Mass repression in the Soviet Union |
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Economic repression |
Political repression |
Ideological repression |
Ethnic repression |
The following is a list of massacres that took place in the Soviet Union. For massacres that took place in countries that were once part of the Soviet Union, see the list of massacres in that country.
Name | Date | Location | Deaths | Notes |
---|---|---|---|---|
Execution of the Romanov family | 1918, July 16–17 | Yekaterinburg | 11 | Justified by the Bolsheviks as necessary to prevent the anti-communist White Army from rescuing them. The USSR repeatedly denied that Vladimir Lenin was responsible. |
White Terror | 1919–1923 | Nationwide | For the purposes of political repression and elimination of opposition to White rule. | |
Red Terror | 1918–1923 | Nationwide | 100,000 [3] – 1,300,000 [4] | For the purposes of political repression and elimination of opposition to Bolshevik rule. |
Tambov Rebellion | 19 August 1920 – June 1921 | Tambov Governorate | 15,000+ (figure of deaths due to execution only) | Total of 240,000 [5] rebels and civilians killed by communist forces. |
First Decossackization | 1919–1920s | Don and Kuban regions | Anywhere from 10,000 [6] executed to 300,000 - 500,000 both deported and killed [7] | The decossackization is sometimes described as a genocide of the Cossacks, [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] although this view is disputed, [13] with some historians asserting that this label is an exaggeration. [6] 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". [14] [6] |
1921–1923 famine in Ukraine | 1921–1923 | Ukraine | 200,000–1,000,000 | No systematic records of fatalities were then made. |
August Uprising | 1924 | Georgia | 7,000-10,000 [15] | After the failed 1924 August uprising in Georgia, Red army detachments exterminated entire families, including women and children, in a series of raids. [16] Mass executions also took place in prisons, [17] where people were shot without trial. Hundreds were shot directly in railway trucks, so that the dead bodies could be removed faster. [18] |
Kazakh famine of 1930–33 | 1930 - 1933 | Kazakhstan | 1.5 - 2.3 million [19] | Some historians and scholars consider that this famine amounted to genocide of the Kazakhs. [20] The Soviet authorities undertook a campaign of persecution against the nomads in the Kazakhs, believing that the destruction of the class was a worthy sacrifice for the collectivization of Kazakhstan. [21] [22] Europeans in Kazakhstan had disproportionate power in the party which has been argued as a cause of why indigenous nomads suffered the worst part of the collectivization process rather than the European sections of the country. [23] |
Holodomor | 1932c- 1933 | Ukraine | 3.5-3.9 Million [24] in Ukraine; in total: ~5.7 to 8.7 million | Scholars continue to debate "whether the man-made Soviet famine was a central act in a campaign of genocide, or whether it was designed to simply cow Ukrainian peasants into submission, drive them into the collectives and ensure a steady supply of grain for Soviet industrialization." [25] Whether the Holodomor is a genocide is a significant issue in modern politics and there is no international consensus on whether Soviet policies would fall under the legal definition of genocide. [26] [27] A number of governments, such as the United States and Canada, have recognized the Holodomor as an act of genocide. However, David R. Marples states such decisions are mostly based on emotions, or on pressure by local groups rather than hard evidence. [28] Robert Davies, Stephen Kotkin, and Stephen Wheatcroft reject the notion that Stalin intentionally wanted to kill the Ukrainians, but exacerbated the situation by enacting bad policies and ignorance of the problem, [29] [30] which, according to historian John Archibald Getty, was the overwhelming weight of opinion among scholars who studied the newly opened Soviet archives in 2000. [13] In contrast according to Simon Payaslian, the scholarly consensus classifies the Holodomor as a genocide. [31] |
Karatal Affair | 1930 | Karatal, Kazakhstan | 18-19 [32] | Kazakhs families were shot dead in their attempt to flee to China with some of the victims including women and children even being raped. [32] [33] |
Blacklisting of villages in Ukraine, Kazakhstan and the North Caucasus | 1932-1933 | Ukraine, Kazakhstan, North Caucasus (Kuban) | Unknown; hundreds of farms and dozens of districts affected. Some blacklisted areas [34] in Kharkiv could have death rates exceeding 40% [35] while in other areas such as Stalino blacklisting had no particular effect on mortality. [35] | 'Blacklisting, synonymous with a "board of infamy", was one of the elements of agitation-propaganda in the Soviet Union, and especially Ukraine and the ethnically Ukrainian[ citation needed ] Kuban region in the 1930s, coinciding with the Holodomor. Blacklisting was also used in Soviet Kazakhstan. [36] The blacklist system was formalized in 1932 by the November 20 decree "The Struggle against Kurkul Influence in Collective Farms". [37] A blacklisted collective farm, village, or raion (district) had its monetary loans and grain advances called in, stores closed, grain supplies, livestock and food confiscated as a "penalty" and was cut off from trade. Its Communist Party and collective farm committees were purged and subject to arrest, and their territory was forcibly cordoned off by the OGPU secret police. [37] In the end 37 out of 392 districts [38] along with at least 400 collective farms where put on the "black board" in Ukraine, more than half of the farms in the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast alone. [39] In 1932, 32 (out of less than 200) districts in Kazakhstan that did not meet grain production quotas were blacklisted. [36] |
Sealing of the Ukrainian borders during the Soviet famine | 1932-1933 | Ukraine | 150,000 | Joseph Stalin signed the January 1933 secret decree named "Preventing the Mass Exodus of Peasants who are Starving", restricting travel by peasants after requests for bread began in the Kuban and Ukraine; Soviet authorities blamed the exodus of peasants during the famine on anti-Soviet elements, saying that "like the outflow from Ukraine last year, was organized by the enemies of Soviet power." [40] During a single month in 1933, 219,460 people were either intercepted and escorted back or arrested and sentenced. [41] It has been estimated that there were some 150,000 excess deaths as a result of this policy, and one historian asserts that these deaths constitute a crime against humanity. [42] In contrast, historian Stephen Kotkin argues that the sealing of the Ukrainian borders caused by the internal passport system was in order to prevent the spread of famine-related diseases. [43] |
Searches for hidden grain in Ukraine | Early 1933 | Ukraine | Possibly 550,000 people had food confiscated from them and an unknown number of them died [44] | Between January and mid-April 1933, a factor contributing to a surge of deaths within certain regions of Ukraine during the period was the relentless search for alleged hidden grain by the confiscation of all foodstuffs from certain households, which Stalin implicitly approved of through a telegram he sent on the 1 January 1933 to the Ukrainian government reminding Ukrainian farmers of the severe penalties for not surrendering grain they may be hiding. [45] In his review of Anne Applebaum's book Mark Tauger gives a rough estimate of those affected by the search for hidden grain reserves: "In chapter 10 Applebaum describes the harsh searches that local personnel, often Ukrainian, imposed on villages, based on a Ukrainian memoir collection (222), and she presents many vivid anecdotes. Still she never explains how many people these actions affected. She cites a Ukrainian decree from November 1932 calling for 1100 brigades to be formed (229). If each of these 1100 brigades searched 100 households, and a peasant household had five people, then they took food from 550,000 people, out of 20 million, or about 2-3 percent." [44] |
Great purge | 1936–1938 | Nationwide | 681,692–1,200,000[ citation needed ] | Ordered by Joseph Stalin. |
Polish Operation of the NKVD | 1937, August– 1938, November | Nationwide | 111,091[ citation needed ] | Largest ethnic shooting during the Great Purge. Polish Nationalism was a very big movement in The USSR at the time, resulting in the deaths of many Polish Nationalists dubbed as "Fascists" by The Soviet Union. |
Sandarmokh | 1937-38 | Sandarmokh, Karelia | 9,000[ citation needed ] (Disputed) | Mass executions of prisoners. |
Vinnytsia massacre | 1937–1938 | Vinnytsia, Ukraine | 11,000[ citation needed ] (Disputed) | |
Katyn massacre | 1940, April–May | Katyn Forest, Kalinin and Kharkiv prisons | 22,000 [46] [ citation needed ] | Mass executions of Polish nationals by NKVD. |
Lunca massacre | 1941, 7 February | Lunka, Ukraine | 600 [47] | |
Fântâna Albă massacre | 1941, April 1 | Northern Bukovina | 44–3,000 [48] [49] | |
NKVD prisoner massacres | 1941, June–July | Occupied Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Baltic states | ~100,000[ citation needed ] | The NKVD prisoner massacres were a series of mass executions of political prisoners carried out by the NKVD, the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs of the Soviet Union, across Eastern Europe, primarily Poland, Ukraine, the Baltic states, and Bessarabia. After the start of the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, the NKVD troops were supposed to evacuate political prisoners into the interior of the Soviet Union, but the hasty retreat of the Red Army, the lack of transportation and other supplies and the general disregard for legal procedures often meant that the prisoners were executed. Approximately two thirds of the 150,000 prisoners [50] were murdered; most of the rest were transported into the interior of the Soviet Union, but some were abandoned in the prisons if there was no time to execute them, and others managed to escape. [51] |
Lychkovo massacre | July 18, 1941 | Lychkovo, Demyansky | Around 41 | Mass killing of 41 people, primarily children, by Nazi Germany [52] [53] |
Khatyn massacre | 1943, March 22 | Khatyn | Around 149 people, including 75 children under 16 years of age. [54] | Extermination of a whole village in Belarus by Nazi Germany |
Khaibakh massacre | 1944, February 27 | Chechnya, Soviet Union | 230–700 [55] [56] | During the deportation of the Chechen and Ingush peoples. Siberian winter was too hard to handle for the Chechens, who lived in a mostly hot climate. |
Soviet famine of 1946–1947 in Ukraine | 1946–1947 | Ukraine | 300,000–1,000,000 [57] | |
Kengir uprising | 1954, May 6 – June 26 | Kengir | 500–700[ citation needed ] | |
Novocherkassk massacre | 1962, June 1 – 2 | Novocherkassk, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union. | 26[ citation needed ] | |
1971 Krasnodar bus bombing | 1971, June 14 | Krasnodar | 10 | A homemade suitcase bomb placed near the gas tank by mentally ill Peter Volynsky exploded, killing 10 persons and wounding 20–90 others |
Aeroflot Flight 773 bombing | 1971, October 10 | Near Baranovo, Naro-Fominsky District | 25 | |
Aeroflot Flight 109 bombing | 1973, May 18 | Chita-Kadala International Airport, Chita Oblast | 81 | An Aeroflot Tupolev Tu-104B flying from Irkutsk Airport to Chita Airport exploded in flight after a passenger detonated a bomb when refused passage to China. The plane crashed east of Lake Baikal, killing all 82 passengers. [58] |
Letipea massacre | 1976, August 8 | Letipea, Estonian SSR | 11 (including the perpetrator) | A conflict between workers and drunken Soviet border guards escalated when one of the guards opened fire with a machine gun, killing multiple workers as well as one of his fellow guards |
1977 Moscow bombings | 1977, January 8 | Moscow | 7 | A bomb was detonated on a Moscow Metro train as it rolled into Kurskaya station. Seven people died and 37 were seriously injured |
Korean Air Lines Flight 007 | 1983, September 1 | Sea of Japan, near Moneron Island, west of Sakhalin Island | 269 | Korean Air Lines Flight 007 is shot down by Soviet Union Air Force Su-15 Flagon pilot Major Gennadi Osipovich near Moneron Island when the commercial aircraft enters Soviet airspace. All 269 on board are killed, including U.S. Congressman Larry McDonald. * September 6 – The Soviet Union admits to shooting down Korean Air Lines Flight 007, stating that the pilots did not know it was a civilian aircraft when it violated Soviet airspace. |
Aeroflot Flight 6833 Hijacking | 1983, November 18 | Tbilisi, Georgian SSR to Leningrad | 8 | 7 Georgians hijack Aeroflot Flight 6833 in hopes of escaping the Soviet Union. The siege ended with Soviet forces storming the plane and resulting in the deaths of 3 passengers, 2 crew members and 3 hijackers. The remaining hijackers were executed. |
Jeltoqsan massacre | 1986, December 16–19 | Alma-Ata, Kazakh SSR | 168-200 [59] | |
Sumgait massacre | 1988, February 26 – March 1 | Sumgait, Azerbaijan SSR | 32 | |
Aeroflot Flight 3739 Hijacking | 1988, March 8 | Veshchevo | 9 (including 5 of the hijackers) | A Tu-154B-2 (СССР-85413), was hijacked by the Ovechkin family, a family of 11 who were attempting to flee the Soviet Union and demanded to be flown to London. The flight engineer persuaded the hijackers to allow a stop in Finland to refuel, but the pilot tricked the hijackers by landing at Veshchevo instead. Realizing they had been tricked, one of the hijackers killed a flight attendant, Tamara Zharkaya. After landing, the aircraft was stormed and another hijacker blew himself up, starting a small fire in the tail that was quickly put out. Four hijackers committed suicide and three passengers also died during the takeover. Two surviving hijackers were tried and received prison sentences |
Kirovabad pogrom | 1988, November | Kirovabad, Azerbaijan SSR | 20-30[ citation needed ] | |
January Massacre | 1990, January 19–20 | Baku, Azerbaijan | 131-170 [60] [61] | Known also as the Black January (Qara Yanvar) |
Tbilisi Massacre | 1989, April 9 | Tbilisi, Georgia | 21 [62] [63] | hundreds of civilians wounded and killed with sapper spades [62] |
Vorkuta uprising | 1953, starting July 19 | Vorkuta | 42 [64] [65] [66] | |
1990 Dushanbe riots | 1990, February 12-14 | Dushanbe, Tajik SSR | 26 | Anti-Armenian and anti-communist unrest in Dushanbe, 565 injured. |
1990 Tbilisi–Agdam bus bombing | 1990, August 10 | Khanlar, Azerbaijan | 15–20 | A bus carrying about 60 passengers from Georgia's capital Tbilisi to Aghdam in Azerbaijan is bombed in Khanlar (now Goygol). The bombing was carried out by two ethnic Armenians named Armen Avanesyan and Mikhail Tatevosov, who were members of Vrezh, an underground militant anti-Azerbaijan group operated out of Rostov-on-Don. |
January Events | 1991, January 11–13 | Vilnius, Lithuania | 14 [67] | After Lithuania recently declared its independence, the USSR sent in the army to crackdown on the "nationalist government". Immediately, hundreds of thousands of unarmed Lithuanians went to the streets to defend the local parliament, TV tower, the radio station and other key buildings. 14 people died during the violence. In 2019, Lithuania sentenced 67 people for war crimes and crimes against humanity. [68] |
Patrikeyevo massacree | 1991, July 14 | Patrikeyevo, Bazarnosyzgansky District, Ulyanovsk Oblast | 11 | Privates Vitaly Semenikhin and Muradov killed 8 soldiers, 3 warrant officers and wounded 2 other soldiers. [69] [70] [71] [72] [73] |
The Soviet Union introduced the collectivization of its agricultural sector between 1928 and 1940 during the ascension of Joseph Stalin. It began during and was part of the first five-year plan. The policy aimed to integrate individual landholdings and labour into nominally collectively-controlled and openly or directly state-controlled farms: Kolkhozes and Sovkhozes accordingly. The Soviet leadership confidently expected that the replacement of individual peasant farms by collective ones would immediately increase the food supply for the urban population, the supply of raw materials for the processing industry, and agricultural exports via state-imposed quotas on individuals working on collective farms. Planners regarded collectivization as the solution to the crisis of agricultural distribution that had developed from 1927. This problem became more acute as the Soviet Union pressed ahead with its ambitious industrialization program, meaning that more food would be needed to keep up with urban demand.
The Holodomor, also known as the Ukrainian Famine, was a man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 that killed millions of Ukrainians. The Holodomor was part of the wider Soviet famine of 1930–1933 which affected the major grain-producing areas of the Soviet Union.
Throughout Russian history famines, droughts and crop failures occurred on the territory of Russia, the Russian Empire and the USSR on more or less regular basis. From the beginning of the 11th to the end of the 16th century, on the territory of Russia for every century there were 8 crop failures, which were repeated every 13 years, sometimes causing prolonged famine in a significant territory. The causes of the famine were different, from natural and economic and political crises; for example, the Great Famine of 1931–1933, colloquially called the Holodomor, the cause of which was the collectivization policy in the USSR, which affected the territory of the Volga region in Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan.
Douglas Tottle is a Canadian trade union activist and journalist, most notable for being the author of the book Fraud, Famine, and Fascism: The Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard, which is classified as Holodomor denial literature by the United States Library of Congress. The book describes the Holodomor, the 1932–1933 human-made famine in Soviet Ukraine, as a "myth", a hoax perpetrated by Ukrainian fascists and anti-Soviet organizations in the West. It cast the "fraud" as originated by the German Nazis, and perpetuated by the CIA, and the supposedly CIA-linked Harvard University.
A stanitsa or stanytsia was a historical administrative unit of a Cossack host, a type of Cossack polity that existed in the Russian Empire.
Vlas Yakovlevich Chubar was a Ukrainian Bolshevik revolutionary and a Soviet politician. Chubar was arrested during the Great Terror of 1937–38 and executed early in 1939.
De-Cossackization was the Bolshevik policy of systematic repression against the Cossacks in the former Russian Empire between 1919 and 1933, especially the Don and Kuban Cossacks in Russia, 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. Several scholars have categorised this as a form of genocide, whilst other historians have highly disputed this classification due to the contentious figures which range from "a few thousand to incredible claims of hundreds of thousands".
The Soviet famine of 1930–1933 was a famine in the major grain-producing areas of the Soviet Union, including Ukraine and different parts of Russia, including Northern Caucasus, Kuban Region, Volga Region, Kazakhstan, the South Urals, and West Siberia. Major causes include: the forced collectivization of agriculture as a part of the First Five-Year Plan and forced grain procurement from farmers. These factors in conjunction with a massive investment in heavy industry decreased the agricultural workforce. Estimates conclude that 5.7 to 8.7 million people died of hunger across the Soviet Union.
James E. Mace was an American historian, professor, and researcher of the Holodomor.
Holodomor denial is the claim that the Holodomor, a 1932–33 man-made famine that killed millions in Soviet Ukraine, did not occur or diminishing its scale and significance.
In 1932–1933, a man-made famine, known as the Holodomor, killed 3.3–5 million people in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, included in a total of 5.5–8.7 million killed by the broader Soviet famine of 1930–1933. At least 3.3 million ethnic Ukrainians died as a result of the famine in the USSR. Scholars debate whether there was an intent to starve millions of Ukrainians to death or not.
Collectivization in Ukraine, officially the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, was part of the policy of collectivization in the USSR and dekulakization that was pursued between 1928 and 1933 with the purpose to consolidate individual land and labour into collective farms called kolkhoz and to eliminate enemies of the working class. The idea of collective farms was seen by peasants as a revival of serfdom.
The causes of the Holodomor, which was a famine in Soviet Ukraine during 1932 and 1933, resulted in the death of around 3–5 million people. The factors and causes of the famine are the subject of scholarly and political debate, which include the Holodomor genocide question. Soviet historians, Stephen Wheatcroft and J. Arch Getty believe the famine was the unintended consequence of problems arising from Soviet agricultural collectivization which were designed to accelerate the program of industrialization in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin. Other academics conclude policies were intentionally designed to cause the famine. Some scholars and political leaders claim that the famine may be classified as a genocide under the definition of genocide that entered international law with the 1948 Genocide Convention.
The Holodomor was a 1932–33 man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine and adjacent Ukrainian-inhabited territories that killed millions of Ukrainians. Opinions and beliefs about the Holodomor vary widely among nations. It is considered a genocide by Ukraine, and Ukraine's Ministry of Foreign Affairs has lobbied for the famine to be considered a genocide internationally. By 2022, the Holodomor was recognized as a genocide by the parliaments of 23 countries and the European Parliament, and it is recognized as a part of the Soviet famine of 1932–1933 by Russia. As of June 2023, 35 countries recognise the Holodomor as a genocide.
Mass killings under communist regimes occurred through a variety of means during the 20th century, including executions, famine, deaths through forced labour, deportation, starvation, and imprisonment. Some of these events have been classified as genocides or crimes against humanity. Other terms have been used to describe these events, including classicide, democide, red holocaust, and politicide. The mass killings have been studied by authors and academics and several of them have postulated the potential causes of these killings along with the factors which were associated with them. Some authors have tabulated a total death toll, consisting of all of the excess deaths which cumulatively occurred under the rule of communist states, but these death toll estimates have been criticized. Most frequently, the states and events which are studied and included in death toll estimates are the Holodomor and the Great Purge in the Soviet Union, the Great Chinese Famine and the Cultural Revolution in the People's Republic of China, and the Cambodian genocide in Democratic Kampuchea.
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 podkulachnik ; these were considered "sub-kulaks".
The Kazakh famine of 1930–1933, also known as the Asharshylyk, was a famine during which approximately 1.5 million people died in the Kazakh Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic, then part of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic in the Soviet Union, of whom 1.3 million were ethnic Kazakhs. An estimated 38 to 42 percent of all Kazakhs died, the highest percentage of any ethnic group killed by the Soviet famine of 1930–1933. Other research estimates that as many as 2.3 million died. A committee created by the Kazakhstan parliament chaired by Historian Manash Kozybayev concluded that the famine was "a manifestation of the politics of genocide", with 1.75 million victims.
The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine is a 1986 book by British historian Robert Conquest published by the Oxford University Press. It was written with the assistance of historian James Mace, a junior fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, who started doing research for the book following the advice of the director of the institute. Conquest wrote the book in order "to register in the public consciousness of the West a knowledge of and feeling for major events, involving millions of people and millions of deaths, which took place within living memory."
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.
Genocide in Ukraine or Ukrainian genocide may refer to:
...the best estimates set the probable number of executions at about a hundred thousand.
Similarly, the overwhelming weight of opinion among scholars working in the new archives (including Courtois's co-editor Werth) is that the terrible famine of the 1930s was the result of Stalinist bungling and rigidity rather than some genocidal plan.
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: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)'TsK VKP/b/ and Sovnarkom have received information that in the Kuban and Ukraine a massive outflow of peasants 'for bread' has begun into Belorussia and the Central-Black Earth, Volga, Western, and Moscow regions. / TsK VKP/b/ and Sovnarkom do not doubt that the outflow of peasants, like the outflow from Ukraine last year, was organized by the enemies of Soviet power, the SRs and the agents of Poland, with the goal of agitation 'through the peasantry' ... TsK VKP/b/ and Sovnarkom order the OGPU of Belorussia and the Central-Black Earth, Middle Volga, Western and Moscow regions to immediately arrest all 'peasants' of Ukraine and the North Caucasus who have broken through into the north and, after separating out the counterrevolutionariy elements, to return the rest to their place of residence.' ... Molotov, Stalin
McFarland, 2007 reprint, (Google Books search inside). ISBN 0786429135.
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