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Population transfers in the Soviet Union. Any good read on the subject? (lemmygrad.ml)

submitted 3 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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u/Ruanda1990 - originally from r/GenZhou
Hi, me again

I was looking into a thread about Israeli and US sottraction of the land of native population in the areas but one user pointed out Soviet era deportation of peoples, posting this article of Wikipedia and this other article

According to Wikipedia, soviet population transfers were "the forced transfer of various groups from the 1930s up to the 1950s ordered by Joseph Stalin". According to Wikipedia the "targets" were Kulaks, ethnic minorities and occupied territory citizens and were a form of "ethnic cleaning" and "genocide", which caused the death of approximately 800,000 to 1,500,000 people. The article starts mentioning the forced deportation of Kulaks (Dekulakization) and the deportation of soviet Koreans in 1937.

The article goes on talking about the deportation of the crimean Tatars, the deportation of Circassians, the deportations of Chechens and Ingush people, the deportation of Germans and Poles after WW2 and finally the deportation of Estonians and other baltic peoples after. Many of those supposed genocides are recognized by the EU and other post soviet states like Ukraine. 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."

What do you think of these articles? Do you recommend any good books on the subject from an ML perspective? Do you have anything to add to these claims? Thank you in advance and have a good day.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 years ago (1 children)

u/Assassin4nolan - originally from r/GenZhou
I'll try and get readings in a sec, but the general gist is that the USSR did move around various ethnic populations for various reasons, mostly during WW2 to try and prevent a 5th column (5th column in the USSR refers to potential fascist collaborators)

For instance, the USSR famously moved 1-2 (1.5 maybe) million Jews from Poland, baltics, and western USSR to the eastern USSR to put them out of the nazi war path, forseeing the holocaust.

Aswell as this, ethnic germans and chechens were reported as having high amounts of fascists and collaborators in their communities, and were moved in the tens/hundreds (depending on who you ask) of thousands across the USSR to move them away from the front. Molotov himself has made statements on why this was done and why he believed it justified at the time, while acknowledging excesses and collateral deaths.

I think the main problem with this topic is that both numbers of those moved, and of those who died while moving are unreliabally sourced by anti Soviet sources, there are probably reliable numbers if you can read Russian and dig deep enough, but anything that posits that Stalin perosnally, stalin alone, stalin malevolently, commanded something due to ethnic chauvinism is overtly an anti communist lie.

This book has a chapter (13) dedicated to deportations, I'm sure it has plenty enough direct document sources

http://www.readmarxeveryday.org/bloodlies/

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 years ago (1 children)

u/Ruanda1990 - originally from r/GenZhou
I don't feel entirely satisfied with this response, because you didn't address the casualty numbers

Whether it was intentional or not, for ethnonationalism or national security, the numbers are incredibly high and concerning. Unless you can disprove the numbers provided by Wikipedia, the deportations in the USSR are to be considered in fact a crime and a black mark in soviet history. According to Wikipedia hundreds of thousands of Koreans died during the transfer, likewise for Germans, Chechens and Ingush and Estonians etc... Amounting to millions of total deaths, so what about them?

You can't deport an entire people because "were reported as having high amounts of fascists and collaborators in their communities", it sounds like the US when they torture people in Guantanamo because they are "terrorists"...

I also need more precise numbers, not "and were moved in the tens/hundreds (depending on who you ask)"...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

u/dornish1919 - originally from r/GenZhou

You can't deport an entire people because "were reported as having high amounts of fascists and collaborators in their communities", it sounds like the US when they torture people in Guantanamo because they are "terrorists"...

As if the USSR didn't participate in a war where over 20 million civilians and soldiers died at the hands of fascists and fascist collaborators. I think they had every right to defend themselves from potential fifth columnists and collaborators which, by the way, absolutely did exist. This wasn't some conspiracy nor was this a group of extremists formally trained by the NKVD taking revenge for religious reasons. This was an organized group of ultranationalists who had swastikas on their flags. Certainly not everybody fell under that category but the Soviets felt at the time they couldn't tear the community apart without there being serious repercussions nor could they separate the men from their families without risk of their population decreasing. Therefore they chose to relocate.