Why did a state that promoted nations later deport them?

The short answer

• Fear of foreign enemies on the borders. Japan occupied Manchuria from 1931, Nazi Germany rose to power in 1933, and the two signed the Anti-Comintern Pact against communism in 1936. Soviet planners looked at Koreans near Japanese-ruled Korea and Poles and Germans near Poland and assumed that kinship across the border could turn them into allies of an invader. Leaders already alert to enemies could regard clearing the border as protection. That assumption opened the way to removing whole peoples.
• The habit of classifying people by nationality. National registration made a policy of removal administratively possible. The state had recorded nationality since the 1920s; from 1932 it appeared on a separate line in internal passports. At sixteen, children of mixed marriages had to choose one parent’s nationality. Officials could therefore identify citizens as Korean, German or Chechen, and the NKVD could organize removals in days. Records made for a policy that supported national cultures could be put to another use.
• The Nazi–Soviet Pact brought hostile new lands. After the August 1939 Pact, Soviet authorities governed eastern Poland, the Baltic states and Bessarabia. Their populations had not previously lived under Soviet rule. Among them were officers, officials, landowners and priests, and settlers whom Poland had placed on the land after 1921. The NKVD treated these groups as anti-Soviet by definition and deported them in 1940–41 to secure the new borders before a war both Stalin and Hitler expected.
• War made collective punishment seem justified. Germany invaded in 1941 and occupied the North Caucasus and Crimea in 1942–43. Cases of collaboration supplied a pretext for extending suspicion from individuals to entire peoples; wartime urgency silenced objections. The NKVD already had experience of mass removal, and Operation Lentil moved hundreds of thousands in days in February 1944. No court had to determine individual guilt when the state had assigned it to a whole nation.

What it changed

Homelands abolished and resettled. The deportations changed the political map as well as the population. The Volga German, Kalmyk and Chechen-Ingush republics and the Karachay region were abolished, their land divided among neighbors. In 1945 the Crimean republic became a province. Russian and Ukrainian settlers entered emptied villages and place names were changed; pale hatching recalls these abolished homelands. In the Caucasus, the division of land has left their borders disputed to this day.

Life as special settlers. A journey east was followed by years of control. Special settlers had to register regularly and needed permission to leave their villages; from 1948 escape carried a threat of twenty years of hard labor. Their national schools and newspapers disappeared, and their children were barred from many university fields. Restrictions began to be lifted only in 1955–56, after a generation had grown up under suspicion in its own country.

Rehabilitation, partial and late. Rehabilitation did not restore every people to the same position. In 1957 Chechens, Ingush, Kalmyks, Karachays and Balkars could return, and their autonomies were restored. Volga Germans were cleared of collective guilt in 1964 but never recovered their republic. Crimean Tatars were allowed home only in 1989. These differences shaped relations with Soviet and post-Soviet states for decades.

A model for postwar repression. The state used mass removal again after 1945 to deprive armed resistance in the annexed borderlands of support. The NKVD and its successor deported about 76,000 people from western Ukraine in October 1947 and about 95,000 from the Baltic states in March 1949. By removing the villages that fed the resistance, the operations broke it.