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The wholesale removal of potentially trouble-making ethnic groups was a technique used consistently by Joseph Stalin during his career: Poles (1934), Koreans (1937), Ukrainians, Jews, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians (1940-1941 and 1945-1949), Volga Germans (1941), Balkars, Chechens, Ingushs (1943), Kalmyks (1944), Meskhetian Turks (1944), Crimean Tatars (18 May 1944). Large numbers of kulaks regardless their nationality were resettled to Siberia and Central Asia.
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. Over 1.5 million people were deported to Siberia and the Central Asian republics. Separatism, resistance to Soviet rule and collaboration with the invading Germans were cited as the main official reasons for the deportations, although an ambition to ethnically cleanse regions may have also been a factor, epecially in the case of Crimean Tatars.
The deportations started with Poles from Belarus, Ukraine and European Russia (see Polish minority in Soviet Union) 1932-1936. Koreans in the Russian Far East were deported in 1937. Volga Germans and seven nationalities of the Crimea and the northern Caucasus were deported: the Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Karachays, and Meskhetian Turks. Other minorities evicted from the Black Sea coastal region included Bulgarians, Greeks, and Armenians. From the newly conquered Eastern Poland 400,000 people were deported. The same followed in the Baltic republics of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia (over 200,000 people were deported). The death toll from these deportations was huge: 60% of the Baltic deportees were estimated to have perished, and nearly half of the entire Crimean Tatar population died of hunger in the first eighteen months after being banished from their homeland. Overall, 40% of those deported are estimated to have perished.
After the WWII, the population of East Prussia was replaced by the Soviet one, mainly by Russians.
In February 1956, Nikita Khrushchev in his speeech On the Personality Cult and its Consequences condemned the deportations as a violation of Leninist principles, asserting that the Ukrainians avoided such a fate "only because there were too many of them and there was no place to which to deport them." His government reversed most of Stalin's deportations, although it was not until as late as 1991 that the Crimean Tatars, Meskhs and Volga Germans were allowed to return en masse to their homelands. The deportations had a profound effect on the non-Russian peoples of the Soviet Union and they are still a major political issue - the memory of the deportations played a major part in the separatist movements in Tatarstan, Chechnya and the Baltic republics.
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