Deportation of the Soviet Greeks
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The deportation of the Soviet Greeks (
Background
Before the
The
There was virtually no counter-revolutionary activity among the Soviet Greeks,
Deportations
Soviet Greeks were deported in three waves as part of the population transfer in the Soviet Union.
- on 29 May 1942, Stalin ordered a deportation of Pontic Greeks and other minorities from the Krasnodar Krai.[13] 1,402 Greeks, including 562 children up to the age of 16, were deported to the east.[1]
- shortly after the
- Operation Volna:special settlers.[19] The deportation occurred between May and June 1949,[24] and encompassed Greek farmers, tradesmen and artisans living along the Georgian coast without prior warning. They were removed from their homes by MVD and sent to cattle cars heading for Central Asia. In the city of Gagra, a Greek woman was separated from her Russian husband, who had to stay behind, as she was sent on a two-week journey in a train without food or water. The people were dispersed to collective farms, living in mud huts, without adequate clothing or food. They were forbidden traveling more than five miles from their farm, facing a 20-year sentence.[25] The 11,000 Greek communist émigrés, who moved to the Soviet Union in 1949 after being defeated in the Greek Civil War, were also deported to the Uzbek SSR for slave labor.[26] The total number of all these three groups deported by June 1949 was 57,680.[27] Greeks made up 27,000[4] or 31,386[28] or 36,000 individuals among these deported groups.[5] Specifically, 476 people (mostly Greeks) were deported from Odesa, Melitopol, Kherson and Izmail; 4,396 Greeks from the Krasnodar Krai; 323 Greeks from Azerbaijan SSR.[28] The property they left behind was placed under the control of the administrative bodies.[27] The official reason for the Greek deportation was to "cleanse the area of politically unreliable elements". The evicted people were allowed to take only personal belongings with them on their journey to exile.[29] Many were confused by the evictions, thinking they would be safe because they were not Germans. One man was unaware of what the reason for his deportation was all until a year into exile, when he was informed he was an "active Dashnak nationalist".[23]
Life in exile
One of the deported Greeks who was born near Sukhumi and sent to the Pahtaral region of Uzbekistan in 1949, recalled the events:
The whole village, almost 200 families, was deported, here, to the Pahtaral region in 1949 .... Nobody had explained to us why we were being exiled or where we were going. We had two hours to collect our things... From 16 June to 10 August we were travelling. About eight or ten families in each cargo train, with the animals .... Once we arrived, I remember I was still a child, most people were dying from diarrhea. The water was fetid. My sister, who was much older, died from consumption at the age of 27, about one year after we arrived.[30]
Another deportee, Lefteris, gave a 1992 interview about his experience:
From Batumi, there were two cargo trains with at least twelve wagons each. We were lucky because we had only forty people in our wagon. In the others there were at least sixty to sixty-five people. They could hardly breathe, let alone sit or take care of babies and old people. For two months we were travelling... When we reached different stations we stopped and we had watered-down soup which they gave us in cups and a piece of bread, enough, that is, so that we wouldn't die of starvation. Often we played our lyres to give courage to the women and children, so that they would stop crying.[31]
The deporations did not encompass all Soviet Greeks. The Turkic-speaking Greeks around Tbilisi and the Greeks in Mariupol were excluded from these evictions.[32] The deported people lived in tents and worked in exhausting conditions in mining, construction, agriculture, and other.[33] They routinely worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week. They suffered from exhaustion, cold, and hunger, with food rations tied to work quotas.[34] On 1 January 1953, 21,057 foreign Greeks were recorded in special settlements in Kazakh SSR and 2,472 in Uzbek SSR,[35] while a total of 52,000 Greeks were recorded in all Soviet special settlements.[36]
Aftermath and legacy
According to the Head of the Georgian SSR Statistical Department, 8,334 Greeks were left on the Black Sea coast in the mid-1950s.[37] On 25 September 1956, MVD Order N 0402 was adopted and defined the removal of restrictions towards the deported peoples in the special settlements.[38] Afterward, the Soviet Greeks started returning to their homes, or emigrating towards Greece.
At the time of the 1949 deportation, it was estimated that there were 41,000 Greeks residing in Abkhaz ASSR inside Georgian SSR. The 1959 Soviet census enumerated only 9,101 Greeks remaining there, meaning that 30,000 were deported. On their place, resettlement from Western Georgia was initiated, interpreted as Stalin's policy of colonisation.[39] Between the 1939 census, which registered 34,621 Greeks, and the 1959 census, the Greeks suffered a 74% decline within the Abkhaz ASSR.[40] Overall, by 2002 when 16,600 of them were registered,[41] the Greek community was reduced to only 1/6 of their original number in Georgia.[42] In the 2002 census, 530 Greeks were recorded in Azerbaijan; 1,174 in Armenia; 97,827 in Russia.[41] 2,800 Greeks remained in Crimea according to the 2001 census, forming 0.1% of the peninsula's population.[43]
Greek historian Anastasis Gkikas estimated that 15,000 Greeks died during these Soviet repressions.[6]
Officially, the 1949 deportation was explained by the USSR as trying to cleanse the border areas from "politically unreliable elements".
In 1938, 20,000 Soviet Greeks arrived to Greece.
See also
- Greek Operation of the NKVD
- Operation Golden Fleece
- Deportation of the Meskhetian Turks
- Excess mortality in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin
- List of ethnic cleansing campaigns
- List of genocides
- Population exchange between Greece and Turkey
Notes
References
Footnotes
- ^ a b c Bugay 1996, p. 87.
- ^ Polian 2004, p. 153.
- ^ a b c d Bugay 1996, p. 88.
- ^ a b de Waal 2010, p. 155.
- ^ a b Kaya 2002, p. 19.
- ^ a b Gkikas 2007, p. 254.
- ^ Rummel 1997, p. 28.
- ^ Photiades 1999, p. 128.
- ^ Pratsinakis 2021, pp. 497–512.
- ^ Pratsinakis 2013, p. 51.
- ^ Voutira 2011, p. 131.
- ^ Kubiiovych & Struk 1984, p. 97.
- ^ a b Richmond 2008, p. 115.
- ^ Hasanli 2014, p. 246.
- ^ "Всесоюзная перепись населения 1939 года. Национальный состав населения по республикам СССР" (in Russian). demoscope.ru. Retrieved 2 April 2023.
- ^ Hasanli 2014, p. 247.
- ^ Pratsinakis 2013, pp. 53.
- ^ Marshall 2010, p. 335.
- ^ a b Bugay 1996, p. 91.
- ^ Thomas 2015, p. 16.
- ^ Pratsinakis 2013, pp. 54.
- ^ Tolz 1993, p. 166.
- ^ a b Kaiser 2019, p. 87.
- ^ Voutira 2011, p. 170.
- ^ a b "Greek Citizens of Soviet Origin Deported to Soviet central Asia". The Department of State Bulletin. 1949. p. 670.
- ^ Parrish 1996, p. 107.
- ^ a b Bugay 1996, p. 92.
- ^ a b Kaiser 2019, p. 86.
- ^ Dundovich, Gori & Guercetti 2003, pp. 101–102.
- ^ Voutira 2011, p. 230.
- ^ Voutira 2011, p. 171.
- ^ a b Pratsinakis 2013, p. 56.
- ^ Pratsinakis 2013, p. 57.
- ^ Viola 2007, p. 99.
- ^ Dundovich, Gori & Guercetti 2003, p. 85.
- ^ Tishkov 1996, p. 38.
- ^ Hasanli 2011, p. 276.
- ^ Bugay 1996, p. 94.
- ^ Hewitt 2013, p. 46.
- ^ Hewitt 2013b, p. 236.
- ^ a b Voutira 2011, p. 337.
- ^ Bondyrev, Davitashvili & Singh 2015, p. 35.
- ^ "About number and composition population of AUTONOMOUS REPUBLIC OF CRIMEA by data All-Ukrainian population census'". Ukrainian Census. 2001.
- ^ Polian 2004, p. 169.
- ^ Voutira 2011, p. 173.
- ^ Olson, Pappas & Pappas 1994, p. 274.
- ^ Olson, Pappas & Pappas 1994, p. 275.
- ^ Kazamias 2021, p. 1434.
- ^ Popov 2016, p. 61.
- ^ "Внесены изменения в указ о мерах по реабилитации армянского, болгарского, греческого, крымско-татарского и немецкого народов и государственной поддержке их возрождения и развития". Президент России.
- ^ "Указ Президента Российской Федерации от 12.09.2015 г. № 458". Президент России.
Books and journals
- Agtzidis, Vlasis (1991). "The Persecution of Pontic Greeks in the Soviet Union". .
- Bondyrev, Igor V.; Davitashvili, Zurab V.; Singh, Vijay (2015). The Geography of Georgia: Problems and Perspectives. Springer. OCLC 909773149.
- OCLC 36402865.
- Dundovich, Elena; Gori, Francesca; Guercetti, Emanuela (2003). Reflections on the Gulag: With a Documentary Index on the Italian Victims of Repression in the USSR. Milan: Greenwood Publishing Group. OCLC 52320240.
- Gkikas, Anastasis (2007). Οι Έλληνες στη διαδικασία οικοδόμησης του σοσιαλισμού στην ΕΣΣΔ [Greek Participation in the Building of Socialism in USSR] (in Greek). Athens: Syghxroni Epoxi. ISBN 978-960-451-056-6.
- LCCN 2011017370.
- Hasanli, Jamil (2014). Khrushchev's Thaw and National Identity in Soviet Azerbaijan, 1954–1959 (revised ed.). Lanham, Maryland: LCCN 2014036925.
- Hewitt, B. G. (2013). Discordant Neighbors: A Reassessment of the Georgian-Abkhazian and Georgian-South Ossetian Conflicts. Leiden: Brill. OCLC 840887419.
- Hewitt, George (2013b). The Abkhazians: A handbook. London: Routledge. OCLC 983782692.
- Kaiser, Claire P. (2019). ""What Are They Doing? After All, We're Not Germans". Expulsion, Belonging and Postwar Experience in the Caucasus". In Goff, Krista A.; Siegelbaum, Lewis H. (eds.). Empire and Belonging in the Eurasian Borderlands. Cornell University Press. OCLC 1054266663.
- Kaya, Bülent (2002). The Changing Face of Europe: Population Flows in the 20th Century. Council of Europe. LCCN 2007397168.
- Kazamias, George (2021). "Refugees". In Speake, Graham (ed.). Encyclopedia of Greece and the Hellenic Tradition. Routledge. ISBN 9781135942069.
- Kubiiovych, Volodymyr; Struk, Danylo Husar (1984). Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Volume 2 (revised ed.). University of Toronto Press. OCLC 913887100.
- Marshall, Alex (2010). The Caucasus Under Soviet Rule. Routledge. LCCN 2010003007.
- Olson, James Stuart; Pappas, Lee Brigance; Pappas, Nicholas Charles (1994). An Ethnohistorical Dictionary of the Russian and Soviet Empires. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Group. LCCN 93018149.
- Parrish, Michael (1996). The Lesser Terror: Soviet State Security, 1939-1953. Westport, Connecticut: OCLC 630860745.
- Photiades, Kostas (1999). Ο ελληνισμός της Ρωσίας και της Σοβιετικής Ένωσης [The Hellenism of Russia and the Soviet Union] (in Greek). Ekdoseis Irodotos. ISBN 978-960-7290-66-3.
- LCCN 2003019544.
- LCCN 2015034247.
- Pratsinakis, Manolis (2013). The Greek diaspora in the Soviet Union (PDF) (PhD). University of Amsterdam. pp. 45–68. hdl:11245/1.394492.
- Pratsinakis, Manolis (2021). "Ethnic return migration, exclusion and the role of ethnic options: 'Soviet Greek' migrants in their ethnic homeland and the Pontic identity". S2CID 233890632.
- Richmond, Walter (2008). The Northwest Caucasus: Past, Present, Future. Routledge. LCCN 2008001048.
- Rummel, R. J. (1997). Death by Government. Transaction Publishers. ISBN 978-1-56000-927-6.
- Thomas, Nigel (2015). Hitler's Russian & Cossack Allies 1941–45. Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 9781472806888.
- OCLC 47008632.
- Tolz, Vera (1993). "New Information about the Deportation of Ethnic Groups in the USSR during World War 2". In Garrard, John; Healicon, Alison (eds.). World War 2 and the Soviet People: Selected Papers from the Fourth World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies. New York City: LCCN 92010827.
- OCLC 456302666.
- Voutira, Eftihia (2011). The 'Right to Return' and the Meaning of 'Home': A Post-Soviet Greek Diaspora Becoming European?. Zürich: LIT Verlag Münster. OCLC 777781352.
- LCCN 2009052376.