The historiography of forced migration within the former USSR continues to grow apace. Pavel Polian’s latest work marks a significant advance in a field first ploughed by the likes of former Soviet dissident Aleksandr Nekrich^[1] and the infamous Cold Warrior Robert Conquest.^[2] In part this has been a product of new archival access, and in part a consequence of a more broad-based and holistic approach to the study of the subject, itself inspired to some degree by the end of the Soviet Union and the consequent need to place the USSR in its overall twentieth century context. Perhaps the most admirable aspect of this fine work is its refusal to see forced migration as a symbol of Soviet “exceptionalism,” as so many others have, but to place it instead within its global context. Forced migration has both a long historical tradition behind it (one need think only of the fate of the Scottish Highlanders in the eighteenth century or of the Muslims of Andalusia after 1492) and a particular place in the history of twentieth-century authoritarian modernization. Polian makes effective use of the work of Peter Holquist to point out both the strong imperial as well as pan-European roots of forced migration before 1917 (both Tsarist Russia and Imperial Germany before 1914 first tinkered with forced migration in their various colonies, and then employed it on a massive scale in eastern Europe during the First World War).^[3] The American scholar Eric Lohr in particular has recently significantly advanced general studies on this point, pointing to the considerable parallels and areas of continuity between the later Soviet government and the actions and thinking of both the imperial and provisional governments of Russia in 1914–1918.^[4] Polian himself also makes effective comparisons between the forced migrations carried out within the Soviet Union after 1917 and those conducted by contemporaneous authoritarian regimes in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s – with Imperial Japan for example, which both pressed some four million Koreans, including children, into slave labour during the Second World War on the Korean peninsula itself, and engaged in the widespread forced migration of Koreans to Japan and other parts of the “Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.” Some 444,000 were ultimately compulsorily moved from Korea to other regions in 1939-1944 (P. 39). Perhaps one of the largest forced migrations to occur in this period happened, of course, under international mandate and with the full consent of the international community after the Second World War, in the grand geopolitical re-ordering of post-war eastern Europe. This began as a voluntary flight of ethnic Germans fleeing from the advancing Red Army in 1944 but culminated in 1945–1946 in a formally organized and internationally monitored “ethnic cleansing” of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary of all German citizens, in the course of which some 400,000 people lost their lives. Brutal though this process frequently was, it undoubtedly helped ensure the final elimination of those diasporas that had previously fuelled conflict and major war in Europe for decades prior to this. This event nonetheless remains a major blank spot in most existing Western historiography of the Second World War, which appears uncomfortable and even vaguely embarrassed by European and American complicity in forced migration, such an uncivilized and barbaric practice in Western eyes. Polian is to be congratulated for not shrinking from analysis of it here.
The great majority of this work, however, focuses solidly on the particular characteristics of forced migration within the Soviet Union between 1919 and the rehabilitation processes that began in the 1950s and which continue even today. Polian follows Terry Martin in identifying clearly distinct periods within this general policy, in which diverse motivations were at play at various times in different regions.^[5] The deportation of the Terek Cossack Host in 1920, for example, was an intrinsic part of the Soviet state-building process, designed to facilitate the creation of viable mountaineer administrative districts in the North Caucasus in general and to defuse the land question that had created ethnic conflict in the Terek oblast’ in particular ever since the 1860s. Tsarist ethnic policies in the region, which had entailed the migration of nearly a million mountaineers abroad by the late 1860s and the colonization of suddenly barren land by the Cossacks, were now being deliberately reversed by a regime eager not to be associated with Great Russian chauvinism and nationalism. By contrast, the deportation on a large scale of ethnic Poles and Germans from the western borderlands in the 1930s was a product of traditional state security concerns; the movement in 1936 of ethnic Poles and Germans from an 800-meter territorial strip along the then Polish-Ukrainian border to Kazakhstan instead was a direct product of a desire by the Soviet military to reinforce and render more secure its western border districts. The construction of aerodromes and fortified border zones was deemed to be under threat if observed by an ethnic group with relatives living on both sides of the Soviet border; consequently 35,820 Poles were deported to Kazakhstan in June 1935 alone and in 1937, again in connection with the creation of new border security zones, and 1,325 Kurds were resettled from Armenia and Azerbaijan to Kirgizia and Kazakhstan (Pp. 88-90). The Koreans meanwhile suffered the dubious honor of being the first group in the Soviet Union to undergo complete deportation on the basis of ethnicity. According to the census of 1937, 167,259 Koreans lived in the Russian Far East and practically all of them underwent forced migration between 1937 and 1938, the majority being moved in train carriages to Kazakhstan. Soviet migratory policy in general meanwhile was never actually genocidal in intent, but it was understandably interpreted as such by many of the nationalities that experienced it. This was largely due to the haste that characterized the implementation of the migrations themselves (the two weeks allotted to move 1,115 Koreans to Northern Sakhalin in October 1937 being typical) and the near-total lack of provision provided those moving both en route and later when they arrived in their newly assigned homelands in terms of basic accommodation, clothing, and food. In this respect, the forced migration of whole ethnicities reflected the more general spirit of the times; industrialization in general in the Soviet Union between 1928 and 1938 was marked by insanely ambitious timetables, slipshod technical practices, and lax attention to basic safety standards. High death rates from preventable causes were regarded by the Soviet leadership at the time as an inevitable by-product of “defensive modernization.”
An altogether different category must be assigned, however, to those peoples whose movement was conceived and conducted as deliberate punishment; both Russian and Western attention in recent years has understandably focused on the Caucasus peoples – the Chechens, Karachai, Kalymks, Balkar, and Meskhetian Turks – who suffered the misfortune to be placed in this category in 1943–1944. In the light of the First and Second Chechen conflicts, a fairly lively literature around the punishment of the Chechens in 1944 has sprung up in the West, the 1944 deportations becoming a central Western explanatory myth for the conflicts that rent Chechnya itself apart after 1994. First originated by Alexander Bennigsen, the Chechen йmigrй historian Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov, and Marie Bennigsen Broxup in the 1960s-80s, this myth has found its most recent reiteration in the work of the Israeli scholar Moshe Gammer, who repeats uncritically the claims of Chechen extremists that they have been engaged in a three-hundred-year-long war for national independence against the Russians.^[6] Relatively few in the West appear brave enough to question or undermine this nationalistic myth for the poppycock that it clearly is; so far by contrast the only relatively sophisticated explanations for events in Chechnya in the 1990s have come instead from Russian ethnographers and anthropologists, who rightly identify the process of modernization as a whole as of far more critical import to understanding current events.^[7]
Pavel Polian’s work marks a considerable step forward in bringing together in one place the assembled facts and figures, so far as they are presently known, on forced migration within the Soviet Union. Particularly valuable are the efforts to map and statistically quantify the scale and direction of the numerous forced migrations under review via maps, graphs, and various tables. This work will undoubtedly become a standard reference work for future historians of Soviet modernization and nationality policies in the 1920s and 30s, as well as for scholars of human migration in general.