Kyrgyz In 1916, in territory which is currently part of
Kazakhstan and
Kyrgyzstan, an uprising against Tsarist Russia occurred. A public commission in Kyrgyzstan called the crackdown of 1916 in which 100,000 to 270,000 Kyrgyz were killed,
Russian sources put the death toll at 3,000.
Pogroms against Jews in
Khmelnytskyi. The
Whitaker Report of the United Nations cited the massacre of 100,000 to 250,000 Jews in more than 2,000
pogroms which occurred during the
White Terror in Russia as an act of
genocide. During the
Russian Civil War, between 1918 and 1921, a total of 1,236 pogroms were committed against Jews in 524 towns in
Ukraine. Estimates of the number of Jews who were killed in these pogroms range from 30,000 to 60,000. Of the recorded 1,236 pogroms and excesses, 493 of them were carried out by
Ukrainian People's Republic soldiers who were under the command of
Symon Petliura, 307 of them were carried out by independent Ukrainian warlords, 213 of them were carried out by
Denikin's army, 106 of them were carried out by the
Red Army and 32 of them were carried out by the
Polish Army.
Decossackisation During the
Russian Civil War the
Bolsheviks engaged in a genocidal campaign against the
Don Cossacks. University of York Russian specialist Shane O'Rourke states that "ten thousand Cossacks were systematically slaughtered in a few weeks in January 1919" and he also states that this mass-slaughter "was one of the main factors which led to the disappearance of the Cossacks as a nation." The late
Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev, head of the Presidential Committee for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression, notes that "hundreds of thousands of Cossacks were killed". Historian
Robert Gellately claims that "the most reliable estimates indicate that between 300,000 and 500,000 were killed or deported in 1919–20" out of a population of around three million. Peter Holquist states that the overall number of executions which were carried out is difficult to establish. In some regions hundreds were executed. In Khoper, the tribunal was very active, with a one-month total of 226 executions. The Tsymlianskaia tribunal oversaw the execution of over 700 people. The Kotel'nikovo tribunal executed 117 in early May and nearly 1,000 were executed overall. Others were not quite as active. The Berezovskaia tribunal made a total of twenty arrests in a community of 13,500 people. Holquist also notes that some of the White reports of Red atrocities in the Don were consciously scripted for agitation purposes. In one example, an insurgent leader reported that 140 were executed in Bokovskaia, but later provided a different account, according to which only eight people in Bokovskaia were sentenced to death, and the authorities did not manage to carry these sentences out. This same historian emphasises he is "not seeking to downplay or dismiss very real executions by the Soviets". Research by
Pavel Polian from the
Russian Academy of Sciences on the subject of
forced migrations in Russia shows that more than 45,000 Cossacks were deported from the
Terek province to Ukraine. Their land was distributed among pro-soviet Cossacks and Chechens.
Ingrian Finns The genocide of the Ingrian Finns () was a series of events triggered by the
Russian Revolution in the 20th century, in which the
Soviet Union deported, imprisoned and killed
Ingrians and destroyed their culture. In the process,
Ingria, in the historical sense of the word, ceased to exist. Before the persecution there were 140,000 to 160,000
Ingrians in Russia and today approximately 19,000 (including several thousand repatriated since 1990.).
Joseph Stalin Multiple documented instances of unnatural mass death occurred in the Soviet Union when it was under the rule of
Joseph Stalin. The causes of these unnatural mass deaths include Union-wide famines in the early 1920s and early 1930s and deportations of ethnic minorities.
Stalin declared a need to extract a "tribute" or a "tax" from the peasantry due to his factional struggles with the
Bukharin wing of the party, peasant resistance to the
NEP under
Lenin, and the need for industrialisation. This idea was supported by most of the party in the 1920s. The tribute collected by the party took on the form of a virtual war against the peasantry that would lead to its
cultural destruction and the relegating of the countryside to essentially a
colony homogenised to the urban culture of the Soviet elite. This campaign of "colonising" the peasantry had its roots both in old
Russian Imperialism and modern
social engineering of the
nation state yet with key differences to the latter such as Soviet repression reflecting more the weakness of said state rather than its strength. There have also been more selective discussions of collectivisation as a project of colonialism in regard to
Ukraine and
Kazakhstan. On 26 April 1991 the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic, under its chairman
Boris Yeltsin, passed the law On the Rehabilitation of Repressed Peoples with Article 2 denouncing all mass deportations as "Stalin's policy of defamation and
genocide."
Holodomor During the
Soviet famine of 1930–1933,
Ukraine,
Kazakhstan and some densely populated regions of
Russia were all affected, but the highest number of deaths occurred in Ukraine. The events which occurred there are referred to as the
Holodomor and they are also
recognised as a genocide by multiple governments. The famine was
caused by a variety of factors with different explanations for them depending on the opinion of the scholar. According to
Simon Payaslian, the scholarly consensus classifies the
Soviet famine (at least the famine in Ukraine) as a
genocide, but some scholars say that it remains a
significant issue in modern politics and they do not believe that Soviet policies would fall under the
legal definition of genocide. Several scholars have disputed the belief that the famine was a genocidal act which was committed by the Soviet government, including
J. Arch Getty,
Stephen G. Wheatcroft,
R. W. Davies, and Mark Tauger. Getty says that the "overwhelming weight of opinion among scholars working in the new archives ... is that the terrible famine of the 1930s was the result of Stalinist bungling and rigidity rather than some genocidal plan." While Wheatcroft rejects the genocide characterisation of the famine, he states that "the grain collection campaign was associated with the reversal of the previous policy of
Ukrainisation." A 2020
Journal of Genocide Research article by Oleh Wolowyna estimated a total of 8.7 million deaths across the entire Soviet Union, including 3.9 million in Ukraine, 3.3 million in Russia, and 1.3 million in Kazakhstan, plus a lower number in other republics. According to the All-Union census of 1926–1937, the rural population in the North Caucasus decreased by 24%. In the Kuban alone, from November 1932 to the spring of 1933, the number of documented victims of famine was 62,000. According to other historians, the real death toll is many times higher. For example, one paper estimates over 14% of the Krasnodar Oblast which roughly includes the Kuban perished due to the famine. The self-identification of the Ukrainian population of Kuban decreased from 915,000 in 1926, to 150,000 in 1939. According to some scholars,
collectivisation in the Soviet Union and the lack of favoured industries were the primary
contributors to famine mortality (52% of excess deaths), and some evidence shows that ethnic Ukrainians and Germans were discriminated against.
Lewis Siegelbaum, professor of History at
Michigan State University, states that Ukraine was hit particularly hard by grain quotas which were set at levels which most farms could not produce. The 1933 harvest was poor, coupled with the extremely high quota level, which led to starvation conditions. The shortages were blamed on kulak sabotage, and authorities distributed what supplies were available only in the urban areas. According to a
Centre for Economic Policy Research paper published in 2021 by Andrei Markevich, Natalya Naumenko, and
Nancy Qian, regions with higher Ukrainian population shares were struck harder with centrally planned policies corresponding to famine, and Ukrainian populated areas were given lower amounts of tractors which were correlated to a reduction in famine mortality, ultimately concluding that 92% of famine deaths in Ukraine along with 77% of famine deaths in parts of Russia and Belarus can be explained by the fact that there was systematic bias against Ukrainians. The collectivisation and high procurement quota explanation for the famine is somewhat called into question by the fact that the oblasts of Ukraine with the highest losses being
Kyiv and
Kharkiv which produced far lower amounts of grain than other sections of the country. Oleh Wolowyna comments that peasant resistance and the ensuing repression of said resistance was a critical factor for the famine in Ukraine and parts of Russia populated by national minorities like Germans and Ukrainians allegedly tainted by "fascism and bourgeois nationalism" according to Soviet authorities. Ukraine's
Yuschenko administration recognised the Holodomor as an act of genocide and it also pressured international governments to do the same. This move was
opposed by the Russian government and some members of the Ukrainian parliament, especially the
Communists. A Ukrainian court found
Joseph Stalin,
Vyacheslav Molotov,
Lazar Kaganovich,
Genrikh Yagoda,
Yakov Yakovlev,
Stanislav Kosior,
Pavel Postyshev,
Vlas Chubar and
Mendel Khatayevich posthumously guilty of genocide on 13 January 2010. As of 2010, the Russian government's official position was that the famine took place, but it was not an ethnic genocide; former Ukrainian president
Viktor Yanukovych supported this position. A ruling of 12 January 2010 by Kyiv's Court of Appeal declared the Soviet leaders guilty of "genocide against the Ukrainian national group in 1932–33 through the artificial creation of living conditions intended for its partial physical destruction."
Kazakhstan Some historians and scholars consider the
Kazakh famine of 1932–33 to have been a
genocide of Kazakhs. 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 collectivisation of Kazakhstan. 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 collectivisation process rather than the European sections of the country. Regarding the Kazakh catastrophe,
Michael Ellman states that it "seems to be an example of 'negligent genocide' which falls outside the scope of the UN Convention". However, historian Robert Kindler refuses to call the famine a genocide, claiming that doing so masks the culpability of lower-level cadres who were locally rooted among the Kazakhs themselves. Historian Sarah Cameron argues that while Stalin did not intend to starve Kazakhs, he did see some deaths as a necessary sacrifice to achieve the political and economic goals of the regime. However, Sarah Cameron believes that while the famine combined with a campaign against nomads was not genocide in the sense of the UN definition, it does comply with Raphael Lemkin's original concept of genocide, which considered destruction of culture to be as genocidal as physical annihilation. Historian Stephen Wheatcroft criticises this view because he believed that the high expectations of central planners were sufficient to demonstrate their ignorance of the ultimate consequences of their actions. Wheatcroft views the state's policies during the famine as criminal acts, though not as intentional murder or genocide. Niccolò Pianciola argues that from Raphael Lemkin's point of view on genocide, all nomads of the Soviet Union were victims of the crime, not just the Kazakhs. A monument for the famine's victims was constructed in 2017. The
Turkic Council has described the famine as a "criminal Stalinist ethnic policy". A genocide remembrance day is held on 31 May for the victims of the famine.
Poles in the Soviet Union in the
Katyn Forest in 1940 Several scholars write that the killing, on the basis of nationality and politics, of more than 120,000 ethnic Poles in the Soviet Union from 1937 to 1938 was genocide. An
NKVD official remarked that Poles living in the Soviet Union were to be "completely destroyed". Under
Stalin the NKVD's
Polish operation soon arrested some 144,000, of whom 111,000 were shot and surviving family members deported to Kazakhstan. According to historian
Michael Ellman, "The 'national operations' of 1937–38, notably the 'Polish operation', may qualify as
genocide as defined by the UN Convention, although there is as yet no legal ruling on the matter".
Karol Karski argues that the Soviet actions against Poles are genocide according to international law. He says that while the extermination was targeting other nationalities as well and according to the criteria other than ethnicity, but as long as Poles were singled out basing on their ethnicity, that makes the actions to be genocide. The historian Terry Martin, refers to the "national operations", including the "Polish Operation", as
ethnic cleansing and "ethnic terror". According to Martin, the singling out of diaspora nationalities for arrest and mass execution "verged on the genocidal". Historian
Timothy Snyder called the Polish Operation
genocidal: "It is hard not to see the Soviet "Polish Operation" of 1937-38 as genocidal: Polish fathers were shot, Polish mothers sent to Kazakhstan, and Polish children left in orphanages where they would lose their Polish identity. As more than 100,000 innocent people were killed on the spurious grounds that theirs was a disloyal ethnicity, Stalin spoke of "Polish filth"."
Norman Naimark called Stalin's policy towards Poles in the 1930s "genocidal" but did not consider the entire
Great Purge genocidal since it targeted political opponents as well.
Simon Sebag Montefiore presents a similar opinion. In practice abandoning its 'official socialist' ideology of the "fraternity of peoples", the Soviets in the
Great Terror of 1937–1938 targeted "a national group as an enemy of the state." During their
Polish operation against party enemies the NKVD hit "Soviet Poles and other Soviet citizens associated with Poland, Polish culture, or Roman Catholicism. The Polish ethnic character of the operation quickly prevailed in practice... ." Stalin was pleased at "cleaning out this Polish filth." Among the several different nationalities targeted in the Great Terror (e.g., Latvians, Estonians, Finns, Belarusians), "ethnic Poles suffered more than any other group." In 1940 the Soviets also killed thousands of
Polish POWs, among about 22,000 Polish citizens shot in the
Katyn forest and other places.
Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Karachay, Kalmyks, Meskhetian Turks, and Volga Germans , Germany, early 1920s. The decree on the deportation of
Volga Germans was published on 28 August 1941. Men aged 15–55 and later women between the ages of 16 and 45 were forced to work in the forests and mines of Siberia and Central Asia under conditions similar to those prevailing in the slave labor camps of the Gulag. The expulsion of the Germans from the Volga ended in January 1942. The number sent to Siberia and Kazakhstan totaled approximately 438,000. Together with 27,000 evicted in the same ethnic cleansing of the Stalingrad Oblast and 47,000 of the Saratov Oblast, the total number sent to forced internal exile was about 950,000, of which 30% died during deportation (285,000), and most never returned to the Volga Region. On 26 February 2004 the plenary assembly of the European Parliament recognised the deportation of Chechen people during
Operation Lentil (23 February 1944), as an act of genocide, on the basis of the 1907
IV Hague Convention: The Laws and Customs of War on Land and the CPPCG. The event began on 23 February 1944, when the entire population of
Checheno-Ingushetia was summoned to local party buildings where they were told they were to be deported as punishment for their alleged collaboration with the Germans. The inhabitants were rounded up and imprisoned in Studebaker trucks and sent to Siberia. • Many times, resistance was met with slaughter, and in one such instance, in the
aul of Khaibakh, about 700 people were locked in a barn and burned to death. By the next summer, Checheno-Ingushetia was dissolved; a number of Chechen and Ingush placenames were replaced with Russian ones; mosques and graveyards were destroyed, and a massive campaign to burn numerous historical Chechen texts was nearly complete. Many people from remote villages were executed per
Lavrentiy Beria's verbal order that any Chechen or Ingush deemed 'untransportable should be liquidated' on the spot. • Throughout the North Caucasus, about 700,000 people were deported (according to Dalkhat Ediev, 724,297, of which the majority, 412,548, were Chechens, along with 96,327
Ingush, 104,146
Kalmyks, 39,407
Balkars and 71,869
Karachais). Many died on the trip, of exposure in Siberia's extremely harsh environment. The
NKVD, supplying the Russian perspective, gives the statistic of 144,704 killed in 1944–1948 alone (with a death rate of 23.5% for all groups). Estimates for Chechen deaths alone (excluding the NKVD statistic), range from about 130,000 to 200,000 thus ranging from over a quarter of the total Chechen population to nearly half being killed (of those that were deported, not counting those killed on the spot) in those 4 years alone.
Deportations of Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians , the leader of the
Communist Party of Lithuania, supervised the mass deportations of Lithuanians. The
mass deportations of up to 17,500
Lithuanians, 17,000
Latvians and 6,000
Estonians carried out by Stalin's government marked the start of another genocide. Added to the killing of the
Forest Brethren and the renewed
Dekulakization which followed the Soviet
reconquest of the Baltic states at the end of
World War II, the total number of people who were deported to Siberia consisted of
118,559 Lithuanians, 52,541 Latvians, and
32,540 Estonians. The high death rate of the deportees during their first few years in exile, caused by the failure of the Soviet authorities to provide them with suitable clothing and housing after they reached their destination, led some sources to label the affair an act of genocide. Based on the
Martens Clause and the principles of the
Nuremberg Charter, the
European Court of Human Rights held that the
March deportation constituted a
crime against humanity. According to Erwin Oberlander, these deportations are a crime against humanity, rather than genocide.
Lithuania began holding trials for genocide in 1997.
Latvia and
Estonia followed in 1998. Latvia has since convicted four security officers and in 2003 it sentenced a former
KGB agent to five years in prison. Estonia tried and convicted ten men and is investigating others. In Lithuania by 2004 23 cases were before the courts, but as of the end of the year none had been convicted. In 2007 Estonia charged Arnold Meri (then 88 years old), a former Soviet Communist Party official and highly decorated former Red Army soldier, with genocide. Shortly after the trial opened, it was suspended because of Meri's frail health and then abandoned when he died. A memorial in Vilnius, Lithuania, is dedicated to genocidal victims of Stalin and Hitler, and the
Museum of Genocide Victims in Lithuania, which opened on 14 October 1992 in the former KGB headquarters, chronicles the imprisonment and deportation of
Lithuanians.
Crimean Tatars , photo taken 1945 after the complete deportation of its inhabitants The ethnic cleansing and
deportation of the Crimean Tatars from
Crimea was ordered by
Joseph Stalin as a form of
collective punishment for alleged collaboration with the Nazi occupation regime in
Taurida Subdistrict during 1942–1943. The state-organised removal is known as the in
Crimean Tatar. A total of more than 230,000 people were deported (the entire ethnic Crimean Tatar population), of which more than 100,000 were killed via starvation or disease. Many activists, politicians, scholars and historians go even further and consider this deportation a crime of
genocide. Professor Lyman H. Legters argued that the Soviet penal system, combined with its resettlement policies, should count as genocidal since the sentences were borne most heavily specifically on certain ethnic groups, and that a relocation of these ethnic groups, whose survival depends on ties to its particular homeland, "had a genocidal effect remediable only by restoration of the group to its homeland". Soviet dissidents Ilya Gabay and
Pyotr Grigorenko both classified the event as a genocide. Historian Timothy Snyder included it in a list of Soviet policies that "meet the standard of genocide." On 12 December 2015, the
Ukrainian Parliament issued a resolution recognising this event as genocide and established 18 May as the "Day of Remembrance for the victims of the Crimean Tatar genocide." The
parliament of Latvia recognised the event as an act of genocide on 9 May 2019. The
Parliament of Lithuania did the same on 6 June 2019. Canadian Parliament passed a motion on 10 June 2019, recognising the Crimean Tatar deportation of 1944 as a genocide perpetrated by Stalin, designating 18 May to be a day of remembrance. == Transcarpathia ==