Migration history
Arrival
The first Pole to travel to the territory which today makes up Kazakhstan was probably Benedict of Poland, sent as part of the delegation of Pope Innocent IV to the Khagan Güyük of the Mongol Empire. [4]
Migration of Poles to Kazakhstan, largely of an involuntary character, began soon after the Kazakh Khanate came under the control of the Russians. Captured participants of the 1830-1831 November Uprising and the 1863-1865 January Uprising, as well as members of clandestine organisations, were sent into exile throughout the Russian Empire. By the time of the Russian Empire Census of 1897, there were already 11,579 Poles in Central Asia, 90 per cent male. [5] Poles both inside and outside of the Soviet Union would later get caught up in Stalinist population transfers in the late 1930s. At least 250,000 Poles from the Polish National Districts of the Soviet Union were deported to the Kazakh SSR in 1930s; among those, as many as 100,000 did not survive the first winter in the country. [6]
After the Soviet invasion of Poland, another 150,000 Poles were deported from eastern Polish territories to Kazakhstan; 80% of these were women and children, as the adult men of their community were typically absent due to army service. After the end of the war, people who had been Polish citizens before September 1, 1939 were allowed to repatriate to Poland; however, no provision was made for earlier deportees to leave Kazakhstan. [7] The 1970 Soviet census found 61,400 Poles (0.5% of the population) in the Kazakh SSR, while the 1979 census found 61,100 (0.4%) and the 1989 census 59,400 (0.4%). [8] However, Polish scholars believe these numbers to be underestimates, due to the reluctance of Poles to register their true ethnicity in their official documentation and the relative ease of changing one's declared nationality to another, such as Ukrainian or Russian; they have given numbers ranging from 100,000 to 400,000. [9]
Post-Soviet emigration
When communist rule in Poland ended, there was great political enthusiasm on the part of the new Polish government for facilitating the repatriation of members of the Polish diaspora. However, up until 1996, there was no formal system for controlling the migration of ethnic Poles from the Soviet Union to Poland. Roughly 1,500 Poles from Kazakhstan came to Poland during this period, often on tourist visas. They were typically granted residency permits, but only a few managed to obtain Polish citizenship. However, legal reforms in 1996 and again in 1998 regularised the immigration procedures, allowing any ethnic Pole from abroad to settle in the country upon receiving an invitation from a company or association. [10] Prospective emigrants were required to apply at the Polish consulate in Kazakhstan with documentary proof of their Polish ancestry. [11]
In a 1996-1998 academic survey, Poles who had emigrated from Kazakhstan cited a number of reasons for their departure, including the decreased social status of non-Kazakh-speakers in the newly independent country, the local economic crisis which saw many salaries go unpaid, and the desire to avoid service in the Kazakhstani army. Some also claimed to survey takers that their female relatives were in danger of bride kidnapping. [12]
Due to their experience with agriculture on kolkhoz during communism, many of the Poles in Kazakhstan were able to obtain invitations from rural communes in Poland, which hoped to revive farms that would otherwise be sold to German expatriates. However, in practise many were specialised with only one type of skill, and lacked familiarity with other aspects of farm operation that they would need in their new lives in Poland. [13] In other cases, Polish students came to Kazakhstan with grants from the Polish Ministry of Education (100 each year), and later invited their family members to join them. [14] There were also reports of people from Poland travelling to Kazakhstan and selling invitations at a high price. [15] The number of repatriates might be as large as 20,000, and is partially reflected by a decrease in the Kazakhstan census' recorded number of Poles in the country. [16]
The Polish minority in the Soviet Union are Polish diaspora who used to reside near or within the borders of the Soviet Union before its dissolution. Some of them continued to live in the post-Soviet states, most notably in Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine, the areas historically associated with the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, as well as in Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan among others.
Mass evacuation, forced displacement, expulsion, and deportation of millions of people took place across most countries involved in World War II. A number of these phenomena were categorised as violations of fundamental human values and norms by the Nuremberg Tribunal after the war ended. The mass movement of people – most of them refugees – had either been caused by the hostilities, or enforced by the former Axis and the Allied powers based on ideologies of race and ethnicity, culminating in the postwar border changes enacted by international settlements. The refugee crisis created across formerly occupied territories in World War II provided the context for much of the new international refugee and global human rights architecture existing today.
The Polish diaspora comprises Poles and people of Polish heritage or origin who live outside Poland. The Polish diaspora is also known in modern Polish as Polonia, the name for Poland in Latin and many Romance languages.
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 city of Vilnius, now the capital of Lithuania, and its surrounding region has been under various states. The Vilnius Region has been part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania from the Lithuanian state's founding in the late Middle Ages to 1569, then since 1569 to 1795 Vilnius region was part of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. From then, the region was occupied by the Russian Empire until 1915, when the German Empire invaded it. After 1918 and throughout the Lithuanian Wars of Independence, Vilnius was disputed between the Republic of Lithuania and the Second Polish Republic. After the city was seized by the Republic of Central Lithuania with Żeligowski's Mutiny, the city was part of Poland throughout the Interwar period. Regardless, Lithuania claimed Vilnius as its capital. During World War II, the city changed hands many times, and the German occupation resulting in the destruction of Jews in Lithuania. From 1945 to 1990, Vilnius was the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic's capital. From the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Vilnius has been part of Lithuania.
Vilnius Region is the territory in present-day Lithuania and Belarus that was originally inhabited by ethnic Baltic tribes and was a part of Lithuania proper, but came under East Slavic and Polish cultural influences over time.
The deportation of Koreans in the Soviet Union was the forced transfer of nearly 172,000 Soviet Koreans (Koryo-saram) from the Russian Far East to unpopulated areas of the Kazakh SSR and the Uzbek SSR in 1937 by the NKVD on the orders of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the Soviet Union Vyacheslav Molotov. 124 trains were used to resettle them 6,400 km to Central Asia. The reason was to stem "the infiltration of Japanese espionage into the Far Eastern Krai", as Koreans were at the time subjects of the Empire of Japan, which was the Soviet Union's rival. However, some historians regard it as part of Stalin's policy of "frontier cleansing". Estimates based on population statistics suggest that between 16,500 and 50,000 deported Koreans died from starvation, exposure, and difficulties adapting to their new environment in exile.
Koryo-saram is the name which ethnic Koreans in the post-Soviet states use to refer to themselves. The term is composed of two Korean words: "Koryo", a historical name for Korea, and "saram", meaning "person" or "people".
A sybirak is a person resettled to Siberia. Like its Russian counterpart sibiryák the word can refer to any dweller of Siberia, but it more specifically refers to Poles imprisoned or exiled to Siberia or even to those sent to the Russian Arctic or to Kazakhstan in the 1940s.
The Poles in Lithuania, also called Lithuanian Poles, estimated at 183,000 people in the Lithuanian census of 2021 or 6.5% of Lithuania's total population, are the country's largest ethnic minority.
The Polish minority in Ukraine officially numbers about 144,130, of whom 21,094 (14.6%) speak Polish as their first language. The history of Polish settlement in current territory of Ukraine dates back to 1030–31. In Late Middle Ages, following the extinction of the Rurik dynasty in 1323, the Kingdom of Poland extended east in 1340 to include the lands of Przemyśl and in 1366, Kamianets-Podilskyi. The settlement of Poles became common there after the Polish–Lithuanian peace treaty signed in 1366 between Casimir III the Great of Poland, and Liubartas of Lithuania.
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.
Georgia–Poland relations refers to foreign relations between Georgia and Poland. Both nations enjoy close and historically friendly relations, rooted in similar experiences, solidarity and shared struggles against foreign imperialism, especially that of Russia.
Ukrainian Kazakhstanis are an ethnic minority in Kazakhstan that according to the 1989 census numbered 896,000 people, or 5.4% of the population. Due to subsequent emigration to Russia and Ukraine, this number had declined to 796,000 by 1998 and 456,997 in the 2009 census.
Kazakhstan is a multiethnic country where the indigenous ethnic group, the Kazakhs, comprise the majority of the population. As of 2021, ethnic Kazakhs are about 70% of the population and ethnic Russians in Kazakhstan are about 16%. These are the two dominant ethnic groups in the country with a wide array of other groups represented, including Ukrainians, Uzbeks, Germans, Tatars, Chechens, Ingush, Uyghurs, Koreans, and Meskhetian Turks.
Oralman is a term used by Kazakh authorities to describe ethnic Kazakhs who have re-immigrated to Kazakhstan since the country gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.
Uyghurs in Kazakhstan, or Uyghur Kazakhstanis, form the country's fifth-largest ethnic group, according to the 2009 census.
The flight and forced displacement of Poles from all territories east of the Second Polish Republic (Kresy) pertains to the dramatic decrease of Polish presence in what is now the former Soviet Union in the first half of the 20th century. The greatest migrations took place in waves between the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and in the aftermath of World War II in Europe.
The history of Poles in Moldova has to be examined keeping in mind the traditional borderline along the Dniester river which separates Bessarabia from Transnistria in Moldova. While the regions on both sides of the river were socially and culturally interconnected, the distinct political histories of the two territories resulted in different patterns of Polish settlement there.
Kazakhstan–Poland relations refer to bilateral relations between Kazakhstan and Poland. Kazakhstan has an embassy in Warsaw whilst Poland has an embassy in Astana. Both countries are members of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe.
