Against Their Will... The History and Geography of Forced Migrations in the USSR is a historical research book by Pavel Polyan (2001), published by the Memorial society. It is the first comprehensive study of all massive-scale forced migrations within the Soviet Union. The book is based on published materials and archival data made public. It contains a large number of summary tables.
During the later stages of World War II and the post-war period, Germans and Volksdeutsche fled and were expelled from various Eastern and Central European countries, including Czechoslovakia and the former German provinces of Silesia, Pomerania, and East Prussia, which were annexed by Poland and the Soviet Union. The idea to expel the Germans from the annexed territories was proposed by Winston Churchill, in conjunction with the Polish and Czechoslovak exile governments in London at least since 1942. Polish prime minister Tomasz Arciszewski supported the annexation of German territory, but opposed the idea of expulsion, wanting instead to naturalize the Germans as Polish citizens and to assimilate them.
A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the East European Germans, 1944–1950 is a 1994 non-fiction book written by Cuban-born American lawyer Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, former research fellow at MPG in Heidelberg, Germany. The work is based on a collection of testimonials from German civilians and Wehrmacht military personnel; and devoted to the expulsion of Germans after World War II from states previously occupied by Nazi Germany. It includes as well selected interviews with British and American politicians who participated at the Potsdam Conference, including Robert Murphy, Geoffrey Harrison, and Denis Allen. The book attempts to describe the crimes committed against the German nation by the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Yugoslavia at the end of World War II – as perceived by the expellees themselves and settlers brought in Heim ins Reich from the east.
Deportation is the expulsion of a person or group of people from a place or country. The term expulsion is often used as a synonym for deportation, though expulsion is more often used in the context of international law, while deportation is more used in national (municipal) law. Forced displacement or forced migration of an individual or a group may be caused by deportation, for example ethnic cleansing, and other reasons. A person who has been deported or is under sentence of deportation is called a deportee.
From 1930 to 1952, the government of the Soviet Union, on the orders of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin under the direction of the NKVD official Lavrentiy Beria, forcibly transferred populations of various groups. These actions may be classified into the following broad categories: deportations of "anti-Soviet" categories of population, deportations of entire nationalities, labor force transfer, and organized migrations in opposite directions to fill ethnically cleansed territories. Dekulakization marked the first time that an entire class was deported, whereas the deportation of Soviet Koreans in 1937 marked the precedent of a specific ethnic deportation of an entire nationality.
Forced settlements in the Soviet Union were the result of population transfers and were performed in a series of operations organized according to social class or nationality of the deported. Resettling of "enemy classes" such as prosperous peasants and entire populations by ethnicity was a method of political repression in the Soviet Union, although separate from the Gulag system of penal labor. Involuntary settlement played a role in the colonization of virgin lands of the Soviet Union. This role was specifically mentioned in the first Soviet decrees about involuntary labor camps.
Throughout the history of the Soviet Union, tens of millions of people suffered political repression, which was an instrument of the state since the October Revolution. It culminated during the Stalin era, then declined, but it continued to exist during the "Khrushchev Thaw", followed by increased persecution of Soviet dissidents during the Brezhnev era, and it did not cease to exist until late in Mikhail Gorbachev's rule when it was ended in keeping with his policies of glasnost and perestroika.
Order 7161 is the top secret USSR State Defense Committee Order no 7161ss of December 16, 1944 about mobilisation and internment of able-bodied Germans for reparation works in the USSR. It was part of the organisation of forced labor of Germans in the Soviet Union since the ending period of World War II.
Forced labor of Germans in the Soviet Union was considered by the Soviet Union to be part of German war reparations for the damage inflicted by Nazi Germany on the Soviet Union during the Axis-Soviet campaigns (1941-1945) of World War II. Soviet authorities deported German civilians from Germany and Eastern Europe to the USSR after World War II as forced laborers, while ethnic Germans living in the USSR were deported during World War II and conscripted for forced labor. German prisoners of war were also used as a source of forced labor during and after the war by the Soviet Union and by the Western Allies.
Pavel Mikhailovich Litvinov is a Russian-born U.S. physicist, writer, teacher, human rights activist and former Soviet-era dissident.
De-Cossackization was the Bolshevik policy of systematic repressions against Cossacks of the Russian Empire, especially of the Don and the Kuban, between 1919 and 1933 aimed at the elimination of the Cossacks as a distinct collectivity by exterminating the Cossack elite, coercing all other Cossacks into compliance and eliminating Cossack distinctness. The campaign began in March 1919 in response to growing Cossack insurgency. According to Nicolas Werth, one of the authors of The Black Book of Communism, Soviet leaders deciding to "eliminate, exterminate, and deport the population of a whole territory", which they had taken to calling the "Soviet Vendée". The de-Cossackization is sometimes described as a genocide of the Cossacks, although this view is disputed, with some historians asserting that this label is an exaggeration. The process has been described by scholar Peter Holquist as part of a "ruthless" and "radical attempt to eliminate undesirable social groups" that showed the Soviet regime's "dedication to social engineering". Throughout this period, the policy underwent significant modifications, which resulted in the "normalization" of Cossacks as a component part of Soviet society.
The Polish population transfers in 1944–1946 from the eastern half of prewar Poland, were the forced migrations of Poles toward the end and in the aftermath of World War II. These were the result of a Soviet Union policy that had been ratified by the main Allies of World War II. Similarly, the Soviet Union had enforced policies between 1939 and 1941 which targeted and expelled ethnic Poles residing in the Soviet zone of occupation following the Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland. The second wave of expulsions resulted from the retaking of Poland from the Wehrmacht by the Red Army. The USSR took over territory for its western republics.
Pavel Markovich Polian, pseudonym: Pavel Nerler is a Russian geographer and historian, and Doctor of Geographical Sciences with the Institute of Geography (1998) of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He authored over 300 publications and is most known for his research on the history and geography of forced migrations.
The Ohrid–Debar uprising was an uprising by the population in Western Macedonia, then Kingdom of Serbia, in September 1913. It was organized by the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) and Albania against the Serbian capture of the regions of Ohrid, Debar and Struga after the Balkan Wars (1912–13).
Operation North was the code name which was assigned by the USSR Ministry of State Security to the massive deportation of Jehovah's Witnesses and their families to Siberia in the Soviet Union on 1 and 8 April 1951.
The Soviet occupation of the Baltic states covers the period from the Soviet–Baltic mutual assistance pacts in 1939, to their invasion and annexation in 1940, to the mass deportations of 1941.
The border area is the area immediately adjacent to the border of a country. In addition to the informal definition, a border area may have a legal definition and delineation, both domestically and due to bilateral agreements. Reasons for legal definition of a border area include enhanced security and special provisions for the residents of border areas to cross the border.
Against Their Will may refer to:
Pavel Dolukhanov was a doctor of Geographical Sciences, Professor, Emeritus Professor (2002), Russian and British paleogeographer and archaeologist at the Institute of History of Material Culture (IHMC), RAS (1959–1989) and the University of Newcastle, United Kingdom (1990–2009), a specialist in archaeology and paleoenvironment of Northern Eurasia. He taught and made research at the Leningrad State University, the University of Newcastle (UK), the Institute of Paleontology in Paris and the International Research Center.
The Trial of the Four, also Galanskov–Ginzburg trial, was the 1968 trial of Yuri Galanskov, Alexander Ginzburg, Alexey Dobrovolsky and Vera Lahkova for their involvement in samizdat publications. The trial took place in Moscow City Court on January 8–12. All four defendants were sentenced to terms in labour camps. The trial played a major part in consolidating the emerging human rights movement in the Soviet Union.
The de-Tatarization of Crimea refers to the Soviet and Russian efforts to remove traces of the indigenous Crimean Tatar presence from the peninsula. De-Tatarization has manifested in various ways throughout history, from the full-scale deportation and exile of Crimean Tatars in 1944 to other measures such as the burning of Crimean Tatar books published in the 1920s and toponym renaming.
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