4. Population Transfers within the Soviet Union – 6,000,000 People Displaced
As the dictator of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin sought to create a totalitarian society that controlled every aspect of its people’s lives, from how they worked to how they thought. While Lenin had not hesitated to persecute people he saw as class enemies in the 1920s, under Stalin a whole new segment of the Soviet population received this designation. More well-off peasant farmers were labeled “Kulaks,” considered to be enemies of the revolution, and in 1929 Stalin initiated a program called “Dekulakization.” This effort, which continued unabated until 1932, saw the deportation of 1,800,000 “Kulaks” to labor settlements in Siberia.
Stalin’s security apparatus would not just target so-called class enemies. Beginning in the 1930s it would move against ethnic groups classified as enemies as well. Stalin feared that the ethnically Polish population in the west might be loyal to the Polish state, newly created after the First World War, rather than the Soviet Union. Likewise, he questioned the support of the Korean population in the east.
Between 1932 and 1937 both ethnic groups would be removed from border regions. This effort would expand in 1939 when the Soviet Union joined Germany in invading Poland. This prompted a new wave of deportations of Poles as well as politically objectionable people from the Baltic states.
When the uneasy alliance between Stalin and Hitler crumbled with the German invasion the Soviets began to target ethnic Germans as well. A substantial German population then lived in the vicinity of the Black Sea. Stalin determined that they were a threat to security and would have to go. The Muslim populations of the same region, some of whom had supported the Germans during their advance to the Soviet Union, were also labeled enemies and sent to Siberia during and shortly after the war. All told, Stalin relocated some 6,000,000 people by force during his tenure.