[21] The partial removal of potentially trouble-making ethnic groups was a technique used consistently by Joseph Stalin during his government;[22] between 1935 and 1938 alone, at least ten different nationalities were deported.

[26] Looking at the entire period of Stalin's rule, one can list: Poles (1939–1941 and 1944–1945), Kola Norwegians (1940–1942), Romanians (1941 and 1944–1953), Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians (1941 and 1945–1949), Volga Germans (1941–1945), Ingrian Finns (1929–1931 and 1935–1939), Finnish people in Karelia (1940–1941, 1944), Crimean Tatars, Crimean Greeks (1944) and Caucasus Greeks (1949–50), Kalmyks, Balkars, Italians of Crimea, Karachays, Meskhetian Turks, Karapapaks, Far East Koreans (1937), Chechens and Ingushs (1944).

Shortly before, during and immediately after World War II, Stalin conducted a series of deportations on a huge scale which profoundly affected the ethnic map of the Soviet Union.

[29] Lavrentiy Beria, the Chief of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, was responsible for organizing and executing numerous deportations of ethnic minorities during that time.

According to the Soviets, of approximately 183,000 Crimean Tatars, 20,000 or 10% of the entire population served in German battalions,[41] though the figure in question is derived from a single SS report on how many individuals were expected to be willing to collaborate and is contradicted by official statistical records, which suggest the number was actually around 3,000, with only 800 being volunteers.

It was only the hurried withdrawal of the Germans from the Caucasus after the battle of Stalingrad that prevented their organizing the Moslem people for effective anti-Soviet action.

"[45] Volga Germans[46] and seven (non-Slavic) nationalities of the Crimea and the northern Caucasus were deported: the Crimean Tatars,[47] Kalmyks, Chechens,[48] Ingush, Balkars, Karachays, and Meskhetian Turks.

All Crimean Tatars were deported en masse, in a form of collective punishment, on 18 May 1944 as special settlers to Uzbekistan and other distant parts of the Soviet Union.

Other minorities evicted from the Black Sea coastal region included Bulgarians, Crimean Greeks, Romanians and Armenians.

[15] By January 1953, there were 988,373 special settlers residing in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, including 444,005 Germans, 244,674 Chechens, 95,241 Koreans, 80,844 Ingush, and the others.

[51] After World War II, the German population of the Kaliningrad Oblast, formerly East Prussia, was expelled and the depopulated area resettled by Soviet citizens, mainly by Russians.

Allied authorities ordered their military forces in Europe to deport to the Soviet Union millions of former residents of the USSR (some of whom collaborated with the Germans), including numerous people who had left Russia and established different citizenships for up to decades prior.

[56] At the end of World War II, more than 5 million "displaced people" from the Soviet Union survived in German captivity.

[60][61] On 17 January 1956, a Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet was issued on lifting restrictions on the Poles evicted in 1936; on 17 March 1956 for the Kalmyks; 27 March for the Greeks, Bulgarians, and Armenians; 18 April for the Crimean Tatars, Balkars, Meskhetian Turks, Kurds, and Hemshins; 16 July for the Chechens, Ingush, and Karachais (all without the right to return to their homeland).

[62]In 1957 and 1958, the national autonomies of Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Karachais, and Balkars were restored; these peoples were allowed to return to their historical territories.

The return of repressed peoples was not carried out without difficulties, which both then and subsequently led to national conflicts (thus, clashes began between returning Chechens and the Russians who settled during their exile in the Grozny Oblast; Ingush in the Prigorodny District, populated by Ossetians and transferred to the North Ossetian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic).

A decree that completely lifted restrictions on freedom of movement and confirmed the right of Germans to return to the places they were expelled was adopted in 1972.

[63] According to a secret Soviet Ministry of Interior report dated December 1965, for the period 1940–1953, 46,000 people were deported from Moldova, 61,000 from Belarus, 571,000 from Ukraine, 119,000 from Lithuania, 53,000 from Latvia, and 33,000 from Estonia.

15 years after recognition in the USSR, in February 2004, the European Parliament also recognized the deportation of Chechens and Ingush in 1944 as an act of genocide.

[67] On 24 September 2012, deputies from United Russia introduced a bill on additional assistance to representatives of repressed peoples to the State Duma.

[78] French historian and expert on communist studies Nicolas Werth,[79] German historian Philipp Ther,[80] Professor Anthony James Joes,[81] American journalist Eric Margolis,[82] Canadian political scientist Adam Jones,[83] professor of Islamic History at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Brian Glyn Williams,[84] scholars Michael Fredholm[85] and Fanny E. Bryan[86] also considered the population transfers of the Chechens and Ingush as the crime of genocide.

[91] Canadian Parliament passed a motion on 10 June 2019, recognizing the Crimean Tatar deportation of 1944 (Sürgünlik) as a genocide perpetrated by Soviet dictator Stalin, designating 18 May to be a day of remembrance.

This view has been supported by many of the major historians of the USSR, those in Russian and even Korean studies such as Fitzpatrick, Suny, F. Hirsch, A. Weiner and A.

Park, in her archival work, found very little evidence that Koreans had proven or were able to prove their loyalties beyond a shadow of a doubt, thus 'necessitating' deportation from the border areas.

[113][114] After the "primordialist turn" by the Stalinist regime in the mid-1930s, the Soviet Greeks, Finns, Poles, Chinese, Koreans, Germans, Crimean Tatars and the other deported peoples were seen to have loyalties to their titular nations (or to non-Soviet polities) as the Soviet state in the 1930s regarded nationality (ethnicity) and political loyalty (ideology) as a primordial equivalents.

The "Russians" and other Eastern Slavs are coming into the territory of the natives (the deported peoples) who were simply Soviet national minorities.

[119][120] John J. Stephan called the "erasure" of Chinese and Korean history (state-formation, cultural contributions, peoples) to the region by the USSR and Russia—the intentional "genesis of a 'blank spot.'

Finally, on the other end of the "primordial" spectrum, the Eastern Slavs (Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians) were seen as inherently more loyal and more representative of the Soviet people.

The causes for such demographic catastrophe lie in harsh climates of Siberia and Kazakhstan, disease, malnutrition, work exploitation which lasted for up to 12 hours daily as well as the lack of any kind of appropriate housing or accommodation for the deported people.

[126] [137] Additionally, around 300,000–360,000 Germans deported after World War II from occupied territories in Eastern Europe perished,[15] but the Soviet Army was not the sole perpetrator of these expulsions, since other European countries also participated.