Population transfer in the Soviet Union

Population transfer in the Soviet Union
Part of Dekulakization, Forced settlements in the Soviet Union, and World War II
The empty Crimean Tatar village of Üsküt, near Alushta, photo taken in 1945 after the complete deportation of its inhabitants
General routes of deportation during the Dekulakization across the Soviet Union in 1930–1931
Location	Soviet Union and occupied territories
Date	1930–1952
Target	Kulaks, peasants, ethnic minorities, and occupied territory citizens
Attack type	ethnic cleansing, population transfer, forced labor, genocide,[1][2][3][4] classicide
Deaths	~800,000[5]–1,500,000[6] in the USSR
Victims	6,000,000 Soviet citizens deported to forced settlements in the Soviet Union
Perpetrators	OGPU / NKVD
Motive	Russification,[7] colonialism,[8] cheap labor for forced settlements in the Soviet Union

From 1930 to 1952, the government of the Soviet Union, on the orders of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin under the direction of the NKVD official Lavrentiy Beria, forcibly transferred populations of various groups. These actions may be classified into the following broad categories: deportations of "anti-Soviet" categories of population (often classified as "enemies of the people"), deportations of entire nationalities, labor force transfer, and organized migrations in opposite directions to fill ethnically cleansed territories. Dekulakization marked the first time that an entire class was deported, whereas the deportation of Soviet Koreans in 1937 marked the precedent of a specific ethnic deportation of an entire nationality.^[9]

In most cases, their destinations were underpopulated remote areas (see Forced settlements in the Soviet Union). This includes deportations to the Soviet Union of non-Soviet citizens from countries outside the USSR. It has been estimated that, in their entirety, internal forced migrations affected at least 6 million people.^{[6][10][11][12]} 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.^[12]

Soviet archives documented 390,000^[13] deaths during kulak forced resettlement and up to 400,000 deaths of people deported to forced settlements during the 1940s;^[14] however, Nicolas Werth places overall deaths closer to some 1 to 1.5 million perishing as a result of the deportations.^[6] Contemporary historians classify these deportations as a crime against humanity and ethnic persecution. Two of these cases with the highest mortality rates were recognized as genocides–the deportation of the Crimean Tatars was declared as genocide by Ukraine and three other countries, whereas the deportation of the Chechens and Ingush was recognized 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."^[3]

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.^[15]