Political Repression in The Soviet Union - Genocide, Ethnic Cleansing, and Population Transfers

Genocide, Ethnic Cleansing, and Population Transfers

In Soviet Union, political repressions targeted not only individual persons, but also whole ethnic, social, religious, and other categories of population.

Population transfer in the Soviet Union may be classified into the following broad categories: deportations of "anti-Soviet" categories of population, often classified as "enemies of workers"; deportations of nationalities; labor force transfer; and organized migrations in opposite directions to fill the ethnically cleansed territories. In most cases their destinations were underpopulated remote areas (see Involuntary settlements in the Soviet Union).

Entire nations and ethnic groups were collectively punished by the Soviet Government for alleged collaboration with the enemy during World War II. At least nine distinct ethnic-linguistic groups, including ethnic Germans, ethnic Greeks, ethnic Poles, Crimean Tatars, Balkars, Chechens, and Kalmyks, were deported to remote unpopulated areas of Siberia (see sybirak) and Kazakhstan. Population transfer in the Soviet Union led to millions of deaths from the inflicted hardships. Koreans and Romanians were also deported. Mass operations of the NKVD were needed to deport hundreds of thousands of people.

The Soviet famine of 1932-1933 was severely aggravated by the actions of the government of the Soviet Union, such as the confiscation of food, the lack of meat, planned delivery limitations that ignored the famine, blocking the migration of its starving population, and the suppression of the information about the famine, all of which prevented any organized relief effort. This led to deaths of millions of people in the affected area. The overall number of the 1932-1933 famine victims Soviet-wide is variously estimated as 6-7 million or 6-8 million.