Evacuation in the Soviet Union

Nearly sixteen million Soviet civilians and over 1,500 large factories were moved to areas in the middle or eastern part of the country by the end of 1941.

Despite early German successes in seizing control of large swaths of western USSR territory throughout 1943 and sketchy contingency plans by the Soviets for mobilization in the east, Soviet industries eventually outpaced the Germans in arms production; a total of 73,000 tanks, 82,000 aircraft and nearly 324,000 artillery pieces were distributed to the Red Army in their fight against the Axis powers by 1945.

[4] Stalin and the Communist Party's Central Committee knew that Hitler would eventually turn on the Soviet Union; plans were made before Operation Barbarossa, and were launched to begin the evacuation as a precaution.

Vasilii Prokhorovich Pronin, a Moscow party member on the city's evacuation committee, submitted a plan (rejected by Stalin) which would have removed about one million Muscovites.

Major cities which received evacuated citizens (as well as other resources and industry) included Kirov, Iaroslavl, Gorky, Ufa, Sverdlovsk, Cheliabinsk, and Kuibyshev.

Evacuees were told that they were allowed to bring personal belongings with them as long as they did not hinder the ability of authorities to get them from the evacuated site to the refugee centre.

[5] A large number of Soviet civilians who were evacuated were classified as deportees instead of evacuees, particularly those whom the party feared would switch loyalties and fight on the German side.

This trend, which began with a 1941 decree dealing with the removal of Volga Germans to Siberia and Kazakhstan, eventually grew to affect as many as 3.3 million people and 52 nationalities.

[6] Because the Volga Germans were one of two deported nationalities (the other was the Crimean Tatars) who were never returned to their homeland after the war ended, modern historians interpret this as ethnic cleansing.

[7] In 1956, over a decade after the end of the World War II, all the groups except the Volga Germans and the Crimean Tatars were resettled in their native lands.

It is believed that the Volga Germans were not permitted to be resettled because the area had already been settled by other Soviet civilians since the end of the war.

[10] After the collapse of the Soviet Union, about 250,000 Crimean Tatars returned and settled in Crimea (which was part of Ukraine until its 2014 annexation by the Russian Federation).

Short-sighted preparation in the overall mobilization of the Western front led many in these councils to scour Moscow libraries for resources pertaining to evacuations during the First World War.

The Urals, in central Russia, developed an impressive array of iron and steel factories as well as agriculture and chemical plants.

The U.S. military attaché reported significant transfers of machinery and men from the Moscow area to the east in late 1940 and early 1941.

They needed to avoid past issues such as hindered military movement, communicable disease, demoralization of units, and strains on the economy.

[25] With a shortage of labor, the Commissariat of Justice and the Council of People's Commissars forced evacuees to work in enterprises, organizations and on collective farms to help the war effort.

Problems arose with worker motivation; some were unhappy with their wages when they returned to their homes, saying that the government paid almost as much in subsidies as they would earn from working.

After the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, the USSR and Germany took over large portions of Eastern Europe (including Poland, the Baltic region, and parts of Romania).

The USSR occupied and annexed eastern Romania, including Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina (where an estimated 250,000 Jews lived at the time), but also the Hertsa region.

Many underestimated the dangers of the impending Nazi war machine, and were murdered; Jews who fled to Russia from Germany, however, said "better Stalin than Hitler".

[29] During World War II, an estimated 700,000 to 3,000,000 Jews were killed in the Nazi-occupied territories of the Soviet Union by the Einsatzgruppen.

Although the Soviet Union did not keep records specifically related to Jews, an estimated 300,000 people were deported from the territories annexed from Romania into locations such as Kazakhstan;[30] it is unknown how many were Jewish.

He read history books (including a biography of Mikhail Kutuzov, who had abandoned Moscow during the French invasion of Russia in 1812) and consulted those close to him.