The Gulag was the government agency in charge of the Soviet network of forced labour camps which were set up by order of Vladimir Lenin, reaching its peak during Joseph Stalin's rule from the 1930s to the early 1950s. English-language speakers also use the word gulag in reference to each of the forced-labor camps that existed in the Soviet Union, including the camps that existed in the post-Lenin era. The full official name of the agency changed several times.
The Volga Germans are ethnic Germans who settled and historically lived along the Volga River in the region of southeastern European Russia around Saratov and to the south. Recruited as immigrants to Russia in the 18th century, they were allowed to maintain their German culture, language, traditions and churches. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, many Volga Germans emigrated to the United States, Canada, Brazil and Argentina.
Katorga was a system of penal labor in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Prisoners were sent to remote penal colonies in vast uninhabited areas of Siberia and Russian Far East where voluntary settlers and workers were never available in sufficient numbers. The prisoners had to perform forced labor under harsh conditions.
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.
The Kalmyk deportations of 1943, codename Operation Ulusy was the Soviet deportation of more than 93,000 people of Kalmyk nationality, and non-Kalmyk women with Kalmyk husbands, on 28–31 December 1943. Families and individuals were forcibly relocated in cattle wagons to special settlements for forced labor in Siberia. Kalmyk women married to non-Kalmyk men were exempted from the deportations. The government's official reason for the deportation was an accusation of Axis collaboration during World War II based on the approximately 5,000 Kalmyks who fought in the Nazi-affiliated Kalmykian Cavalry Corps. The government refused to acknowledge that more than 23,000 Kalmyks served in the Red Army and fought against Axis forces at the same time.
NKVD troika or Special troika, in Soviet history, were the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs made up of three officials who issued sentences to people after simplified, speedy investigations and without a public and fair trial. The three members were judge and jury, though they themselves did not carry out the sentences they dealt. These commissions were employed as instruments of extrajudicial punishment introduced to supplement the Soviet legal system with a means for quick and secret execution or imprisonment. It began as an institution of the Cheka, then later became prominent again in the NKVD, when it was used during the Great Purge to execute many hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens. Defendants in the Troika's proceeding were typically not entitled to legal aid or the presumption of innocence. Convictions usually did not include information about the actual incriminating evidence and basically contained only information about indictment and sentencing. The outcome of such trials was often determined before it even began due to targeted numbers of citizens to be executed or imprisoned in Gulag prison camps.
The Sovietdeportations from Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina took place between late 1940 and 1951 and were part of Joseph Stalin's policy of political repression of the potential opposition to the Soviet power. The deported were typically moved to so-called "special settlements" (спецпоселения).
The Crimea Germans were ethnic German settlers who were invited to settle in the Crimea as part of the East Colonization.
The Great Purge of 1936-1938 in the Soviet Union can be roughly divided into four periods:
Dekulakization was the Soviet campaign of political repressions, including arrests, deportations, or executions of millions of kulaks and their families. Redistribution of farmland started in 1917 and lasted until 1933, but was most active in the 1929–1932 period of the first five-year plan. To facilitate the expropriations of farmland, the Soviet government announced the "liquidation of the kulaks as a class" on 27 December 1929, portraying kulaks as class enemies of the Soviet Union.
Forced labour was used extensively in the Soviet Union as a means of controlling Soviet citizens and foreigners. Forced labor also provided manpower for government projects and for reconstruction after the war. It began before the Gulag and Kolkhoz systems were established, although through these institutions, its scope and severity were increased. The conditions that accompanied forced labour were often harsh and could be deadly.
The Nazino tragedy was the mass murder and mass deportation of about 6,700 prisoners to Nazino Island, located on the Ob River in West Siberian Krai, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union, in May 1933. Sent to construct a "special settlement" and to cultivate the island, the deportees were abandoned with only scant supplies of flour for food, little to no tools, and virtually none of the clothing or shelter necessary to survive the harsh Siberian climate.
Kulak, also kurkul or golchomag, was the term which was used to describe peasants who owned over 8 acres of land towards the end of the Russian Empire. In the early Soviet Union, particularly in Soviet Russia and Azerbaijan, kulak became a vague reference to property ownership among peasants who were considered hesitant allies of the Bolshevik Revolution. In Ukraine during 1930–1931, there also existed a term of pidkurkulnyk ; these were considered "sub-kulaks".
The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, abbreviated NKVD, was the interior ministry of the Soviet Union.
In the Soviet Union of World War II, NKVD labor columns were militarized labor formations created from certain categories of population, both fully rightful Soviet citizens, as well as categories of limited civil rights. They were primarily from the people of ethnicities associated with the countries that fought against the Soviet Union. The vast majority of them were ethnic Germans. In later literature these formations were informally referred to as "labor army", in an analogy with Soviet Labor armies of 1920–1921, although this term was not used in official Soviet documents in reference to 1941–1946.
Robert Indrikovich Eikhe was a Latvian Bolshevik and Soviet politician who was the provincial head of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in Siberia during the collectivization of agriculture, until his arrest during the Great Purge.
Estimates of the number of deaths attributable to the Soviet revolutionary and dictator Joseph Stalin vary widely. The scholarly consensus affirms that archival materials declassified in 1991 contain irrefutable data far superior to sources used prior to 1991 such as statements from emigres and other informants.
The deportation of the Meskhetian Turks was the forced transfer by the Soviet government of the entire Meskhetian Turk population from the Meskheti region of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic to Central Asia on 14 November 1944. During the deportation, between 92,307 and 94,955 Meskhetian Turks were forcibly removed from 212 villages. They were packed into cattle wagons and mostly sent to the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. Members of other ethnic groups were also deported during the operation, including Kurds and Hemshins, bringing the total to approximately 115,000 evicted people. They were placed in special settlements where they were assigned to forced labor. The deportation and harsh conditions in exile caused between 12,589 to 50,000 deaths.
The Deportation of the Karachays, codenamed Operation Seagull, was the forced transfer by the Soviet government of the entire Karachay population of the North Caucasus to Central Asia, mostly the Kazakh and Kyrgyzstan SSR, in November 1943, during World War II. The expulsion was ordered by NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria after approval by Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin. Nearly 70,000 Karachays of the Caucasus were deported from their native land. The crime was a part of a Soviet forced settlement program and population transfer that affected several million members of non-Russian Soviet ethnic minorities between the 1930s and the 1950s.
Operation Vesna was a mass deportation of the armed opposition to the Soviet power in the occupied Lithuania carried out by the forces of the Ministry of State Security (MGB) on May 22–24, 1948.
