[4][5][6][7] Whereas Vladimir Lenin had supported and implemented policies of korenizatsiia (integration of non-Russian nationalities into the governments of their specific Soviet republics),[4] Joseph Stalin reversed much of the previous policies,[4] signing off on orders to deport and exile multiple ethnic-linguistic groups brandished as "traitors to the Fatherland", including the Balkars, Crimean Tatars, Chechens, Ingush, Karachays, Kalmyks, Koreans and Meskhetian Turks, with those, who survived the collective deportation to Siberia or Central Asia, were legally designated "special settlers", meaning that they were officially second-class citizens with few rights and were confined within small perimeters.
[13] After the deportation to Central Asia, some two thousand Soviet Koreans (or more) remained on northern Sakhalin for the expressed purpose of working on the Soviet-Japanese concessions (ie.
[14][12] Ironically, the Soviet Koreans found themselves working alongside Japanese laborers and managers because of their government's (Stalin's) economic policies and need for hard currency (the 1925 Convention).
For Chang, these events on N. Sakahlin (after the deportation order) debunk the myth that the Soviets were staunch and ideologically pure socialists.
Seemingly the Koreans could not catch a break from the clutches of the Japanese ("Asia for Asians, we will free you from non-Asian colonialism") nor the Soviets.
The USSR's policy towards Koreans demonstrated a widespread belief in primordialism—the idea that ethnic groups were permanent, ancient and unassimilable—which contributed to Soviet bureaucracy's paranoia on perceived disloyal nationalities.
showed their belief in "biological" nationality, a refusal to believe linguistic assimilation or religious conversion, and tropes of "yellow peril" where Koreans were conflated with Japan and perceived as conspiring or having questionable loyalty.
[12]: 20–25 Even as tsarist-era writers became less prominent in the Soviet Union, the belief in primordialism would continue through passportisation and Stalinist deportations of ethnicities, being expressed most overtly from the 1930s.
By the 1930s about 24,600 Chinese lived in the Russian Far East, and were targeted by Soviet policies that became increasingly repressive against diaspora nationalities, leading to deportation and exile.
The forcible deportation of the Crimean Tatars from Crimea was ordered by Stalin in 1944 and constituted a form of ethnic cleansing of the region as collective punishment for alleged collaboration with the Nazi occupation regime in Taurida Subdistrict during 1942–1943.
A large number of deportees (more than 100,000 according to a 1960s survey by Crimean Tatar activists) died from starvation or disease as a direct result of deportation.
While most deported ethnic groups were allowed to return to their homelands in the 1950s, a vast majority of Crimean Tatars were forced to remain in exile under the household registration system until 1989.
[23][24][25][26] The Soviet Union enacted a campaign of decossackization to end the existence of Cossacks, a social and ethnic group in Russia.
[34] Polish writer and commentator, Dr Tomasz Sommer, also refers to the operation as a genocide, along with Prof. Marek Jan Chodakiewicz among others.
Savin connected 1920s persecutions of Germans in the Soviet Union to that of other nationalities such as Koreans, Poles, Latvians, Finns, Chinese, Greeks, and others.
He stated that "long before Nazism came to power and the problem of a military threat emerged, the top leaders of the secret police of the USSR had already formulated the view of the German Diaspora as being a spy and sabotage base" starting as early as 1924, and focusing on the long standing Volga German minority.
[46] In practice, this meant heavily armed punitive operations carried out against Chechen "bandits" that failed to achieve forced assimilation, culminating in an ethnic cleansing operation in 1944, which involved the arrests and deportation of over 500,000 Chechens and Ingush from the Caucasus to Central Asia and the Kazakh SSR.
[47] The deportations of the Chechens and Ingush also involved the outright massacre of thousands of people, and severe conditions placed upon the deportees – they were put in unsealed train cars, with little to no food for a four-week journey during which many died from hunger and exhaustion.
[48] Like all other deported peoples, they were subject to the special settler regime upon arrival, significantly reducing their rights and making them second-class citizens.
[49] Meskhetian Turks are a Turkic people who originally inhabited Georgia before their internal exile by the Soviet Union.
Members of other ethnic groups were also deported during the operation, including Kurds and Hemshils (Armenian Muslims), bringing the total to approximately 150,000 evicted people.
[51] The Meskhetian Turks were one of the six ethnic groups from the Caucasus who were deported in 1943 and 1944 in their entirety by the Soviet secret police—the other five were the Chechens, the Ingush, the Balkars, the Karachays and the Kalmyks.
[70] Joseph Stalin emerged as dictator of the Soviet Union following a power struggle with Leon Trotsky after Lenin's death.
[75] Since 1936, in the show trial of "Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Center", the suspects, prominent Bolshevik leaders, were accused of hiding their Jewish origins under Slavic names.
[76][better source needed] After World War II, antisemitism was openly escalated as a campaign against the "rootless cosmopolitan"[77] (a euphemism for "Jew").
[84][better source needed] The Black Book of Soviet Jewry was a historical work written by Vasily Grossman and Ilya Ehrenburg and compiled by the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee to document Nazi crimes in the Holocaust.
[87][88] On 12 August 1952, Stalin's antisemitism became more visible as he ordered the execution of the most prominent Yiddish authors in the Soviet Union, in an event known as the Night of the Murdered Poets.
Stalin accused predominantly Jewish doctors of plotting against the state and planned show trials, dying before the campaign continued.
[93][94] On 22 February 1981, in a speech which lasted over 5 hours, General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev denounced antisemitism in the Soviet Union.
[98] The Soviet TASS news agency responded with a statement: "It is to be regretted that the meetings of the Ghanaian students which began in connection with their claims to the embassy of their country resulted in the disturbance of public order in Moscow streets.