New Information about the Deportation of Ethnic Groups in the USSR during World War 2

Abstract

During World War 2 the Soviet Germans, ethnic groups from the North Caucasus, the Crimea, and Georgia, and also the Kalmyks, were deported from their homelands to Kazakhstan, Central Asia and Siberia, where they were subjected to harsh treatment under the so-called ‘special settlement’ regime.¹ Despite their public rehabilitation after Stalin’s death, these people (spetsposelentsy) did not have their rights fully restored. The consequences of the deportations are still felt today, contributing to inter-ethnic tensions and provoking territorial disputes. At the end of 1990 a number of Soviet scholarly journals started publishing information, taken from the NKVD files in the Central State Archives of the October Revolution (TsGAOR) that deal with the deportations. This material helps to clarify the number of people who perished as a result of the deportations and provides previously unknown details as to the manner in which the deportations were organised.

The author wishes to thank Ann Sheehy, senior research analyst at the RFE/RL Research Institute in Munich, for much information used in this article, and for her valuable advice.