cleanse" its territory from anti-Soviet elements.

May 10, 1944 - "given the treacherous actions Crimean Tatars against the Soviet people and proceeding from the undesirability of further residence of the Crimean Tatars on the border outskirts Soviet Union"- Beria turned to Stalin with a written proposal for deportation. The GKO resolutions on the eviction of the Crimean Tatar population from the territory of Crimea were adopted on April 2, May 11 and 21, 1944. A similar resolution on the eviction of the Crimean Tatars (and Greeks) from the Krasnodar Territory and Rostov Region was dated May 29, 1944.

According to historian Pavel Polyan, citing Professor Nikolai Bugai, the main operation began at dawn on May 18. By 4 pm on May 20, 180,014 people had been evicted. According to the final data, 191,014 Crimean Tatars (more than 47 thousand families) were deported from Crimea.

About 37 thousand families (151,083 people) of the Crimean Tatars were taken to Uzbekistan: the most numerous "colonies" settled in Tashkent (about 56 thousand people), Samarkand (about 32 thousand people), Andijan (19 thousand people) and Fergana (16 thousand people) ) areas. The rest were distributed in the Urals (Molotovskaya (now Perm) and Sverdlovsk region), in Udmurtia and in the European part of the USSR (Kostroma, Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod), Moscow and other regions).

Additionally, during May-June 1944, about 66 thousand people were deported from Crimea and the Caucasus, including 41 854 people from Crimea (among them 15 040 Soviet Greeks, 12 422 Bulgarians, 9620 Armenians, 1119 Germans, Italians , Romanians, etc.; they were sent to Bashkiria, Kemerovo, Molotov, Sverdlovsk and Kirov region USSR, as well as in the Guryev region of Kazakhstan); about 3.5 thousand foreign citizens with expired passports, including 3350 Greeks, 105 Turks and 16 Iranians (they were sent to the Fergana region of Uzbekistan), from the Krasnodar Territory - 8300 people (only Greeks), from the Transcaucasian republics - 16 375 people (only Greeks).

On June 30, 1945, by the Decree of the PVS, the Crimean ASSR was transformed into the Crimean region as part of the RSFSR.

In the spring of 1944, forced relocations were carried out in Georgia.

According to Professor Nikolai Bugai, in March 1944 more than 600 Kurdish and Azerbaijani families(a total of 3240 people) - residents of Tbilisi, were resettled within Georgia itself, to the Tsalka, Borchali and Karayaz regions, then the "Muslim peoples" of Georgia who lived near the Soviet-Turkish border were resettled.

In a certificate sent by Lavrenty Beria to Stalin on November 28, 1944, it was stated that the population of Meskheti, connected with “... family relations with the inhabitants of Turkey, smuggled, showed emigration sentiments and served for the Turkish intelligence agencies as sources of recruiting spy elements and planting bandit groups ". On July 24, 1944, in a letter to Stalin, Beria proposed to relocate 16,700 households "Turks, Kurds and Hemshils" from the border regions of Georgia to Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. On July 31, 1944, a decision was made to resettle 76,021 Turks, as well as 8694 Kurds and 1,385 Hemshils. Turks meant Meskhetian Turks, residents of the Georgian historical region of Meskhet-Javakheti.

The eviction itself began on the morning of November 15, 1944 and lasted three days. In total, according to various sources, from 90 to 116 thousand people were evicted. More than half (53,133 people) arrived in Uzbekistan, another 28,598 people - in Kazakhstan and 10,546 people - in Kyrgyzstan.

Rehabilitation of deported peoples

In January 1946, the deregistration of special settlements of ethnic contingents began. Finns deported to Yakutia were first removed from the register, Krasnoyarsk region and the Irkutsk region.

In the mid-1950s, a series of decrees of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet followed on the lifting of restrictions in the legal status of the deported special settlers.

On July 5, 1954, the Council of Ministers of the USSR adopted a Resolution "On the removal of certain restrictions in the legal status of special settlers." It noted that as a result of the further consolidation of Soviet power and the inclusion of the bulk of the special settlers employed in industry and agriculture in the economic and cultural life of the areas of their new residence, there was no need to apply legal restrictions to them.

The next two decisions of the Council of Ministers were adopted in 1955 - "On issuing passports to special settlers" (March 10) and "On deregistration of certain categories of special settlers" (November 24).

On September 17, 1955, the Decree of the PVS was issued "On the amnesty of Soviet citizens who collaborated with the occupiers during the Great Patriotic War 1941-1945 ".

The first decree, specifically relating exclusively to the "punished people", also dates back to 1955: it was the Decree of the PVS of December 13, 1955 "On the lifting of restrictions in the legal status of Germans and their family members in special settlement."

On January 17, 1956, the PVS Decree was issued on the lifting of restrictions on the Poles evicted in 1936; March 17, 1956 - from Kalmyks, March 27 - from Greeks, Bulgarians and Armenians; April 18, 1956 - from the Crimean Tatars, Balkars, Meskhetian Turks, Kurds and Hemshils; On July 16, 1956, legal restrictions were lifted from the Chechens, Ingush and Karachais (all without the right to return to their homeland).

On January 9, 1957, five of the totally repressed peoples, who had previously had their own statehood, were returned to their autonomy, but two - the Germans and the Crimean Tatars - did not (this did not happen even today).

The material was prepared on the basis of information from open sources

The deportation of an entire people is a sad page in the USSR of the 1930-1950s, the "fallacy" or "criminality" of which practically all political forces have to admit.

There were no analogues of such atrocities in the world. In ancient times and during the Middle Ages, peoples could destroy, drive them out of their homes in order to seize its territories, but no one thought of organizing to resettle it to other, obviously worse conditions, as well as to introduce into the propaganda ideology of the USSR such concepts as “people traitor "," punished people "or" desecrated people ".

February 23 marks the 68th anniversary of the deportation of the Chechen and Ingush peoples from the North Caucasus to Kazakhstan. But, in addition to the Chechens and Ingush, in the USSR in different years, more ... two dozen ethnic groups were deported, about which for some reason it is not customary to speak widely in modern history. So, who, when and for what reason from the peoples of the Soviet Union was forcibly resettled and why?

What peoples of the USSR experienced the horrors of the pre-war deportation?

Two dozen peoples inhabiting the USSR were subject to deportation. These are: Koreans, Germans, Ingermanland Finns, Karachais, Balkars, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Crimean Tatars and Meskhetian Turks, Bulgarians of the Odessa region, Greeks, Romanians, Kurds, Iranians, Chinese, Hemshils and a number of other peoples. At the same time, seven of the above peoples also lost their territorial-national autonomy in the USSR:

1. Finns. The first to come under repression were the so-called “non-indigenous” peoples of the USSR: first, back in 1935, all Finns were evicted from a 100-kilometer strip in the Leningrad Region and from a 50-kilometer strip in Karelia. They left quite far - to Tajikistan and Kazakhstan.

2. Poles and Germans. At the end of February of the same 1935, more than 40 thousand Poles and Germans were resettled from the territory of the border regions of Kiev and Vinnitsa regions into the depths of Ukraine. It was planned to evict the "foreigners" from the 800-kilometer border zone and from the places where it was planned to build strategic objects.

3. Kurds. In 1937, the Soviet leadership began to "clean up" the border areas in the Caucasus. All Kurds were hastily evicted from there to Kazakhstan.

4. Koreans and Chinese. In the same year, all local Koreans and Chinese were evicted from the border areas in the Far East.

5. Iranians. In 1938, Iranians were deported from the regions of Azerbaijan near the border to Kazakhstan.

6. Poles. After the partition of Poland in 1939, several hundred Poles were resettled from the newly annexed territories to the north of Russia.

The pre-war wave of deportations: what is characteristic of such an eviction?

It was typical for her:

The blow was dealt to diasporas that have their own national states outside the USSR or compactly live in the territory of another country;

People were only evicted from border areas;

The eviction did not resemble a special operation, it was not carried out with lightning speed, as a rule, people were given about 10 days to get ready (this implied the opportunity to leave unnoticed, which was used by some of the people);
... all the pre-war evictions were only a preventive measure and had no basis whatsoever, except for the far-fetched fears of the top leadership in Moscow about "strengthening the state's defense capability." That is, the repressed citizens of the USSR, from the point of view of the Criminal Code, did not commit any crime, i.e. the punishment itself followed even before the very fact of the crime.

The second wave of mass deportations falls on the Great Patriotic War

1. Germans of the Volga region. The first to suffer were the Soviet Germans. All of them were classified as potential "collaborators". In total, there were 1,427,222 Germans in the Soviet Union, and during 1941 the overwhelming majority of them were resettled to the Kazakh SSR. The Autonomous SSR Nemtsev of the Volga region (existed from October 19, 1918 to August 28, 1941) was urgently liquidated, its capital, the city of Engels and 22 cantons of the former ASSR, by the Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of September 7, 1941 were divided and included in the Saratov ( 15 cantons) and Stalingrad (Volgograd) (7 cantons) regions of the Russian Federation.

2. Greeks, Romanians, Bulgarians and Finns. In addition to the Germans, other preventively resettled peoples were Greeks, Romanians, Bulgarians and Finns. Reasons: the allies of Nazi Germany who attacked the USSR in 1941 were Hungary, Romania, Italy, Finland and Bulgaria (the latter did not send troops to the territory of the USSR).

3. Kalmyks and Karachais. In late 1943 - early 1944, Kalmyks and Karachais were punished. They were the first to be repressed as punishment for real actions.

4. Chechens and Ingush. On February 21, 1944, L. Beria's decree was issued on the deportation of Chechens and Ingush. Then there was a forced eviction of the Balkars, and a month later they were followed by the Karachais.
5. Crimean Tatars. In May-June 1944, Crimean Tatars were mainly resettled to Uzbekistan.
6. Turks, Kurds and Hemshili. In the fall of 1944, the families of these peoples were resettled from the territory of the Transcaucasian republics to Central Asia.

7. Ukrainians. After the end of hostilities on the territory of the USSR, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians (from the western part of the republic), Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians were subjected to partial deportation.

What was characteristic of the second wave of deportations?

Suddenness. People could not even guess that tomorrow they would all be evicted;

Lightning speed. The deportation of an entire people took place in an extremely short time. People simply did not have time to organize themselves for any resistance;

Universality. Representatives of a certain nationality were sought out and punished. People were even recalled from the front. It was then that the citizens began to hide their nationality;

Cruelty. Weapons were used against those who tried to escape. Transportation conditions were terrible, people were transported in freight cars, they were not fed, they were not treated, they were not provided with everything they needed,

and in the new places nothing was ready for life, the deported were often planted simply in the bare steppe;
... high mortality. According to some reports, losses on the way amounted to 30-40% of the number of internally displaced persons. Another 10-20% could not survive the first winter in a new place.

Why did Stalin repress entire nations?

The initiator of most of the deportations was the People's Commissar of the NKVD Lavrenty Beria, it was he who submitted reports with recommendations to the commander-in-chief. But the decision was made by Joseph Stalin, and he was personally responsible for everything that happened in the country. What reasons were considered sufficient to deprive an entire people of their homeland, leaving them with children and old people in the deserted, cold steppe?

1 espionage Without exception, all repressed peoples were accused of this. The "non-indigenous" spied for their mother countries. Koreans with Chinese in favor of Japan. And the indigenous people communicated information to the Germans.
2. Collaboration. Refers to those evicted during the war. This refers to service in the army, police and other structures organized by the Germans. For example, the German field marshal Erich von Manstein wrote: "... The majority of the Tatar population of Crimea was very friendly towards us. We managed to form armed self-defense companies from the Tatars, whose task was to protect their villages from attacks by partisans hiding in the Yaila mountains." In March 1942, 4 thousand people already served in self-defense companies, and another 5 thousand people were in the reserve. By November 1942, 8 battalions were created, in 1943 another 2. The number of Crimean Tatars in the fascist troops in the Crimea, according to N.F. Bugaya, consisted of more than 20 thousand people.

A similar situation can be traced for a number of other deported peoples:

Mass desertion from the ranks of the Red Army. Voluntary transfer to the side of the enemy.
... Help in the fight against Soviet partisans and the army. They could serve as guides for the Germans, provide information and food, help in every way. To hand over communists and antifascists to the enemy.
... Sabotage or preparation of acts of sabotage at strategic targets or communications.

Organization of armed detachments with the aim of attacking Soviet citizens and military personnel.

Traitors. Moreover, the percentage of traitors among the representatives of the deported people should be very high - much higher than 50-60%. Only then were there sufficient grounds for his forced eviction.

Naturally, this does not apply to peoples punished before the war. They were repressed only because they, in principle, could commit all of the above crimes.

What other motives could the "Father of All Nations" pursue?

1. To secure the most important regions for the country on the eve of a possible Third World War. Or "prepare" a place for some important event... Thus, the Crimean Tatars were evicted just before the Yalta conference. No one, even hypothetically, could allow German saboteurs to attempt an assassination attempt on the Big Three on the territory of the USSR. And how extensive an agent base the Abwehr had among the local Tatars, the Soviet special services knew very well.

2. Avoid the possibility of major national conflicts, especially in the Caucasus. The people, for the most part, remained loyal to Moscow, after the victory over the Nazis, could begin to take revenge on the people, many of whose representatives collaborated with the invaders. Or, for example, demand for yourself a reward for your loyalty, and the reward is the land of "traitors."

What do Stalin's "defenders" usually say?

The deportation of the Soviet peoples is usually compared to internment. The latter is a common practice, moreover, formalized at the level of international legislation. So, according to the Hague Convention of 1907, the state has the right to the population belonging to the titular nation (!) Of the opposing power, “... to establish, as far as possible, far from the theater of war. It can keep them in camps and even subject them to confinement in fortresses or places adapted for this purpose. " Many countries participating in the First World War did this, and so did the Second World War (for example, the British in relation to the Germans or the Americans in relation to the Japanese). In this regard, it should be said that no one would have accused Stalin if his repressions were limited only to the Germans. But to hide behind the Hague Convention, justifying the punishment of two dozen ethnic groups, is at least ridiculous.

Ottoman trace. They also often try to draw parallels between Stalin's policies and the actions of the colonial administrations of Western countries, in particular England and France. But the analogy is lame again. European colonial empires only increased the presence of representatives of the titular nation in the colonies (for example, Algeria or India). British government circles have always opposed a change in the ethno-confessional balance of power in their empire. What is the obstruction of the British administration of the mass emigration of Jews to Palestine. The only empire that practiced the use of peoples as chess pieces, was the Ottoman Empire. It was there that they came up with the idea to resettle Muslim refugees from the Caucasus (Chechens, Circassians, Avars and others) to Bulgaria, the Balkans and the Arab countries of the Middle East. Stalin may have learned national politics from the Turkish sultans. In this case, the angry accusations against the West are absolutely groundless.

War communism was not invented by Lenin. This was the implementation of the emergency mobilization program of tsarist Russia in case things go too bad on the fronts and the situation with internal resources is bad. This is how deportation is. In the General Staff, at the end of the 19th century, a whole science, military demography, was developed. This science calculated the population of certain nationalities or religions in any territory and, based on these data, the loyalty index in this territory was calculated. And if such an index was lower than necessary, then in order to achieve harmony, the expulsion of the population and even its extermination was allowed.

This was also applied in peacetime. In the 90s of the 19th century, there were at least two evictions of Jews from Moscow, who lived there unnecessarily when Isaac Levitan was forced to leave Moscow. NSThis may seem like an anecdote - Jews were expelled from the front line during the First World War. In the Baltics, the Russian military command felt that Jews who spoke Yiddish, similar to German, might not be loyal to Russian authorities... It seems like a historical anecdote against the backdrop of what happened next.

If we talk about the resettlement of entire peoples, then we can recall, for example, the 30s, deportation of Koreans from the Far East to Central Asia, deportation of the Karelian peoples on the eve of the war with Finland in 39-40. Well, 41 years old - deportation Soviet Germans.

But they began to evict peoples en masse in 1943. Why? There is an opinion among the people that these are traitorous peoples who massively went over to the side of the Nazis and brought the "white horse" for Hitler. This is said in particular about the Chechens. It's funny though. How could the Chechens cooperate with the Nazis, if on the territory of Chechen-Ingushetia the Wehrmacht only reached the North of the Malgobek region. There was no possibility of such cooperation.

However, where there was cooperation, it hardly differed from other regions (Ukraine, native Russia, the Baltic states) in scale and depth. There were units formed from Kalmyks who fought on the side of the Wehrmacht. There were auxiliary units from the Crimean Tatars, but here it is more likely not about selectivity based on ethnicity, the Germans needed to control the mountainous areas, and for this it was logical to recruit residents of this very mountainous and wooded area into their units. Moreover, such cooperation was never continuous; there were also partisan detachments formed from the Tatars. There were Tatars who went over to the partisans. The commanders of the partisan detachments who fought in the Crimea write about this.

What happened if the collaboration was in all territories? To do this, it is necessary to study specifically those motives that the Soviet party nomenclature based on the plan of these punitive deportations.

In part, it seems that the responsibility for the officials was shifted onto the local population. Someone must be responsible for the failure of the partisan movement in Crimea. Someone must be to blame for the flight of the Red Army in 1942, when it turned out that the population in the territory occupied by the Germans cooperated with them only because the Chekists had already "made good use of" there. It was easier to point out those who collaborated rather than list their own mistakes.

It was very easy to talk about the massiveness and cruelty of the insurrectionary movement in mountainous Chechnya, because while numerous NKVD units were dispatched to fight this movement, they were not sent to the front. The fact that the real scale of the insurrectionary movement, which rarely subsided in the Chechen mountains since the 1920s and 1930s, was written, in particular, by the Deputy People's Commissar of Justice of Checheno-Ingushetia Dziyaudin Malsagov. But it is obvious that such an overstatement of the internal enemy was in the interests of the local KGB leadership. There are many prerequisites of this kind, which eventually formed at first into relatively moderate, according to Soviet concepts, documents.

The Karachais who were deported were the first to appear on the list in the fall of 1943, initially it was supposed to expel not all, but only a small part. The accomplices of the enemy and their families were listed. But for some reason a new resolution appeared on the document. And for some reason, in the future, a plan of precisely continuous punitive deportation was developed and implemented.

Suddenly this car malfunctioned. In the summer of 1944, when the next decree on eviction was being prepared, the resolution was negative. And yet another continuous deportation did not take place.

We can, by indirect evidence, restore the logic of why this happened. Territories were not needed as such, but as economic entities continuing to run the economy. The continuous eviction of a large part of the inhabitants knocked entire republics out of economic circulation. If it may seem that in industry it is possible to replace some people with others without much damage, in fact, the “territories liberated from the enemies of the people” were then re-populated both by the inhabitants of the neighboring Caucasian republics and the so-called “legal” population imported from central Russia. But if the machines can survive for a while without working on them, then what will happen to agriculture? And, perhaps, the Boss, lighting his pipe and looking at the not at all pleasing correlations from the newly populated regions, decided that enough is enough, not necessary, that, in the end, the "medicine" turns out to be bitter than any disease.

There is a myth that continuous punitive deportations were successful. But that's a myth, based primarily on the fact that the Caucasian peoples did not leave the chronicles of their resistance to deportation. It is known that in Chechnya the armed resistance after February 1944 by no means weakened, but increased many times over. Many men went to the mountains with weapons. And if the organized groups were liquidated by the beginning of the 50s, then all the same, the return of residents to the mountain villages was prevented until the 70s and 80s. And not unreasonable, because the last abrek of Chechnya, Khasukha Magomadov, was killed only in 1976. At the same time, two years earlier, he killed the head of the Shatoy district department of the KGB ... Everything that we know indicates that these armed groups have become many times stronger precisely as a result of the deportation. Instead of surrendering, we went into the forest, into the mountains. The history of such resistance is better known in the Baltics or Western Ukraine.

Security did not improve in any way, and the losses were great. In order not to withdraw the territory from economic circulation, in the future the Soviet government did not return to the practice of continuous punitive deportations. Even when the Red Army entered the territory of Western Ukraine and the Baltic States, where the resistance was the most brutal and organized, deportations, along with other depressions, were massive, but not continuous. They concerned only a certain part of the population.

How did the deportation process go technically?

While we were looking at it from the perspective of the man with the pipe, who was looking at the map from above. And how was it on a human scale? On the eve of February 23, troops were brought into Chechnya, ostensibly for exercises. Only on the eve of the operation, the Soviet party activists were informed what would actually happen. And in cooperation with the Soviet party activists, with local communists and security officers, including those from among those nationalities who were deported, this operation was being prepared. The troops stood up in each locality... And on February 23, it was said: "You have two hours to get ready, you can take so many things with you, and then - in the cars, and they will take you away." Then what could be called the excesses of the performer took place. In general, it is a war crime, a crime against humanity.

Snow fell in the mountains. And from many mountain villages, only men could be descended on foot to the plain. Women, children and old people could not master such a descent. Motivating by this, the head of the operation in the mountain village of Khaibakh locked up women, children, old people in the stables of the Beria collective farm, which was then set on fire, and the people trapped in it were shot. Hundreds of people died. This story was confirmed by correspondence documents, documents of the party investigation that took place in the late 50s, eyewitness recollections and excavations that were carried out there around 90.

This is not the only execution, not the only destruction, murder of peoplewhich the state machine could not take with it. This happened in other mountain villages of western Chechnya and Ingushetia. And the already mentioned Deputy People's Commissar Dziyaudin Malsagov, who participated there from the local leadership in the deportation, wrote about this. He tried to complain to the generals in charge of the operation, tried to complain to the People's Commissar Lavrentiy Beria. But, obviously, by a miracle, he himself was not destroyed then.

And then the trains headed east. At the same time, the echelon with the party and Soviet leadership, with the administrative workers who participated in this deportation, departed a month later. In more comfortable, non-freight wagons, where people were loaded in large quantities, with stoves, without a proper supply of food and water, which caused a great mortality along the way. They were not dumped in an open field in Central Asia, but were allowed to live in cities, these party Soviet people... And some were appointed to quite responsible positions. The same Malsagov lost his position as a prosecutor after he wrote about the crimes committed and the need to investigate them a few years later.

There is talk of a high mortality rate, especially in the transport of deportees. It happened in different ways. Many remember those unloaded in the snow during the deportation in the winter of 1944. Let's think about those who were deported in May 1944 - about the Crimean Tatars - when the heat was already on, and the trains were going east, and people did not have enough water. Here mortality reached ten percent of the total number loaded on wagons. The appalling conditions at the resettlement sites also resulted in high deaths. Quite often more than on the way.

Currently, there are studies to track the dynamics of the number of these peoples after deportation. The first year was the most difficult. And just because it iswas carried out exclusively selectively only on the basis of ethnicity, we can say that these crimes should be called genocide.Of course, additional legal work is required, but, in my opinion, all formalities have been completed. Because the existing definitions of genocide speak of selectivity precisely on the basis of racial, national, ethnic, and not social.

What then? People took root, somehow survived where they seemed to be exiled forever. An acquaintance of mine who, by coincidence, entered the institute in Elista, the capital of Kalmykia, at the end of the 60s, and spoke to his classmates, was surprised to learn that they were born in various places - from Norilsk and further south. All the people were scattered. They got into different conditions. Crimean Tatars, for example, ended up in the Fergana Valley, including the Leninabad region, where there were uranium mines and, in general, relatively high-tech production, for which vocational training was needed. Other peoples often found themselves in conditions that did not require such vocational training and, accordingly, did not receive such an education. Their youth did not receive such an education. The Germans found themselves in very difficult conditions in the so-called labor armies. There, the death rate was also very high, beginning in late 1941. But perhaps the most terrible was the word "eternal", because all these peoples found themselves far from their homeland in an eternal settlement.

Eternity began to crumble in 1953. The special settlement regime was softened after Stalin's death. However, no one was in a hurry with the return and rehabilitation of the "punished peoples". The fact is that the death of Stalin and the fall of Beria did not affect the situation of those who directly supervised the deportations. For example, Generals Serov and Kruglov, who became the mainstay of Nikita Khrushchev.

After numerous complaints, including Khrushchev, a resolution was issued on the return of the Chechens and Ingush, on the restoration of the Chechen-Ingush SSR. Only the resolution was belated, because the Chechens and Ingush began to return without permission. There is a well-known story about the old "Zaporozhets", humpbacked, who transported many tens of people from more than one family for many flights from Kazakhstan, bypassing the Caspian Sea. It was a process that is difficult to stop in a country where the totalitarian order is retreating a little, where it is impossible to anchor people on the ground.

And before 1953 there were any massive attempts to escape from these special settlements? Technically, could they have such an opportunity, or was it completely unrealistic?

Of course, there could not have been mass escapes. The regime in the special settlement was very cruel. For leaving the place of special settlement, people could be sentenced to a long term of imprisonment. The control was regular. In fact, it was a colony-settlement regime. Regular searches: looking for surplus food, and indeed the minimum food supply. How people survived in these conditions is difficult to understand.

Prepare an organized, mass (and at least partial) escape in conditions when the entire system of internal affairs bodies in the country is "sharpened" not for public safety, not for ensuring public safety, but, as we now know from documents, primarily for the search for fugitives from factories, enterprises, when people were actually enslaved at enterprises (leaving a job was a criminal offense) - in these conditions it was very difficult to do something.

But the peoples somehow settled down. There is a famous bike, a letter written by one of the schoolchildren, which he wrote about his grandfather, when a German family and a Chechen family lived nearby. And there, and there old people, heads of families, were distinguished by their humor. And in the morning the German greeted the Chechen: "Hello, bandit!" He answered him: "Hello, fascist." When the local commandant was outraged by this, the old men explained to him: "I was exiled here as a fascist, and he is like a bandit - what are the claims?" People lived and survived.

But, of course, until the XX Congress, before the removal of the special settlement regime, before the permission to return as a whole people, there could not be such a return. This is especially clearly seen in the fate of those peoples who were not allowed to return to their roots. The most famous three peoples are the Volga Germans, who were not allowed to restore their national and territorial autonomy, the Crimean Tatars and Meskhetian Turks

As I understand from your story, the forced eviction stopped in 1944 precisely because Stalin realized that it was simply unprofitable?

Another note was prepared on the deportation of another Caucasian people. But she did not receive a positive resolution. And the deportation there was selective, just accomplices of the Nazis and their families.

Comrade Stalin turned out to be smarter than his epigones, who, speaking about the current situation in the Caucasus or elsewhere, are calling for total deportation. Comrade Stalin, the Stalinist Soviet Union learned a lesson. Obviously, if we are not talking about inheriting scorched land, but about the fact that the territory is needed primarily as an economic one, as a relatively safe territory, then continuous punitive deportations turn out to be by no means a means of ensuring security, not a means of achieving stability and prosperity, but vice versa. - lay on long time instability and failure in the economy.

This is especially interesting in the context of the latest, including modern, news, such as: the riot in Pugachev and political talk about the secession of some regions of Russia ...

Let's look at this issue from two sides. The point is not only that this kind of deportation is a crime, that the state must ensure the rights of all its citizens throughout its territory, that people in uniform must ensure that criminals (whether Russian or Chechen) are punished to the same extent anywhere in the country ( be it Moscow, Pugachev or Grozny). The authorities do not do this.
But we forget another important point: the mass labor migration of Caucasians and Chechens across the territory of Russia began precisely as a result of deportation. Deportation and subsequent return. The fact is that when in 1957 the Chechens and Ingush were returned to the Caucasus, it turned out that there were, in general, no jobs for them here. Places in industry are occupied by the so-called “legal population”.

Several tens of thousands of young men stayed in Chechnya for the summer of 1991. There is August and the events that are sometimes called the Chechen revolution. Who knows, if they had been working at that time, finishing the construction of all sorts of necessary buildings in Russia, how things would have turned out. But one way or another, high labor migration, high labor mobility of the population was partly due to the consequences of deportation.

It is simply a matter of substituting concepts. If the police do not maintain order and do not equally punish violators of this order (be they Russians or Chechens), then the consequences will be dire. If we ourselves do not respect order and do not respect ourselves, then hardly anyone else will respect us or respect order more. If the police or the court turn out to be corrupt and, for example, the same Caucasians are released from the police or released from the courtroom, and this is obviously unfair, then this is the problem, first of all, of the corrupt court and the government, which we seem to elect. But it is much easier to speak out not to bring our own power under control, but to speak out against migrants.

Deportations of peoples in the USSR: the sad lessons of Stalin's ethnic policy

The deportation of an entire people is a sad page of the USSR in the 1930-1950s, the "fallacy" or "criminality" of which practically all political forces are forced to admit .

There were no analogues of such atrocities in the world. In ancient times and during the Middle Ages, peoples could destroy, drive them out of their homes in order to seize its territories, but no one thought of organizing to resettle it to other, obviously worse conditions, as well as to introduce into the propaganda ideology of the USSR such concepts as “people traitor "," punished people "or" desecrated people ".

February 23 marks the 68th anniversary of the deportation of the Chechen and Ingush peoples from the North Caucasus to Kazakhstan. But, in addition to the Chechens and Ingush, in the USSR in different years, more ... two dozen ethnic groups were deported, about which for some reason it is not customary to speak widely in modern history. So, who, when and for what reason from the peoples of the Soviet Union was forcibly resettled and why?

What peoples of the USSR experienced the horrors of the pre-war deportation?

Two dozen peoples inhabiting the USSR were subject to deportation. These are: Koreans, Germans, Ingermanland Finns, Karachais, Balkars, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Crimean Tatars and Meskhetian Turks, Bulgarians of the Odessa region, Greeks, Romanians, Kurds, Iranians, Chinese, Hemshils and a number of other peoples. At the same time, seven of the above peoples also lost their territorial-national autonomy in the USSR:

1 Finns... The first to come under repression were the so-called “non-indigenous” peoples of the USSR: first, back in 1935, all Finns were evicted from a 100-kilometer strip in the Leningrad Region and from a 50-kilometer strip in Karelia. They left quite far - to Tajikistan and Kazakhstan.

2. Poles and Germans... At the end of February of the same 1935, more than 40 thousand Poles and Germans were resettled from the territory of the border regions of Kiev and Vinnitsa regions into the depths of Ukraine. It was planned to evict the "foreigners" from the 800-kilometer border zone and from the places where it was planned to build strategic objects.

3. Kurds... In 1937, the Soviet leadership began to "clean up" the border areas in the Caucasus. All Kurds were hastily evicted from there to Kazakhstan.

4. Koreans and Chinese... In the same year, all local Koreans and Chinese were evicted from the border areas in the Far East.

5. Iranians... In 1938, Iranians were deported from the regions of Azerbaijan near the border to Kazakhstan.

6. Poles... After the partition of Poland in 1939, several hundred Poles were resettled from the newly annexed territories to the north of Russia.

The pre-war wave of deportations: what is characteristic of such an eviction?

It was typical for her:

the blow was dealt to the diasporas having their own national states outside the USSR or compactly living on the territory of another country;

people were only evicted from border areas;

the eviction did not resemble a special operation, it was not carried out with lightning speed, as a rule, people were given about 10 days to get ready (this implied the opportunity to leave unnoticed, which was used by some of the people);
all pre-war evictions were only a preventive measure and had no basis whatsoever, except for the far-fetched fears of the top leadership in Moscow regarding the issue of "strengthening the state's defense capability." That is, the repressed citizens of the USSR, from the point of view of the Criminal Code, did not commit any crime, i.e. the punishment itself followed even before the very fact of the crime.

The second wave of mass deportations falls on the Great Patriotic War

1. Volga Germans. The first to suffer were the Soviet Germans. All of them were classified as potential "collaborators". In total, there were 1,427,222 Germans in the Soviet Union, and during 1941 the overwhelming majority of them were resettled to the Kazakh SSR. The Autonomous SSR Nemtsev of the Volga region (existed from October 19, 1918 to August 28, 1941) was urgently liquidated, its capital, the city of Engels and 22 cantons of the former ASSR, by the Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of September 7, 1941 were divided and included in the Saratov ( 15 cantons) and Stalingrad (Volgograd) (7 cantons) regions of the Russian Federation.

2. Greeks, Romanians, Bulgarians and Finns... In addition to the Germans, other preventively resettled peoples were Greeks, Romanians, Bulgarians and Finns. Reasons: the allies of Nazi Germany who attacked the USSR in 1941 were Hungary, Romania, Italy, Finland and Bulgaria (the latter did not send troops to the territory of the USSR).

3. Kalmyks and Karachais. In late 1943 - early 1944, Kalmyks and Karachais were punished. They were the first to be repressed as punishment for real actions.

4. Chechens and Ingush. On February 21, 1944, L. Beria's decree was issued on the deportation of Chechens and Ingush. Then there was a forced eviction of the Balkars, and a month later they were followed by the Kabardians.
5. Crimean Tatars. In May-June 1944, Crimean Tatars were mainly resettled to Uzbekistan.
6. Turks, Kurds and Hemshili... In the fall of 1944, the families of these peoples were resettled from the territory of the Transcaucasian republics to Central Asia.

7. Ukrainians... After the end of hostilities on the territory of the USSR, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians (from the western part of the republic), Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians were subjected to partial deportation.

What was characteristic of the second wave of deportations?

suddenness... People could not even guess that tomorrow they would all be evicted;

lightning speed... The deportation of an entire people took place in an extremely short time. People simply did not have time to organize themselves for any resistance;

universality... Representatives of a certain nationality were sought out and punished. People were even recalled from the front. It was then that the citizens began to hide their nationality;

cruelty... Weapons were used against those who tried to escape. Transportation conditions were terrible, people were transported in freight cars, they were not fed, they were not treated, they were not provided with everything they needed,

and in the new places nothing was ready for life, the deported were often planted simply in the bare steppe;
high mortality. According to some reports, losses on the way amounted to 30-40% of the number of internally displaced persons. Another 10-20% could not survive the first winter in a new place.

Why did Stalin repress entire nations?

The initiator of most of the deportations was the People's Commissar of the NKVD Lavrenty Beria, it was he who submitted reports with recommendations to the commander-in-chief. But the decision was made by Joseph Stalin, and he was personally responsible for everything that happened in the country. What reasons were considered sufficient to deprive an entire people of their homeland, leaving them with children and old people in the deserted, cold steppe?

1 espionage... Without exception, all repressed peoples were accused of this. The "non-indigenous" spied for their mother countries. Koreans with Chinese in favor of Japan. And the indigenous people communicated information to the Germans.
2. Collaborationism... Refers to those evicted during the war. This refers to service in the army, police and other structures organized by the Germans. For example, the German field marshal Erich von Manstein wrote: "... The majority of the Tatar population of Crimea was very friendly towards us. We managed to form armed self-defense companies from the Tatars, whose task was to protect their villages from attacks by partisans hiding in the Yaila mountains." In March 1942, 4 thousand people already served in self-defense companies, and another 5 thousand people were in the reserve. By November 1942, 8 battalions were created, in 1943 another 2. The number of Crimean Tatars in the fascist troops in the Crimea, according to N.F. Bugaya, consisted of more than 20 thousand people.

A similar situation can be traced for a number of other deported peoples:

Mass desertion from the ranks of the Red Army. Voluntary transfer to the side of the enemy.
Help in the fight against Soviet partisans and the army. They could serve as guides for the Germans, provide information and food, help in every way. To hand over communists and antifascists to the enemy.
Sabotage or preparation of sabotage at strategic sites or communications.

Organization of armed detachments with the aim of attacking Soviet citizens and military personnel.

Traitors. Moreover, the percentage of traitors among the representatives of the deported people should be very high - much higher than 50-60%. Only then were there sufficient grounds for his forced eviction.

Naturally, this does not apply to peoples punished before the war. They were repressed only because they, in principle, could commit all of the above crimes.

What other motives could the "Father of All Nations" pursue?

1. To secure the most important regions for the country on the eve of a possible Third World War. Or "prepare" a place for some important event. Thus, the Crimean Tatars were evicted just before the Yalta conference. No one, even hypothetically, could allow German saboteurs to attempt an assassination attempt on the Big Three on the territory of the USSR. And how extensive an agent base the Abwehr had among the local Tatars, the Soviet special services knew very well.

2. Avoid the possibility of major national conflicts, especially in the Caucasus. The people, for the most part, remained loyal to Moscow, after the victory over the Nazis, could begin to take revenge on the people, many of whose representatives collaborated with the invaders. Or, for example, demand for yourself a reward for your loyalty, and the reward is the land of "traitors."

What do Stalin's "defenders" usually say?

The deportation of the Soviet peoples is usually compared to internment. The latter is a common practice, moreover, formalized at the level of international legislation. So, according to the Hague Convention of 1907, the state has the right to the population belonging to the titular nation (!) Of the opposing power, “... to establish, as far as possible, far from the theater of war. It can keep them in camps and even subject them to confinement in fortresses or places adapted for this purpose. " Many countries participating in the First World War did this, and so did the Second World War (for example, the British in relation to the Germans or the Americans in relation to the Japanese). In this regard, it should be said that no one would have accused Stalin if his repressions were limited only to the Germans. But to hide behind the Hague Convention, justifying the punishment of two dozen ethnic groups, is at least ridiculous.

Ottoman trace... They also often try to draw parallels between Stalin's policies and the actions of the colonial administrations of Western countries, in particular England and France. But the analogy is lame again. European colonial empires only increased the presence of representatives of the titular nation in the colonies (for example, Algeria or India). British government circles have always opposed a change in the ethno-confessional balance of power in their empire. What is the obstruction of the British administration of the mass emigration of Jews to Palestine. The only empire that practiced the use of peoples as chess pieces was the Ottoman Empire. It was there that they came up with the idea to resettle Muslim refugees from the Caucasus (Chechens, Circassians, Avars and others) to Bulgaria, the Balkans and the Arab countries of the Middle East. Stalin may have learned national politics from the Turkish sultans. In this case, the angry accusations against the West are absolutely groundless.

Market Leader - http://www.profi-forex.org/news/entry1008067181.html

Deportation of peoples- a form of repression, a kind of instrument of national policy.

The Soviet policy of deportation began with the eviction of White Cossacks and large landowners in 1918-1925

The first victims of Soviet deportations were the Cossacks of the Terek region, who in 1920 were evicted from their homes and sent to other areas of the North Caucasus, Donbass, and also to the Far North, and their land was transferred to the Ossetians. In 1921, the victims of the Soviet ethnic policy were Russians from Semirechye, who were expelled from the Turkestan Territory.

By 1933, there were 5300 national village councils and 250 national districts in the country. Only in one Leningrad region there were 57 national village councils and 3 national districts (Karelian, Finnish and Veps). There were schools in which teaching was carried out on national languages... In the early 1930s, newspapers were published in Leningrad in 40 languages, including Chinese. There were radio broadcasts in Finnish (about 130 thousand Finns then lived in Leningrad and the Leningrad Region).

In the mid-1930s, the abandonment of the former national policy began, expressed in the elimination of the cultural (and, in some cases, political) autonomy of individual peoples and ethnic groups. In general, this happened against the background of centralization of power in the country, the transition from territorial to sectoral management, repression against real and potential opposition.

In the mid-1930s, many Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Poles, Finns and Germans were first arrested in Leningrad. From the spring of 1935, on the basis of a secret instruction people's commissar Internal Affairs GG Yagoda dated March 25, 1935, local residents were forcibly evicted from the border areas in the northwest, most of whom were Ingrian Finns.

15 thousand families of persons of Polish and German nationalities (about 65 thousand people) were evicted from Ukraine, the territories adjacent to the Polish border, to the North Kazakhstan and Karaganda regions. In September 1937, on the basis of a joint resolution of the Council of People's Commissars and the Central Committee of the CPSU (b) No. 1428-326 "On the eviction of the Korean population from the border regions of the Far Eastern Territory", signed by Stalin and Molotov, 172 thousand ethnic Koreans were evicted from the border regions of the Far East. The eviction of some nations from border areas is sometimes associated with military preparations.

From the end of 1937, all national districts and village councils outside the titular republics and regions were gradually eliminated. Also, outside the autonomies, teaching and publishing of literature in national languages ​​was curtailed.

Deportations during the Great Patriotic War

In 1943-1944. Mass deportations of Kalmyks, Ingush, Chechens, Karachais, Balkars, Crimean Tatars, Nogays, Meskhetian Turks, Pontic Greeks, Bulgarians, Crimean Gypsies, Kurds were carried out - mainly on charges of collaboration, extended to the entire people. The autonomies of these peoples were eliminated (if they existed). In total, during the Great Patriotic War, peoples and groups of the population of 61 nationalities were resettled.

Deportation of Germans

On August 28, 1941, by a decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, the Autonomous Republic of the Volga Germans was liquidated. 367,000 Germans were deported to the east (two days were given for training): to the Komi Republic, to the Urals, to Kazakhstan, Siberia and Altai. The Germans were partially recalled from the active army. In 1942, the mobilization of Soviet Germans at the age of 17 into workers' columns began. The mobilized Germans built factories, worked in logging and in mines.

Representatives of the peoples whose countries were part of the Hitlerite coalition (Hungarians, Bulgarians, many Finns) were also deported.

On the basis of the decision of the Military Council of the Leningrad Front of March 20, 1942, about 40 thousand Germans and Finns were deported from the front-line zone in March-April 1942.

Those who returned home after the war were deported again in 1947-1948.

Deportation of Karachais

According to the 1939 census, 70,301 Karachais lived on the territory of the Karachay Autonomous District. From the beginning of August 1942 to the end of January 1943, she was under German occupation.

On October 12, 1943, a decree was issued by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, and on October 14, the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR stopped the eviction of Karachais from the Karachay Autonomous Region to the Kazakh and Kyrgyz SSR. These documents explained the reasons for the eviction

For the forceful provision of the deportation of the Karachai population, military units with a total number of 53,327 people were involved and on November 2, the deportation of the Karachais took place, as a result of which 69,267 Karachais were deported to Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.

Deportation of Kalmyks

At the beginning of August 1942, most of the uluses of Kalmykia were occupied and the territory of Kalmykia was liberated only at the beginning of 1943.

On December 27, 1943, a decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR was issued, and on December 28, a resolution of the Council of People's Commissars signed by V.M. 2975 NKVD officers and the 3rd motorized rifle regiment NKVD, and the leadership of the operation was carried out by the head of the NKVD in the Ivanovo region, Major General Markeev.

Deportation of Chechens and Ingush

On January 29, 1944, the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR Lavrenty Beria approved the "Instruction on the procedure for the eviction of Chechens and Ingush", and on January 31, the State Defense Committee issued a decree on the deportation of Chechens and Ingush to the Kazakh and Kyrgyz SSR. On February 20, together with I.A.Serov, B.Z.Kobulov and S.S. also about 100 thousand officers and soldiers of the NKVD troops, drawn from all over the country to participate in "exercises in the highlands." On February 21, he issued an order for the NKVD on the deportation of the Chechen-Ingush population. The next day, he met with the leadership of the republic and the highest spiritual leaders, warned them about the operation and offered to conduct necessary work among the population, and already in the morning of the next day, the eviction operation began.

Deportation and dispatch of trains to their destinations began on February 23, 1944 at 02:00 local time and ended on March 9, 1944. The operation began with the code word "Panther", which was broadcast over the radio. The deportation was accompanied by few attempts to escape to the mountains or insubordination from the local population.

According to official data, 780 people were killed during the operation, 2016 “anti-Soviet elements” were arrested, more than 20 thousand units were seized firearms, including 4868 rifles, 479 machine guns and assault rifles. 6544 people managed to hide in the mountains.

Deportation of Balkars

On February 24, 1944, Beria proposed to Stalin to evict the Balkars, and on February 26 he issued an order for the NKVD "On measures to evict the Balkar population from the KB of the ASSR." The day before, Beria, Serov and Kobulov met with the secretary of the Kabardino-Balkarian regional party committee Zuber Kumekhov, during which it was scheduled to visit the Elbrus region in early March. On March 2, Beria, accompanied by Kobulov and Mamulov, traveled to the Elbrus region, informing Kumekhov of his intention to evict the Balkars, and transfer their lands to Georgia so that she could have a defensive line on the northern slopes of the Greater Caucasus. On March 5, the State Defense Committee issued a Decree on eviction from the KB of the ASSR, and on March 8-9, the operation began. On March 11, Beria reported to Stalin that "37 103 people were evicted from Balkars"

Deportation of Crimean Tatars

In total, 228,543 people were evicted from Crimea, 191,014 of them were Crimean Tatars (more than 47 thousand families). From every third adult Crimean Tatar they took a signature that he got acquainted with the decree, and that 20 years of hard labor threatened to escape from the place of special settlement, as a criminal offense.

Deportations of Azerbaijanis

In the spring of 1944, forced relocations were carried out in Georgia. At the end of March, 608 Kurdish and Azerbaijani families numbering 3240 people - residents of Tbilisi, "Those who voluntarily left their jobs in agriculture and arrived to live in Tbilisi", were resettled within the Georgian SSR, to Tsalkinsky, Borchalinsky and Karayazsky districts. Only 31 families of military personnel, war invalids, teachers and university students were left in the city. In accordance with the GKO decree No. 6279ss of July 31 of the same year, Meskhetian Turks, Kurds, Hemshils and others were evicted from the border regions of the Georgian SSR, and the “others” sub-contingent consisted mainly of Azerbaijanis. In March 1949, the number of Azerbaijani special settlers evicted from the republic was 24,304 people, who during 1954-1956. in fact, were removed from the register of special settlements.

In 1948-1953. the resettlement was carried out by the Azerbaijanis living in Armenia. In 1947, the first secretary of the Communist Party of the Armenian SSR, Grigory Arutinov, achieved the adoption by the Council of Ministers of the USSR of a resolution "On the resettlement of collective farmers and other Azerbaijani population from the Armenian SSR to the Kura-Araks lowland. Azerbaijan SSR", As a result of which up to 100 thousand Azerbaijanis were resettled" on a voluntary basis "(and in fact - repatriation) to Azerbaijan. 10,000 people were resettled in 1948, 40,000 in 1949, 50,000 in 1950.

Deportation of Meskhetian Turks

He noted that "The NKVD of the USSR considers it expedient to overpower from Akhaltsikhe, Akhalkalaki, Adigensky, Aspindza, Bogdanovsky regions, some village councils of the Adjara ASSR - 16,700 farms of Turks, Kurds, Khemshin"... On July 31, the State Defense Committee adopted a resolution (No. 6279, "top secret") on the eviction of 45,516 Meskhetian Turks from the Georgian SSR to the Kazakh, Kyrgyz and Uzbek SSRs, as noted in the documents of the Department of Special Settlements of the NKVD of the USSR. The entire operation, by order of Beria, was led by A. Kobulov and the Georgian people's commissars of state security Rapava and internal affairs Karanadze, and for its implementation only 4 thousand operative employees of the NKVD were allocated.

Situation of the deported peoples

In 1948, a decree was adopted prohibiting the Germans, as well as other deported peoples (Kalmyks, Ingush, Chechens, Finns, etc.) from leaving the deportation areas and returning to their homeland. Those who violated this decree were sentenced to labor camp for 20 years.

Rehabilitation

In 1957-1958, the national autonomies of the Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Karachais and Balkars were restored; these peoples were allowed to return to their historical territories... The return of the repressed peoples was carried out not without difficulties, which both then and subsequently led to national conflicts (for example, clashes began between the returning Chechens and the Russians settled during their expulsion to the Grozny region; Ingush in the Prigorodny region populated by Ossetians and transferred to the North Ossetian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic.

However, a significant part of the repressed peoples (Volga Germans, Crimean Tatars, Meskhetian Turks, Greeks, Koreans, etc.), even at that time, were not returned to national autonomy (if any), or the right to return to their historical homeland.

On August 28, 1964, that is, 23 years after the start of deportation, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR canceled the restrictive acts against the deported German population, and the decree that completely lifted restrictions on freedom of movement and confirmed the right of Germans to return to the places from where they were deported , was adopted in 1972.

On November 14, 1989, by the Declaration of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, all repressed peoples were rehabilitated, and repressive acts against them at the state level in the form of a policy of slander, genocide, forced resettlement, the abolition of national-state formations, the establishment of a regime of terror and violence in places of special settlements were recognized as illegal and criminal.

In 1991, the Law on the Rehabilitation of Repressed Peoples was adopted, which recognized the deportation of nations as "a policy of slander and genocide" (Article 2).

15 years after recognition in the USSR, in February 2004, the European Parliament also recognized the fact of the deportation of Chechens and Ingush in 1944 as an act of genocide.