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Forced Migrations before the Second World War(1919–1939)
- Central European University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Forced Migrations before the Second World War (1919–1939) THE FIRST SOVIET DEPORTATIONS AND RESETTLEMENTS IN 1919–1929 There is a widely shared view that it was not before the 1930s that the Soviet authorities took up such measures as deportations. In reality, however, the very first years of the Soviet rule, while the Civil War was still in full swing, featured these harrowing and extreme practices. In the western part of the North Caucasus the events were largely predetermined by the long-lasting confrontation between the “white” Cossacks and Ossetians allied with them on the one hand, and—on the other—poor landless Vainakhs, who cherished naïve hopes of gaining advantage from land redistribution that could be brought about through their union with the Bolsheviks. The first order for population movement was issued by a congress of the Soviets of Terskaya Obl. in April–May 1918. The populations of four stanitsa settlements —Tarskaya, Sunzhenskaya, Vorontsovo-Dashkovskaya, and Feldmarshalskaya1—were assigned for removal. And on 24 January 1919—and this time at state level—the Russian CP Central Committee issued a directive on decossackization, which envisaged forced resettlement as one of the measures to be taken.2 In March 1920, after the Red Army gained full victory, Sovietization took severe forms. The Terek Cossacks were bound to be the first to be expelled as a response to their rebellions against the Soviet authorities. Residents of three stanitsa settlements located on the plain—Tarskaya, Sunzhenskaya, and Vorontsovo-Dashkovskaya (and apparently those of Tarsky khutor)—were resettled on 17 April 1920. Following an order issued by G. K. Ordzhonikidze (a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Caucasus Front) in October 1920, residents of the stanitsa settlements of Yermolayevskaya, Romanovskaya , Samashkinskaya, Mikhaylovskaya, and Kalinovskaya,3 aged between 18 and 50, faced the same fate (others were resettled too, but to nearby villages and settlements, but beyond a 50km radius of their previous places of residence). A total of 9 thousand families (or some 45 thousand persons) were removed to the Donbass region, and to the European north (in particular to Arkhangelsk Gub.). Any return of the Cossacks to their homelands was prosecuted.4 The vacated lands (some 98 thousand dessiatina of arable fields) were handed over to the Red Cossacks and to poor Chechen and Ingushetian highlanders, which stimulated the latter to move from the mountains to the plain and provide the most reliable backing to the regime in the Caucasus. It turned out, however, that the support for the regime did not imply any regard for its order: gangsterism became an ever-present phenomenon after the deportation of Cossacks.5 The traditional settlement in the mass of the Russian-speaking population in the Caucasus was thus disrupted. Later, the Cossack okrugs as administrative units (Sunzhensky, Kazachy, Zelenchuk, and Ardon Okrugs) were themselves disbanded. Remarkably, it was at that time, during the very first Soviet deportations, that toponymic6 repression was already in place too. If a stanitsa’s population was expelled, but the settlement itself was not destroyed, then it would be renamed and ascribed the status of aul. For example, in the Nazran Okrug stanitsa of Sunzhenskaya was renamed aul Akki-Yurt,Vorontsovo-Dashkovskaya stanitsa was renamed Tauzen-Yurt, Tarskaya stanitsa became Angusht, Tarsky khutor was turned into aul Sholkhi, Feldmarshalskaya stanitsa became Alkhaste. In Chechen Okrug, Mikhaylovskaya stanitsa was renamed aul Aslanbek , Samashkinskaya stanitsa Samashki, Romanovskaya stanitsa ZakanYurt , andYermolovskaya stanitsa became Alkhan-Yurt.7 The resettlement of well-off Russian peasant Cossacks from Semirechye was carried out in the spring and summer of the famine of 1921, in the course of a land reform that was implemented under the slogan of fighting “kulak chauvinism” and liquidating inequality between non-native European settlers and the natives (the former group was regarded historically as being an enemy of the latter). Those subjected to this resettlement had inhabited Semirechye, SyrDarya , Fergana, and Samarkand Obls. for a relatively short term, AGAINST THEIR WILL 60 [44.220.41.140] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 22:35 GMT) namely since the Stolypin agrarian reform, when over 438 families moved to Turkestan. These settlers founded some 300 peasant and Cossack villages, and engaged in some arbitrary seizures of the best areas of land. Resolutions dealing with this matter were issued by the Russian CP Central Committee on 29 June and 5 December 1920 and stipulated a set of deportation measures, and even the transporting of kulaks to concentration camps by way of “punitive sanction,” although...