Table of Contents

Introduction

The USSR had a great number of ethnic groups, as did the Russian Empire before it and the Russian Federation afterwards. This was the result of geography and history. The Eurasian supercontinent with its vast tracts of land, varied terrains, and many climates allowed an astounding diversity of ethnic groups to develop. What became Russia began as a small principality centered on Moskva and grew into the Russian Empire. At its maximum extent in 1895, the empire ruled over almost 43% of the Eurasian land mass and contained well over one hundred ethnic groups. The Soviet Union, although a bit smaller than the Russian Empire, inherited almost all of this ethnic diversity.

I had been searching for a long time for a detailed period map showing Soviet ethnic groups in the 1936–1941 period, and I finally found a good one the Soviets created in 1941. The map of course is in Cyrillic Russian. The map shows the location of about 80 ethnic groups but does not indicate the size of their populations. A number of small ethnic groups are not shown on the map, likely because of their few numbers. The map also omits some important, larger ethnic groups. At least some of these omissions are likely for political reasons. For example, the Soviet Union had a Korean minority, but they do not appear anywhere on the map. This was likely to hide the fact that Stalin had almost all these Koreans forcibly relocated from the Soviet Far East to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in Central Asia. The Soviet Union acquired a Rusyn minority in 1939 when it annexed southeastern Poland into the Ukrainian SSR of the USSR. The map does not show any Rusyns, since the Soviets decided they just a subgroup of Ukrainians. (As Rusyns, they would have had some minority rights in the Soviet system and might have deserved their own autonomous entity inside the Ukrainian SSR.)

The Soviet map It has a rather poor map legend, so I created my own, English-language version plus a locator map to help find the regions mentioned in the legend. I also created an overlay to show some important ethnic groups the Soviets did not to show on the map. The overlay can be toggled off in case you want to the Soviet map as it was published in 1941.

The text includes population information on the ethnic groups, from the 1939 Soviet census. Since this census was conducted before the annexations of 1939-1940, it does not include the populations of the annexed territory. Another section accordingly covers this topic. I've also added a section showing how the home languages of the ethnic groups relate to one another in language families.

I call this work a Classic Europe supplement as the history of how the 1917–1941 Soviets treated their ethnic groups is covered elsewhere. For that, see my Classic Europe guidebook, Soviet Russia and the USSR, 1917–1941.

1941 Map of Soviet Ethnic Groups

Map Legend for the 1941 Map of Soviet Ethnic Groups:

Locator Map:

The USSR was a huge country with over 100 different languages and ethnic groups. The Soviets called ethnic groups nationalnosti ("nationalities"). For census purposes, ethnic identity was based on self-identification: the censuses counted people as belonging to a group if they claimed they were members of that group. The censuses also asked people what language they spoke at home, but ethnic identity was divorced from home language: persons could identify themselves as a member of an ethnic group even if they did not speak the traditional home language of that group. For example, very many people who identified as Ukrainian had Ukrainian as their home language, but many others had Russian as their home language, and some used both languages at home.

Ethnic groups names on the map legend are those used by the Soviets 1941, translated into English. Note that modern ethnic group names and ethnic classifications can differ from the 1941 Soviet criteria. In some cases, I provide the modern name in brackets to aid in understanding. For example, "Oirat [Altay]" occurs for a people in the region of the Altay Mountains. "Oirat" was the 1941 name, but "Altay" is the modern term.

The map shows about 80 selected ethnic groups. Some are missing; they mostly seem to be low-population groups, often concentrated in areas of little geographical extent. For example, the Dagestan ASSR (in the Russian SFSR) had a great number of ethnic groups in a relatively small region, and only a few of them are shown. At least two somewhat larger groups, the Chinese and Koreans, seems to have been excluded for political reasons. The USSR in the 1930s forcibly relocated many of these people from the Soviet Far East to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in Central Asia. I strongly suspect the 1941 map did not show them to hide the fact that they had been internally deported.

The map only hints at the great extent ethnic groups were often mixed together in the USSR. For example, the Belorussian SSR (see excerpt map on right) is all bright red, which was the color allocated for the Belorussians [Belarusians]. Jews are shown in three places in the SSR, labeled Евреи and Е, and Poles are shown in one place, labeled Поляки. Both groups were actually present in many more places in this union republic. Further, the Belorussian SSR contained many Russians and Ukrainians, with both groups being more numerous than the Poles. (The reason why Russians and Ukrainians are not shown is discussed below.) The Belorussian SSR also had smaller but still significant minorities of Germans, Latvians, Tatars, and Lithuanians, and it contained many smaller groups. There were more union republics far more diverse than Belorussian SSR.

Conversely, Belarusians only show up in two small patches outside the Belorussian SSR: one in the nearby Lithuanian SSR and one in western Siberia just west of the city of Tobolsk. This understates the presence of Belarusians elsewhere in the USSR, as the 1939 census indicates that 13% of the USSR's 5.28 million Belarusians lived outside the Belorussian SSR.

Russians were located almost everywhere across the USSR, due in part to them being a key and most numerous ethnic group of the preceding Russian Empire. Russians had spread out as colonists, government officials, merchants, and entrepreneurs throughout the empire. Ukrainians were almost as widespread as Russians, for similar reasons. They were especially present in the agricultural regions of the USSR, the result of Ukrainian farmers colonizing arable land in what became southern Russia, southern Siberia, and the Russian Far East as the Russian Empire conquered those regions. There were so many Ukrainians one part of the Far East that it informally became known as "Green Ukraine".

Members of various other ethnic groups were present in many places outside their traditional homelands. For example, Armenians were originally from Armenia but were also present in every union republic of the USSR. Volga Tatars (usually just called "Tatars") had their homeland in the Volga-Urals region but were present in every union republic. Even the Laks, numbering only about 56,000 in total and from a small area in Dagestan, were present in every union republic (although often in quite small numbers; only 17 in the Belorussian SSR per the 1939 census).

The USSR gained even more diversity due to being the world's only socialist state in the 1920s. Some socialists, Marxists, and communists from various countries migrated to the USSR in hopes of helping to build Soviet socialism. They did not emigrate in huge numbers like immigrants did to places like Argentina, Canada, or the USA, but nonetheless thousands went to the USSR. Stalin's brutality in the 1930s and paranoia over foreigners as spies resulted in many immigrants leaving, but some willingly remained and others got caught up in the GULag. The 1941 census, for example, lists Americans, Basques, Belgians, Dutch, English [note 4], French, Italians, Spaniards, and more [note 5].

I do not have details on how the Soviets chose to construct the map. My conjecture is that they (mostly) worked on district (rayon or equivalent) level, with the majority or plurality group in a district determining how the district was shown on the map. This would explain, for example, the many small areas of Russian and Ukrainians scattered across Kazakhstan. The Soviets may have based their analysis on rural patterns while ignoring urban areas. Many Soviet cities had a different ethnic composition than the surrounding countryside, but the map does not mark cities differently. For example, Vilnius, the capital of the Lithuanian SSR, would have had a Polish majority, but the city is not shown as a Polish area, nor is "Polish" listed as a group anywhere in this union republic. For another example, Baku in the Azerbaijan SSR was the USSR's major oil-producing center and had a Russian majority. The city is not shown as a Russian area, nor is "Russian" listed at all as a group anywhere in this union republic.

Some color-patterns on the map represent multiple ethnic groups. It was logical, for example, to use the same color-pattern for the Cherkess and Kabardians, since they both spoke dialects the Kabardino-Cherkess language. This was the same deal with the Karachays and Balkars, who spoke the Karachay-Balkar language. A few color-patterns have more diverse groupings. In the western USSR, Slavic-language Bulgarians and Turkic-language Gagauz share a small area and thus the same color-pattern. However, there is a connection of sorts between the two groups: in Russian imperial times the Gagauz were often called "Turkish-speaking Bulgars". The Russians believed that when the Ottoman Empire conquered southeastern Europe, some Bulgarians there came to speak Turkish, and their language developed into what is now called Balkan Gagauz Turkish (aka Rumelian Turkish). In support of this claim, the Russians noted the religion of the Gagauz people was Eastern Orthodox Christianity like the Bulgarians and not Islam like most Turkic-language peoples. However, the actual origins of the Gagauz people is very uncertain, and the Bulgarian conjecture is just one of many. Some of these Gagauz people migrated to Bessarabia (what is now Moldova and southwestern Ukraine), and these migrants language developed into what is now called Gagauz, considered a separate language from Balkan Gagauz Turkish. (Balkan Gagauz Turkish has a good deal of mutual intelligibility with both Gagauz and Turkish.)

The mountainous part of Dagestan in the Caucasus had a great number of indigenous ethnic groups, which the Soviets just indicated as "Dagestanis (Avars, Dargins, Laks, Lezgins, and [other] groups)". The rugged Pamir Mountains in eastern Tajik was a similar case and was just indicated as "Pamiris (Shughnis, Rushani, and [other] groups".

The 1939 Soviet Census

The 1939 Soviet census contains a wealth of information about the population of the USSR on the eve of World War II. The census, however, is also flawed, a direct consequence of Stalin's brutal policies following his rise to dictatorial power in the late 1920s.

Prelude 1: The 1926 Soviet Census

The Russian Civil War and other circumstances prevented the Soviets at first from conducting comprehensive censuses following their rise to power in 1917. They conducted a partial census in 1920 but were unable to cover the entire country, as the civil war and Soviet-Polish War were both underway. They conducted another partial census in 1923 just after the civil war, but lack of resources due to the devastation of the war meant they only counted urban areas. Since most of the Soviet population at that time lived in rural areas, the 1923 census said little about the entire country.

The first comprehensive census occurred in 1926 and showed that the USSR had about 147 million people. It is estimated that the population of the Russian Empire in 1916 (excluding Finland and Russian Poland, to make it more comparable to the USSR) was about 160–169 million [note 6], an indication of how destructive the Russian Civil War had been. Casualties and massacres were only small factors in the population decline. Famine and disease were devastating, and emigration to escape the war or the triumph Soviets caused 900,000-2,000,000 people [note 7] to flee the country.

1926 Soviet Census Summary [note 8]

Prelude 2: The 1937 Soviet Census

The next census was supposed to have been conducted in 1932. However, Stalin had achieved dictatorial power in the late 1920s and instituted massive, brutal changes to the Soviet economy and society. Part of this was a rapid, forced collectivization of Soviet agriculture, which by the early 1930s had resulted in a massive famine. Millions of people died of starvation or diseases due to malnutrition, and at least a million people fled Soviet Central Asia, crossing its long, thinly-guard borders to foreign countries. The height of the famine was in 1932–1933, and the 1932 census was repeatedly delayed until January 1937. I think it is very likely the Soviets delayed the census to give the population time to recover. The overall Soviet population was young, so a growth rate of three million or so per year was possible in good times.

Stalin, perhaps willfully unaware of how devastating his famine had been, believed that the Soviet population had been growing rapidly since the 1926 census. In 1934, he publicly claimed that it had reached 160.5 million at the end of 1930 and 168 million at the end of 1933 [note 9]. By 1935, Stalin was claiming the Soviet population was growing at a rate of three million per year [note 10]. All this implied that Stalin might have expected the population to be about 175–180 million by the end of 1936.

There were, however, some troubling signs. While no census had been conducted since 1926, Soviet statisticians working with birth and death registrations estimated the 1937 census would come in at only 170–172 million people [note 11]. Stalin did not believe their estimates and turned to an often-used Soviet device to ignore bad news: enemies of the Soviet Union were engaging in sabotage. Specifically, the Soviet government claimed that class enemies (priests, kulaks, members of the defeated White Movement from the civil war) had infiltrated the "organs of registration" to decrease the birth count and, by double-recording deaths, to inflate the death count [note 12]. This was ridiculous. Soviet birth and death records, kept by local officials, were somewhat haphazard, but local government agencies were not teeming with class enemies.

The results of the 1937 census pierced the bubble of Stalin's over-inflated expectations. The population wasn't 175–180 million. It wasn't even the statisticians' estimate of 170–172 million. Instead, the census showed the USSR had a population of only 162 million people, just 15 million more than 1926 (an average rate of growth of less than 1.5 million per year). Had the results been made public, it would have starkly shown how devastating the famine of the early 1930s had been. It would have also exposed Stalin and the Soviet government as blatant liars, since they had denied a famine had even taken place. Perhaps even worse for the vain, insecure Stalin, the results would have shown that his public statements on the population were completely wrong, as the 1937 USSR had millions fewer people that what he claimed it had in 1933. The 1937 census was thus political poison and had to be suppressed. It was. The usual suspects were blamed.

The results were not published. The public was told that enemies of the people had infiltrated the census organization and sabotaged the 1937 census. The census officials were purged. Many lost their jobs, some were imprisoned, and a few were executed. A new census was scheduled to be held in January 1939. The new census officials knew that their jobs, maybe their freedom, and maybe even their lives depended upon telling Stalin what he wanted to hear, regardless of the facts.

The 1939 Soviet Census

The 1939 census was conducted in January 1939. As was typical for this time without electronic digital computers, it took months to compile and process the results. In March 1939 while the results were still being tabulated, Stalin gave a speech in which he claimed the USSR had at least 170.6 million people. It is uncertain how Stalin came up with this figure, but I speculate he was determined that the Soviet population had to clearly exceed his claim of being 168 million in 1933. The census officials met Stalin's expectations: the census found that the USSR had 170.6 million people (170,557,093). The USSR actually had fewer people, as the census was manipulated and falsified to increase the count. Census procedures were changed to increase the chance of double counting people [note 13].

Census data was outright falsified, including "manipulation of control forms and direct one-percent inflation of census results, as well as geographic redistribution of census data". The modern consensus is that the census officials inflated the results by about 0.5–1.5 million people, although claims that they were inflated by as many as 3 million people have been made. I note that by itself a 1% inflation of the census results implies the Soviet population of 170.6 million was actually 168.9 million, a difference of 1.5 million. Double counting suggests the population was even smaller, although it is unclear if double counting added all that many more people to the count.

Geographic redistribution of census data occurred to hide the size of the GULag system and (almost certainly) to increase the population of Ukraine and Kazakhstan, the two regions that suffered the most from the famine. While the existence of the GULag was no secret, its size was. Many GULag camps were located in remote, low-population areas in the far north and Siberia. Accurate reporting of the census for these regions would have shown suspiciously large population increases in these regions, with the obvious inference that they were due to the GULag camps. Instead, secret Soviet documents revealed in the 1990s show that the Soviets redistributed (on paper) about 760,000 Gulag prisoners from these regions to other places in the USSR. The documents do not state which places were selected, but almost certainly there were the Ukrainian and Kazakh SSRs. Different secret Soviet documents show that Ukraine's population was boosted by about 384,000 people and Kazakhstan's by about 375,000. Since the total gain in these two cases is about 759,000, it seems fairly certain this is where the 760,000 prisoners ended up [note 14]. These redistributions had an even larger impact than their numbers imply, as they were added to the Ukrainian and Kazakhstan totals before the 1% inflation was calculated.

Another complication for the 1939 census (as well as for most Soviet censuses) was other information the Soviet state wanted kept secret. This included the size of the millions-strong defense establishment (the Soviet military plus the civilian staff of government defense organizations), the hundred-thousands-strong state security apparatus (the NKVD in 1939), and some other government organizations. These people were for census purposes the "centralized contingent" (tsentralizovannyy kontingent) and census officials were not allowed to count them. However, they did need to included in the census, so each organization with a centralized contingent conducted its own "secret census" using special forms created by the census officials. The organizations then returned the results, possibly manipulated, to the census officials, who added the information into the public census totals.

If I understand the 1939 census correctly, the centralized contingents were usually added into the districts and regions where the personnel were stationed. Most if not all of the Soviet military was handled this way. This is believed to have raised the ethnic Russian population of the Belorussian SSR to some significant degree, since Red Army units raised in the Russian SFSR were stationed in the Belorussian SSR. Each centralized-contingent organization could have manipulated its census data before handing the results over to the census officials, but so far no documentation has been found to confirm or deny that this happened. I suspect that the NKVD secretly redistributed some of its staff. NKVD GULag camp guards and administrators for camps in remote, low-population regions might have been enough to raise the population counts of those regions to suspicious levels. Like the 760,000 GULag prisoners known to have been redistributed, some GULag staff could have been transferred (on paper) to other regions [note 15].

The 1939 census is thus flawed, and some of the manipulations must have distorted the actual ethnic composition of some union republics. At least the biggest manipulation, the "direct one-percent inflation of census results" would have proportionally increased the size of all ethnic groups. However, the (paper) redistribution of GULag prisoners to Ukraine and Kazakhstan very likely changed the apparent ethnic balance of these places. Most GULag prisoners were Russians and Ukrainians (unsurprisingly, since they were the two biggest ethnic groups in the USSR), so this could have disproportionately increased the Russian total in Ukraine and must have done so for the Russian and Ukrainian totals in Kazakhstan. Once sufficient information about the manipulations of the 1939 census became available in the 1990s, analysis suggests that Kazakhstan's ethnic Kazakh population might have been roughly 100,000 or so larger than the ethnic Russian population, the reverse of what the 1939 census showed. (Kazakhs would still have been an overall minority in the Kazakh SSR.) The analysis is based on logical assumptions on how the Soviets manipulated the census, but the historical Soviets might have done things differently. In this work, I use the 1939 census figures without later corrections, as these were the figures the Soviet government itself used at the time.

1939 Soviet Census Summary [note 16]

Ethnic Groups in the 1939 Census

The 1939 census went into detail on ethnic groups. How did the USSR determine who belonged to which ethnic group? This could not be determined by the language spoken at home, as ethnic identity was not necessarily connected to language. Further, trying to use language would have been problematic, due to the many dialects within many languages. Belarusian and Ukrainian, for example, each had multiple dialects, and the West Polesian dialect in the southwest of Belorussian SSR was intermediate between "standard" Belarusian and "standard" Ukrainian. When people censused in this region said they spoke Belarusian or Ukrainian, what did that really mean? (It is still disputed today whether West Polesian is a dialect of Belarusian, a dialect of Ukrainian, or its own microlanguage.) Soviet censuses avoided these issues by having people self-identity their ethnicity. This process, too, was not without problems. The Soviet government allocated some resources by size of ethnic group, so this created incentives for local officials and ethnic leaders to pressure people claim they belonged to a different ethnic group than the one they actually identified with.

The Soviets made public only very limited details about the results of the 1939 census. More detailed results were restricted to official use only, and some results were state secrets unavailable event to most officials. Even information about the overall sex ratios of the population was secret [note 17]. (For example, the majority of people executed in the purges or sent to the GULag camps were male. Atypical sex ratios, if made public, would have been a sign that something unusual and dreadful was going on in the USSR.) The ethnic breakdowns of the USSR overall and at union republic level were also kept secret. Beside the usual Soviet secrecy, the Soviets kept ethnic data classified to hide the forced relocation of some ethnic groups. For example, had the ethnic data been published, the presence of almost 170,000 Koreans in Central Asia would have revealed the group's relocation from the Soviet Far East [note 18].

1939 Soviet Census by Ethnic Groups

The five most numerous groups in the USSR and in each union republic are shown by color: 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th.

A group name in pale yellow (like Russians) indicates the group is shown on the Soviets' 1941 map of ethnic groups in the USSR. A group name in light purple (like Koreans) indicates a group I have added to the map on the special overlay. One group on the overlay does not appear in the census below: Rusyns. For geopolitical convenience, the Soviets decided to consider Rusyns as Ukrainians, as discussed elsewhere.

Groups names are from the census, translated from the Russian-language group names of the period into corresponding English-language group names. Group names in parentheses are alternative Russian-language names the 1939 Soviets used. For example, "Buryats (Buryat-Mongols)": my source on the census lists "Buryats", but the official Soviet name of this group was "Buryat-Mongols" until the 1950s. Group names in brackets are modern English-language names. For example, "Belorussians [Belarusians]".

Soviet 1939–1940 Annexations

In August 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact. The two countries also negotiated a secret agreement that divided parts of eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence. Germany then invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, starting World War II. The Soviet Union took over as much of its sphere as its could: It invaded Poland in September 1939 and annexed eastern Poland that autumn. It invaded Finland in November 1939 and annexed parts of that country in March 1939 in a peace settlement. In June 1940, it occupied the Baltic states, soon annexing them all into the USSR. It also occupied parts of Romania in June 1940: not just the province of Bessarabia as had been agreed to in the 1939 German-Soviet deal but also the northern half of the province of Bukovina and the Hertza district. This Romanian territory was then annexed in to the USSR.

Internationally, the USSR justified its invasion of Poland by (falsely) claiming the Polish government had collapsed and Soviet forces were restoring order. Soviet propaganda inside the USSR and in occupied eastern Poland claimed the USSR was liberating the peoples of this region from the oppressive Polish bourgeois state, freeing farmers from landlords and workers from capitalists. Soviet propaganda also had an ethnic element: millions of Belarusians and Ukrainians lived in eastern Poland, and the USSR claimed their rightful homelands were the Belorussian and Ukrainian SSRs. The Soviets accordingly annexed eastern Poland, with the northern half going into the Belorussian SSR and the southern half into the Ukrainian SSR. They stage-managed the process to make it look like the population in each region had formed its own people's assembly that then spontaneously petitioned the USSR to admit the region into the neighboring SSR. The Soviets would reuse these themes of liberation and the freed peoples asking to be admitted to the Soviet Union for most of the territory they would annex in 1940.

These annexations added millions of people to the USSR, most of whom perforce became Soviet citizens. One major exception was the Volksdeutsche, ethnic Germans whose ancestors had settled in eastern Europe since medieval times. Germany and the USSR negotiated several agreements on voluntary transfers of people: German residents of Soviet territory would be allowed to go to Germany, while Belarusian, Russian, and Ukrainian residents of German territory would be allowed to go to the USSR. Hundreds of thousands of Volksdeutsche agreed to go to Germany (and were mostly settled in former Polish territory annexed into Germany). An unknown number, likely few, of Belarusians, Russians, and Ukrainians agreed to go to the USSR [note 19]. The Volksdeutsche relocations were technically voluntary, but the Volksdeutsche were subject to propaganda and pressure to move to Germany. Many were reluctant to move at first but were eventually persuaded to relocate. Some Volksdeutsche relocations began even before the Soviets had taken over their lands. For example, Germany began campaigns to relocate the Baltic Germans of Estonia and Latvia in late 1939, even though the Soviets did not take over those countries until 1940 [note 20].

The German-Soviet-agreements may not have just covered newly-gained Soviet territory but also parts of the USSR within its 1938 borders. Sources are quite contradictory on this point, with some saying it began in 1939. Others claim relocation from within the 1938 Soviet borders only started in 1941 following the German invasion of the USSR [note 21].

The populations and ethnic groups the USSR gained in 1939–1940 are discussed in the following sections.

Eastern Poland

An estimated 13.2 million people lived in eastern Poland in 1939 when the Soviets occupied the region, divided among the following ethnic groups:

• 38% Poles.
• 37% Ukrainians (per Soviet classification; includes those whom the Poles classified as Ruthenians).
• 14.5% Belarusians (per Soviet classification; includes those whom the Poles classified as Locals).
• 8.4% Jews.
• 0.9% Russians.
• 0.6% Germans. (It is likely almost all of the Germans relocated to Germany.)
• 0.6% other groups.

The ethnic groups are based on Soviet classification. Poland's classifications differed, particularly in that Ruthenians (Rusyns) were a separate group from Ukrainians. Also, Poland had a special "Locals" classification for people who did not identify as belonging to a specific ethnic group. This included many Belarusians, as Belarusian nationalism and ethnic identity at the time was not as developed in rural areas as it was for many other groups. (During censuses, some people in these areas answered "Christian" when asked about their ethnic identity, as religion had traditionally mattered much more than language or ethnicity.) Locals also included some people who would be considered Ukrainian, Lithuanian (such as ethnic Lithuanians who spoke a Slavic language instead of Lithuanian), etc. If "Locals" still seems to you a bit odd as a group, keep in mind that some dialects in eastern Poland were intermittent between Belarusian and Ukrainian, with many people there not identifying as Belarusian or Ukrainian. Still, it had also been argued that Poland used the Locals category to dilute the number of people identifying as Belarusian.

In addition to the civilian population of eastern Poland, an estimated 336,000 refugees (198,00 Jews and 138,000 Poles) fleeing from the Germans in western Poland ended up in the Soviet zone. Some of these refugees found life under the Soviets unappealing and returned to western Poland during the short period (through to the end of October 1939) when Germany and the USSR allowed some repatriations. After October, the border was sealed, but some refugees found ways to leave by crossing the border at poorly-guarded crossings or by bribing the border guards. Even a few Jews left the Soviet zone of former eastern Poland for German-occupied Poland, deciding to take their chances with the antisemitic Nazis rather than remaining under the Soviets [note 22]. It is not known how many of the 336,000 refugees managed to leave the USSR in 1939–1940, although the vast majority must have remained in the USSR.

Finland

About 12% of Finland's pre-war territory, mostly in the southeast of the country, went to the USSR in the March 1940 peace settlement that ended the Winter War. Before turning over the territory to the Soviets, the Finns evacuated almost everyone there who wanted to leave. This was the vast majority of the population in the region, an estimated 430,000 people (about 12% of Finland's total population). Only a few thousands elected to remain behind. I have seen no firm breakdown of how many people stayed or their ethnic composition. Many likely were ethnic Finns and Karelians, the two main groups of southwestern Finland. (Karelians spoke the Karelian language, which was closely to the Finnish language.) This region also had an ethnic Russian minority, some of whom might have stayed. Other ethnic groups of Finland (Swedes, Sámi, Romani) were likely present only in very small numbers or absent from the region. After taking over the region, the USSR began to bring in Soviet citizens as settlers.

Estonia

Estonia had an estimated population of 1,133,000 in 1938, with it falling to an estimated 1,128,000 in 1939 and an estimated 1,096,000 in 1940 (presumably before the Soviet occupation). My sources do not cover the reasons for the decline (the population had been growing in 1930–1938), but I speculate it was caused by emigration partly due to German efforts from 1939 to have the Baltic Germans relocate to Germany and partly due to fears that the Soviet Union planned to take over the country.

The Soviets occupied Estonia in June 1940 and in July 1940 annexed the country into the USSR as the Estonian SSR. While a detailed ethnic breakdown of Estonia is not available for 1940, one is available from the Estonian census of 1934. The absolute numbers would have changed by 1940, but the relative proportions between groups should likely be approximately the same.

Estonian Census of 1934

Latvia

Latvia had an estimated population of 2,000,000 in 1939, with it falling to an estimated 1,940,000 in 1940 (presumably before the Soviet occupation). My sources do not cover the reasons for the decline (the population had been growing in the 1930s), but I but I speculate it was caused by emigration partly due to German efforts from 1939 to have the Baltic Germans relocate to Germany and partly due to fears that the Soviet Union planned to take over the country.

The Soviets occupied Latvia in June 1940 and annexed the country into the USSR as the Latvian SSR in August 1940. While a detailed ethnic breakdown of Latvia is not available for 1940, one is available from the Latvian census of 1935. While the numbers would have changed by 1940, the relative proportions between groups would likely be approximately the same.

Latvian Census of 1935

Lithuania

The Soviets occupied Lithuania in June 1940 and annexed the country into the USSR as the Lithuanian SSR in August 1940. Lithuania had an estimated population of 2,432,000 in 1939 (this excludes the Klaipėda Region, which had been transferred to Germany in March 1939). The population in 1940 was likely about 2,460,000. This excludes former Polish territory the USSR transferred to Lithuania in 1939 and 1940. (Including the population of this territory for Lithuania would double count the people there for both eastern Poland in 1939 and for Lithuania in 1940 [note 23].)

While a detailed ethnic breakdown of Lithuania is not available for 1940, one is available from the Lithuania census of 1923 [note 24]. The age of this census makes it less than ideal to use for 1940. The numbers certainly changed greatly by 1940, but the relative proportions between the groups perhaps did not diverge too much.

Lithuanian Census of 1923

Romanian Territory

In June 1940, the USSR massed an invasion force on the borders of Romania and on 26 June issued an ultimatum demanding the Romanians cede the province of Bessarabia and the northern half of the province of Bukovina. Bessarabia had been part of the Russian Empire, and the USSR never recognized Bessarabia joining Romania at the end of World War I. Ethnic Ukrainians were the most numerous group (a plurality but not majority) in the northern half of Bukovina, and the Soviets wanted to add the region to the Ukrainian SSR. The Red Army had been prepared to invade Romania, but the Romanians, with little chance of withstanding a Soviet invasion, gave in to the Soviet demands and ceded Bessarabia and North Bukovina. At the last minute, the Soviets also decided to occupy the small Hertza district [note 25].

Altogether, about 3.8 million people lived in the territories the Soviets annexed: about 3,300,000 in Bessarabia, 500,000 in Northern Bukovina, and 25,000 in the Hertza district. Wikipedia [note 26] claims the ethnic breakdown of these territories in 1940 was as follows:

• 53.49% Romanians (in Soviet terms, most of these would be Moldavians [Moldovans]).
• 15.3% Ukrainians and Ruthenians (in Soviet terms, all of these would be Ukrainians).
• 10.34% Russians.
• 7.27% Jews.
• 4.91% Bulgarians.
• 3.31% Germans (most of whom relocated to Germany).
• 5.12% other groups. (The Wikipedia article does not break this category down, but from other sources these groups would include Gagauz, Hungarians, Romani, and others.)

Most of the Romanians in these territories spoke Moldovan, which is generally recognized as a major dialect of Romanian (some claim Moldovan is its own language). The Soviets chose to classify Moldovan as a separate language and Moldavians as a separate ethnic group from Romanians, in hopes of weakening the Moldavians' ties with Romania.

Once the Soviets began to occupy Romanian territory, people fled these regions for unoccupied Romania. (The flow slows to a trickle when Soviet border guards gained control of the borders; there were several instances of the guards firing indiscriminately into masses of people trying to leave.) However, migration was not just one way: an estimated 110,000–150,000 crossed from unoccupied Romania to the Soviet zone. Many of these people were residents of the territories the Soviets annexed but had been elsewhere in Romania when the Soviets took over, and they returned home to be reunited with their families. Many others were Jews fleeing unoccupied Romania to escape the increasing fascism and antisemitism there. Overall, it is unclear from my sources if the occupied territories lost more people than they gained. The 1941 Romanian census recorded about 70,000 refugees in Romania from the territories that went to the USSR.

The Soviets annexed these Romanian territories into the USSR as follows: the northern and southern parts of Bessarabia, North Bukovina, and the Hertza district were considered Ukrainian and went to the Ukrainian SSR. The central part of Bessarabia was considered Moldavian and was merged with most of the Moldavian ASSR of the Ukrainian SSR, to form the Moldavian SSR. This became a union republic of the USSR in August. (The rest of the Moldavian ASSR consisted of Ukrainian-majority districts that lost their autonomous status and became ordinary parts of the Ukrainian SSR.)

Volksdeutsche Transfers to Germany

Germany and the USSR agreed to allow the voluntary transfer of certain ethnic groups between their territories, which resulted in many Volksdeutsche, ethnic Germans living outside of Greater Germany, relocating to Germany. Germany also arranged Volksdeutsche transfers in countries and territories beyond those covered in their agreements with the USSR.

In fact, the first steps to relocating the Volksdeutsche were taken with Italy before the start of World War II. After World War I, Italy had annexed the southern part of Tyrol county from Austria-Hungary, calling it the Italian province of Bolzano (aka "South Tyrol") [note 28]. This region had an overwhelming majority of ethnic Germans. After Mussolini came to power in the early 1920s, Fascist Italy instituted many measures to try to italianize South Tyrol. All Germanic place names were changed to Italian, and the German inhabitants were encouraged to adopt Italian versions of their personal and family names. Ethnic Italians from the rest of Italy were encouraged to migrate to South Tyrol, in hopes of reducing the Germans to a minority population there. Italy could follow these policies in the 1920s and early 1930s as neither Germany nor Austria was strong enough to do anything about them. The rise of Nazi Germany in the 1930s and the incorporation of Austria into Germany in 1938 changed this dynamic. Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy were aggressive, expansionist countries and began to ally together as other major European countries opposed their plans. The Italian treatment of the South Tyrolian Germans, however, was a potential problem for relations between the two countries. To settle this issue, they came to an agreement: the South Tyrolian Germans could choose either to relocate to Germany or to remain in Italy but lose all minority rights there. These Volksdeutsche were then subjected to considerable German propaganda and pressure to relocate, and about 70% of them decided to do so. The German-Italian deal served as a model for later German arrangements on relocating the Volksdeutsche from other regions.

After the start of World War II, the great majority of the relocating Volksdeutsche were settled in former Polish territory annexed into Germany [note 29]. Some were settled in other places: Some went to other German-controlled regions outside the pre-WW2 borders of Germany, as part of a plan to turn these areas German. Only a few went to places in Germany within its pre-war borders [note 30]. Nazi propaganda called the resettlement effort Heim ins Reich (Home to the Reich), which of course ignored the fact that some settlers were actually colonizing places that had not been part of the German Reich.

Volksdeutsche Relocations to Annexed Territory in Poland [note 31]

Soviet Population Gain from Annexations

I've compile the above information in this section to estimate the population the Soviets gained in their annexations of 1939–1940.

Estimated Overall Soviet Population Gain, per Annexed Region

I've seen no definitive ethnic breakdown for the annexed territories in total. I've made my own estimate using the information in the previous sections. When sources do not give an ethnic breakdown in 1939–1940, I've perforce assumed the relative proportions between groups in a territory did not change since the last census was conducted there. This will not accurate but I hope is good enough for a rough estimate.

Estimated Overall Soviet Population Gain, per Ethnic Group

Estimated Soviet Population, January 1935 to January 1941

So, with a gain of about 22.5 million people, what was the population of the USSR in 1941? The Soviets did not conduct a census in 1941, having just done so in 1939. Various population estimates for the USSR claim the Soviet Union had about 198.7 million people as of 1 January 1941. My own estimate comes in at about 198.1 million: 175.8 million in the base Soviet population, 22.5 million gained from the annexations [note 32], and 0.2 million lost due to deaths from the 1940 relocations. Most likely in my opinion the published estimates of the Soviet population do not capture the population loss due to the relocations. (Note that all the estimates including mine are affected by the flawed 1939 census, so the actual Soviet population may have been smaller.

Soviet Repression in the Annexed Territories

An influx of 22.5 million people raised the USSR's population by the equivalent of a medium-sized European country [note 33], but the Soviet Union realized far less economic or military benefit from these new citizens than the numbers might suggest. The annexed territories had capitalist systems and many people whom the Soviets considered to be class enemies: bourgeoisie (capitalists, landowners, professionals, and other members of the middle class), clergy, petty bourgeoisie (shopkeepers, artisans, and prosperous land-owning farmers), and so on. There were many Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Romanian, and western Ukrainian nationalists who did not want to be part of the USSR. Even many in the proletariat, whom the Soviets claimed they were liberating, feared what the Soviets might do. The fears were justified.

The Soviets began to convert the government, economic, and social systems of the annexed territories into the Soviets' version of socialism: state ownership of all important property (land, factories, businesses, etc.), reorganization of farmland with the eventual goal of collective agriculture, measures to discourage religion, imposition of the Soviet legal system, transformation of education systems to espouse Communist ideology, Communist Party domination of all levels of government, and so on. The Soviets would resort to brutal repressive measures to impose their system. Repression actually started relatively slowly in 1939 in eastern Poland. There was some brutality even from the start: During the Soviet invasion, some Polish Army soldiers who surrendered were summarily executed. Overall, civilians were not subjected to mass repression, as the occupying Soviet military and security forces had been ordered to treat the civilian population fairly, likely in hopes of gaining the trust of the general populace.

Once the occupation was in place, the Soviets began confiscating farmland, factories, and businesses. Owners of large farms lost their land, which was distributed among poorer farmers. Factories and other enterprises whose owners had fled the Soviet invasion were confiscated and run by the government. Officially, only "ownerless" enterprises were confiscated at first, but the Soviets also began confiscating enterprises whose owners were present [note 34]. By the end of January 1940, almost all private enterprises of consequence had been confiscated. These economic measures, however, were not accompanied by mass arrests or widespread summary executions of class enemies. Many aspects of the capitalist system remained in place. For example, the Polish złoty stayed in circulation as legal tender.

From early 1940, however, the Soviets incrementally scaled up repression to sovietize the annexed territories. In January, the złoty was replaced by the Soviet ruble, and people were allowed to convert no more than 300 złoties to rubles, wiping out the life savings of many people [note 35]. (The złoty remained in circulation for a time for black market activities, and some hoarded it in hopes of Polish sovereignty being restored.) In March 1940, Stalin and the other members of the Politburo decided to get rid of Polish "nationalists and counterrevolutionaries": members of the Polish elite. They ordered the NKVD to execute 25,700 of them, with about 22,000 actually being executed in April and May 1940. This is often called the mass execution of Polish Army officers, but they comprised only about 8,000 of the 22,000. The remaining victims were about 8,000 intelligentsia and 6,000 police officers [note 36]. The operation is also sometimes called the Katyn Massacre, as the international community first became aware of the murders from a mass grave found at Katyn [note 37] in the western USSR. The executions actually occurred at various sites throughout the western USSR.

Besides mass executions, other forms of Soviet repression ramped up in 1940 in the former eastern Poland. The middle classes, "kulaks" (prosperous land-owning farmers), other class enemies, and ordinary people opposed to the Soviet takeover were targeted with mass arrests. Four waves of mass deportations from former eastern Poland occurred, from February 1940 through June 1941. This engulfed perhaps 1.2 million people, although some claim the total might have been as high as 1.7 million and others suggest the total was much lower (based on NKVD records, which however are suspected to have excluded many deportees). These people were sent to remote places like the far north, Kazakhstan, and Siberia. All ethnic groups in the region were affected: not just Poles but also Belarusians, Jews, Ukrainians, etc. Inhumane conditions prevailed during the travel to the resettlement sites and at the sites themselves, so many people die en route or within a year of being resettled. For example, people sent to Kazakhstan arrived with just a few personal possessions and were met with indifference or hostility by the local authorities and population, who considered them anti-Soviet criminals. They often received minimal and sometimes no assistance in obtaining shelter, food, and medical care.

The refugees in former eastern Poland, an estimated 336,000 (198,00 Jews and 138,000 Poles), were also repressed in 1940. During the year, they were increasingly pressured to accept Soviet citizenship. Many resisted this, since it very likely meant the Soviets would then not allow them to leave the USSR and reunite with their families. (The Soviets were also uninterested in reuniting families by allowing them to emigrate to the USSR.) By the end of the year, those who had refused Soviet citizenship were declared criminals and were sent to GULag camps as forced laborers. Many would subsequently die in 1941–1945, due to heavy labor combined with starvation rations due to wartime food shortages.

From mid-1940, the Soviets occupied and annexed the Baltic states and the eastern parts of Romania. Unlike eastern Poland in 1939, these new territories did not go through a period of relatively mild treatment at first. Instead, they were subjected to similar heavy repressive measures like those already underway in the former eastern Poland: confiscations of land and enterprises, mass arrests, and summary executions. Forced deportations in these territories did not start until late May 1941, with many being deported in June 1941. Some were sent to GULag camps and many were sent to remote settlements in places like the far north, Siberia, and Central Asia. Estimates vary on how many people were relocated:

• from Lithuania: 17,000–18,000
• from Latvia: 14,000–16,000
• from Estonia: 10,000–11,000
• from eastern Romania: 24,000–30,000

As with the case of eastern Poland, all remaining ethnic groups in these territories were involved, and they suffered death and deprivation during their travels and in the year after their arrival at their settlement sites. The Soviets almost certainly would have forcibly relocated even more people from the annexed territories, but Germany's invasion of the USSR on 22 June 1941 interrupted the deportations.

Soviet repression meant the population acquired in the annexations of 1939–1940 must have fallen due to executions and relocations. It must have declined even further because of the impact on the remaining population. Likely, harsh treatment, neglect, and despair must have caused death rates to rise and birth rates to fall.

The brutal Soviet policies also alienated many people in the annexed territories, including many who had not already been anti-Soviet. After Germany invaded the USSR in June 1941, many of these people welcomed the Germans as liberators. Many soldiers conscripted into the Red Army from the annexed territories deserted or surrendered. Civilian revolts against the Soviets broke out in multiple places in the former Baltic states, and Baltic partisan groups operated against retreating Soviet forces. Almost all of the annexed territories quick fell to the invaders, with many people there more than willing to collaborate with the Axis against the Soviets. The Soviets would regain control of these territories in 1944 and soon resumed executions and deportations there, this time focused on the people who had collaborated with the enemy.

Language Relationships of the USSR

This section covers how the languages of the Soviet Union relate to one another. Terms and symbols on the following table are:

Ethnic Group per Soviet Classification: This lists the English-language versions of the ethnic group names the Soviets used in 1939 (per the Soviet census) and in 1941 (per the map). Most group names are traditional ones dating back to the Russian Empire or earlier times. However, in the 1920s and 1930s the Soviets switched to different names for some small groups, usually in an attempt to use the name the group itself used. These are noted in the table.

When the modern English-language name of a group differs from the Soviet 1939–1941 version, I note it brackets. For example, Komis [Komi-Zyryans] means that the group the 1939–1941 Soviets called the Komi people are now called the Komi-Zyryan people.

Mistreatment/Persecution Status: The Soviets from their rise to power claimed that they treated all ethnic groups favorably and respected their rights. In reality, they frequently mistreated or deliberately persecuted various ethnic groups [note 38]. Symbols after the name of an ethnic group show if the group was mistreated or persecuted by the Soviets in the 1917–1945 time period:

• ⦰ Pre-war Mistreatment or Persecution
  The group was persecuted by the Soviets before the start of the war with Germany on 22 June 1941. In many cases, an ethnic group was persecuted if it was transnational, having significant presence in both the USSR and in a nearby foreign country. In the Soviet system, members of such groups who lived in the USSR were potentially or actively treasonous to the Soviet Union: likely to spy for the foreign country, likely to commit economic or physical sabotage against the Soviets, and likely to rebel if the USSR went to war with the foreign country.
• The Soviets treated many members of theses groups with arbitrary arrests, summary executions, and forced relocations to remote regions of the USSR. For example, Soviet Poles in the western USSR were persecuted due to the existence of neighboring Poland. These pre-war relocations sometimes but not always resulted in the deportation of almost the entire ethnic group. Most Soviet Koreans were deported from the Soviet Far East, for example, but only about 15,000 Greeks out of a population of almost 300,000 were deported from the western USSR.
• The height of the pre-war relocations was a series of NKVD "national operations" against targeted ethnic groups in 1937–1938, such as the Polish operation (NKVD Directive № 00485) and the Greek operation (NKVD Directive № 50215). Be aware that a group was sometimes persecuted several different times in the pre-war period. In addition to the 1937 Polish operation, Soviet Poles had also been subjected to persecutions in the 1920s and early 1930s.
• ✡ Antisemitism
  The Russian Empire had a long history of antisemitism, with many laws that restrict the Jews. Pogroms and other violence against the Jews occurred, conducted sometimes by the military and police forces of the state, by private groups, and by a mix of the two. In the early 20th Century, Russia enacted freedom of religion and rescinded its laws targeting Jews, but antisemitism remained prevalent among many government officials, state forces, and parts of the populace. After the Soviets took over in 1917, they officially opposed antisemitism as a crime of capitalism: "capitalists fomenting hatred against the Jews in order to blind the workers, to divert their attention from the real enemy of the working people, capital" [note 39]. However, antisemitism remained entrenched among many people in the Soviet state. In the Russian Civil War, Red Army forces would at times conduct pogroms because some of their commanders and many of their soldiers held antisemitic beliefs. (Most Red Army common soldiers were conscripted from the poorly-educated peasantry, where antisemitism was quite prevalent.) The Soviet leadership did denounce antisemitic crimes committed by the Red Army but did not impose systems to prevent them. (In contrast, the leadership imposed severe control and harsh punishments for soldiers who tried to desert or to retreat without orders.) Red Army pogroms ended when the Soviets won the civil war and demobilized most of the Red Army.
• Since the Soviets were against religion, religious Jews and Jewish religious bodies were caught up in Soviet anti-religion actions. However, the Soviets targeted all religions, so this did not represent any special persecution of the Jews.
• Many educated, non-religious Jews in Russia had been attracted to socialist and Marxist movements, with their goals of tearing down elite privilege and rebuilding society to treat common people fairly. The Bolshevik Party (the Communist Party from 1918) thus had many non-religious Jewish members, including in its upper leadership. The Jewish origins of some top Communists allowed fascists and antisemites to paint Communism as a Jewish conspiracy aiming for world domination. (Nazi propaganda, for example, was vehemently against "Judeo-Communism".) Some of the non-Jewish Communist Party leaders also harbored antisemitic attitudes, including Stalin. He once derided the Mensheviks, bitter Marxist rivals of the Bolsheviks, as a "Jewish faction" and promoted the Bolsheviks as a "genuine Russian faction" simply because the Mensheviks contained a higher percentage of Jews than did the Bolsheviks.
• When Stalin gained dictatorial power in the late 1920s, he publicly reaffirmed the Soviets' official policy of antisemitism. However, his purges during the 1930s disproportionately removed many Jewish Communists from positions of power in the Party and government. This process increased when Stalin decided to seek an accommodation with Nazi Germany. Maksim Litvinov, an ethnic Jew and the People's Commissar of Foreign Affairs of the USSR, was dismissed in 1939. His replacement, Vyacheslav Molotov, was ordered to purge the commissariat of Jews. Molotov then entered negotiations for a non-aggression pact with Joachim von Ribbentrop, Germany's foreign minister. During the negotiations, Stalin told Ribbentrop he would rid the Soviet intelligentsia of its "Jewish domination". The negotiations resulted in a non-aggression treaty together with a secret agreement that split much of eastern Europe between Germany and the USSR.
• During World War II, Stalin would have some Jews forcibly relocated from the western USSR to Siberia and other remote regions. After the war, Stalin would institute larger anti-Jewish purges. This was partly due to the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, as in the Stalinist system the existence of Israel called into question the loyalties of Soviet Jews, especially since the Soviets assumed Israel would be pro-Western and pro-USA.
• 🕱 Ethnic Groups Affected by Stalin's Famine
  Soon after Stalin achieved dictatorial power in the late 1920s, he began a policy of rapid, forced collectivization of agriculture. This resulted in a massive famine in the USSR during the early 1930s. Most of the Soviet population was affected by the famine; millions of people died from starvation or diseases caused by malnutrition. Some ethnic groups were particularly hit hard by the famine. The large Ukrainian farming population was particularly affected (in what became known as the Holodomor, from a Ukrainian phrase meaning "to exterminate by hunger"). The Kazakhs, many of whom were animal herders, were decimated (in the Asharshylyk, Kazakh for "famine"). The Asharshylyk reduced the Kazakhs from the majority group in Kazakhstan to a minority. The 1930s–1950s Soviets exacerbated this situation by forcibly relocating members of other ethnic groups, such as Germans, Koreans, and Poles, to Kazakhstan. The Kazakhs thus remained a minority in Kazakhstan until the 1990s.
• Scholars still argue over whether the Soviets intentionally targeted the Ukrainians and Kazakhs. This debate does not matter here, as it is sufficient that millions of Ukrainians and Kazakhs were deliberately mistreated. Once the famine began, the Soviets knew it was devastating to millions of Ukrainian farmers and Kazakh herders. They refused to take measures to alleviate the catastrophe. Instead, they implemented policies that increased the suffering and death toll, such as seizing what little food Ukrainian farmers had hidden and preventing them from fleeing the famine areas.
• ⌖ Repression in Annexed Territories
  In 1939–1940, Stalin's semi-alliance with Hitler allowed the Soviet Union to annex eastern Poland, parts of Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and parts of Romania. These territories all had capitalist systems which the Soviets set out to destroy and convert into their repressive version of socialism. This involved the persecution of numerous class enemies (capitalists, landowners, clergy, etc.), nationalists who wanted independence from the USSR, and anyone who resisted imposition of the Soviet system. While this repression was not just based on ethnicity, it had an ethnic component. Almost all ethnic groups in the annexed territories were mistreated and some were explicitly persecuted.
• ✠ Persecution of the Soviet Germans
  Ethnic Germans were persecuted by the Soviets in 1941 soon after Germany invaded the Soviet Union. The war caused the Soviets to regard this group as potentially or actively treasonous. In 1941, many of these Germans were forcibly relocated from the western USSR to remote regions of the USSR like Kazakhstan and Siberia. Although they were not imprisoned in the GULag forced-labor system, many were nevertheless required to do forced labor for the Soviets during the war.
• ⊗ Persecution of Collaborator Groups
  During the war with Germany, some ethnic groups suffered mass persecution by the Soviets starting in 1943. Germany and its Axis allies had overrun considerable amounts of Soviet territory in 1941–1942, and some Soviet citizens from all ethnic groups collaborated with the enemy in the occupied regions. In 1943–1945, the Soviets recaptured these regions and collectively punished ethnic groups if a significant minority of their members (as judged by the Soviets) had been collaborators or anti-Soviet rebels. Punishment consisted of the entire group being forcibly relocated from its homeland to remote parts of the USSR. For example, the Crimean Tatars were deported from the Crimea to Central Asia in 1944.
• ▦ Persecution of Selected Ethnic Groups
  Parts of some ethnic groups were forcibly relocated during the war from 1942. These deportations had elements in common with the 1941 relocation of the Germans (✠) and the 1943–1945 punishment of collaborator ethnic groups (⊗). They occurred in regions in danger of being occupied by the Axis and targeted ethnic groups believed to be likely to collaborate with the Axis, such as the Soviet Romanians and Soviet Greeks.

Forced relocations of ethnic groups were typically inhumanely implemented and resulted in considerable loss of life. The mere fact of being relocated meant the people were anti-Soviet criminals in the eyes of Soviet security forces, local Party and government officials, and the general population. Food, sanitary conditions, and health care during the transportation to the relocation areas were minimal or sometimes completely lacking. Soviet security forces often mistreated, sometimes fatally, the deportees during transportation. Food, sanitary conditions, health care, and housing upon arrival at the relocation areas were all completely inadequate, typically for many months, while the relocated people were expected to work hard. Local Party and government authorities in the relocation areas did little or nothing for the deportees, who were also met with hostility by the local populace. Because of these conditions, a significant percentage of the deported people died during transportation or in the first year after arrival, due to malnutrition, diseases, and overwork.

After World War II, in 1946 the General Assembly of the United Nations declared genocide was an international crime. This was followed up in 1948 by the Genocide Convention (the "Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide"), which came into force in 1951. The Convention outlawed "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group" The USSR was a party to convention. How did its actions before, during, and after World War II avoid being genocide? In short, when the Convention was being drafted, Soviet negotiators ensured that acts against "classes" of people were not defined as genocide. Thus, its liquidation of the kulaks (prosperous farmers) was not genocide, because the kulaks were not "a national, ethnic, racial or religious group" but were a class of people. (In Marxist-Leninist ideology, they were part of the petty bourgeoisie.) The "intent" phrasing in the Convention also let off the Soviets for the forced relocations of ethnic groups, as they could claim they were relocating groups with no intention of destroying them, even though in most cases groups experienced many excessive deaths when they were relocations.

Size:
This is a rating on the total population of the ethnic group:

The importance of a group in the USSR was often directly related to its size. I have chosen the intervals to try to help illustrate this. For example, there was only one group at "▫▫▫ ▫▫▫ ▫", the ethnic Russians. The Russians were the essential core group of the USSR and were specially treated, especially under Stalin. This did not prevent them from suffering due to inhumane Soviet policies, but Russians were never singled out for mistreatment simply because they were Russians.

In my opinion, 1.200 million rather than 1.000 million for the start of the "▫▫▫ ▫" rating works best, as does 0.075 million (75,000) for the start of the "▫▫" rating. This helps show that almost all of the ethnic groups the Soviets mistreated during the war ("✠", "⊗", "▦") were relatively small, in the "▫" and "▫▫" sizes. The one exception was the Soviet Germans ("✠"), at "▫▫▫ ▫" in size. It is likely that more ethnic Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians actually collaborated with the Axis than did members of the persecuted groups. Of course, the Soviets could not collectively punish the three Slavic groups, since they were crucial for the existence of the Soviet state. Instead, in these cases they punished the actual collaborators (and, often, their families). This then begs the question: why did the Soviets single out certain ethnic groups for collective punishment? Most of the affected groups were Muslims in Soviet border regions adjacent to Muslim countries. The suspicion is that the Soviets used collaboration as an excuse to ethnically cleanse these border regions. In support of this conjecture, I note the wartime Soviets forcibly relocated the Meskhetian Turks and other Muslim minorities from the Adjarian ASSR of the Georgian SSR in 1944. The Germans did not occupy any part of this territory during the war, so these Muslims were not collaborators. Instead, the excuse for ethnic cleansing was that these Muslims were spies for next-door Turkey.

Language Family:
This lists the language family of the home language for each ethnic group in the table. Modern names of the families are used. Most families are "genetic', meaning linguists believe the languages in a family all evolved over time from a common ancestral language. For example, the Indo-European languages are believed to have descended from a "Proto-Indo-European" language. Despite having a common ancestor, languages in a family can evolve so extensively that there can be no mutual intelligibility among them. For example, a monolingual speaker of Albanian, French, German, Greek, Polish, or Welsh would not be able to converse with a speaker of any of the other languages, even though these are all Indo-European languages with homelands in Europe.

The Paleo-Siberian family is geographical rather than genetic, as discussed below in the table. Two other families, Altaic and Uralic, may not be genetic but instead may be geographical. The reasons for this are discussed for each family in the table.

Four of the families originated in or near regions that would eventually be in the Soviet Union, as shown on the following map.

Language Group/(Language Branch):
Language groups and branches show the hierarchical structure of languages within a family. All these are supposed to be genetic relationships: the languages in a group are descended from a common group ancestor, and the languages in a branch are descended from a common branch ancestor. I do not always show branch names. I use "group" and "branch" as terms of convenience; actual linguistic terms may differ, such as "dialect cluster" in some instances. Also be aware that there are several different names for some groups and branches. For example, the Siberian branch of the Turkic language group is sometimes called "Northeastern Common Turkic" or just "Northeastern" instead of "Siberian".

People who spoke the languages of a group or branch did not necessarily have a native ability to communicate with one another. For example, there were many Turkic languages. Some were so different from one another that mutual intelligibility was not present, such as between Sakha in northeastern Siberia and Azerbaijani in the Transcaucasus. On the other hand, some languages were so similar that there was a great degree of intelligibility between them, like with Kazakh and Kyrgyz.

Language per Soviet Classification:
This lists the English versions of the language names the Soviets used in 1939–1941. These names are the Russian names, since Russia was the lingua franca of the USSR. Thus, it is "Belorussian", not "Belarusian". When the modern English-language name of the language is different, I note it brackets. For example, "Komi [Komi-Zyryan]" means what the 1939–1941 Soviets called the Komi language is now called Komi-Zyryan.

The listed language for an ethnic group is its traditional home language. In the USSR, this did not mean that all members of the group spoke that language. In the Ukrainian SSR, for example, some people who identified as Ukrainian spoke Russian, not Ukrainian, as their home language. In some small ethnic groups, particularly in the Russian SFSR, a number of people spoke Russian as their home language and had little or no fluency in the group's traditional language. (This process has continued throughout the 20th and 21st Centuries, so that today some languages in the list below are extinct or critical endangered.)

A language can have many dialects. There is sometimes great controversy on whether something is a language in itself or is instead a dialect of another language. For example, Belarusian, Russian, and Ukrainian each had many dialects. Some people in the border regions between what is now Belarus and Ukraine speak a tongue that is intermediate between Belarusian and Ukrainian: is this a dialect of Belarusian, a dialect of Ukrainian, or its own microlanguage? A similar situation existed in border regions of what became the Russian SFSR and the Ukrainian SSR: did people there speak a Ukrainian-influenced Russian dialect or a Russian-influenced Ukrainian one?

Dialect-vs-language disputes were often complicated and influenced by geopolitical considerations. The USSR and Romania both claimed the province of Bessarabia, which had many people who spoke Moldovan (aka Moldavian). Many Romanians and Moldovans claimed Moldovan was a dialect of Romanian, which implied that Bessarabia naturally should be part of Romania. Soviets claimed Moldovan was a separate language, which was intended to bolster their claims to the province.

Regions on the Map:
These codes related ethnic groups in the table to their regions on the locator map for the 1941 map:

CAsia, (CAsia): Soviet Central Asia
NWest, (NWest): Northwestern USSR
Sib-FE, (Sib-FE): Siberia and/or the Soviet Far East
SRu-Cau, (SRu-Cau): Southern Russia and/or the Caucasus Region
SWest, (SWest): Southwestern USSR
Vol-Ural, (Vol-Ural): Central Volga and the Urals Region
West, (West): Western USSR

A code without parentheses is for the main ethnic group of a region, which is shown as a colored pattern on the map. A code in parentheses is for a minority ethnic group within a region, which is shown on the map using text rather than colored pattern. For example, the bright red region in the western USSR (see map on right) shows the presence of the Belorussians. Within this region text shows the presence of Jews and Poles.

Appendix

How the 1939–1940 Ethnic Breakdown was Calculated

Ethnic group populations are calculated from the estimated total populations of the annexed territories (in 1939 for eastern Poland and in 1940 for the rest of the territories) together with the percentage of each ethnic group in each territory. The Baltic states do not have percentages for 1939–1940, so the percentages from the most-recent census are used: 1934 for Estonia, 1935 for Latvia, and 1923 for Lithuania. These are just rough calculations, so I ignored niceties like significant digits. This gives an appearance of precision that is completely unjustified, but it all works out when the totals are rounded off in the final column.

"Eastern Romania" means the territories the USSR annexed from Romania: Bessarabia, North Bukovina, and Hertza.

Estimated Sizes of Ethnic Groups in the Annexed Territories (in millions)

The "Other Groups" category includes Finns, Gagauz, Romani, Slovaks, etc. This category has some minor issues. One is that the ethnic groups in the category differed from territory to territory. For example, Finns were in the Estonian "other groups" category but not in the eastern Romanian one, while conversely Gagauz were in the Romanian "other groups" category but not the Estonian one.

A slightly more significant issue is that the other groups category for some territories included ethnic groups listed in the table. For example, there were Estonians in the Latvian "other groups" category, Belarusians in Lithuanian "other groups", etc. Because of this, some groups should be a bit larger than shown, but a quick check suggests this is not particularly significant. The grand total for Other Groups is roughly 300,000 people. The largest ethnic group in this category is almost certainly Lithuanians: a bit more than 80,000 Lithuanians resided in eastern Poland. Adding 0.08 to the Lithuanian total would kick it up from 2.1 to 2.2. No other groups should benefit as much. Since dealing with intervals of 0.1 already likely exceeds the accuracy of this table, I did not try to achieve a more detailed break down for the Other Groups category. (Sorry, Lithuanians.)

The Soviet Parade of Peoples

The poster shows a parade of people from each of the 11 union republics in the USSR as of 1938. All but one of the marchers are in stereotypical clothing of their union republic's majority ethnic groups. The exception is the marcher on the right, representing the Russian SFSR, who is in modern clothing for 1938. I suspect this is likely part of Soviet propaganda to promote Russians as the modernizing "elder brothers" of the Soviet peoples, to be admired and emulated. Each banner proclaims "Long Live Stalin" in the language and script of the majority ethnic group of the union republic.

From left to right, the union republics are the Uzbek SSR (Uzbek language in Latin script), Turkmen SSR (Turkmen/Latin script), Kyrgyz SSR (Kyrgyz/Latin script), Tajik SSR (Tajik/Latin script), Kazakh SSR (Kazakh/Latin script), Armenian SSR (Armenian language and script), Georgian SSR (Georgian language and script), Azerbaijan SSR (Azerbaijani/Latin script), Belorussian SSR (Belarusian/Cyrillic script), Ukrainian SSR (Ukrainian/Cyrillic script), and Russian SFSR (Russian/Cyrillic script).

As part of Stalin's drive to promote things Russian, all the languages shown on the poster that used the Latin script would soon be required to change to Cyrillic script. These languages had traditionally used the Arabic script before the Soviets came to power, with the Soviets switching them to the Latin script in the 1920s. Stalin abandoned this drive and required them to change to Cyrillic. The Latin script survived in a few places in the USSR, such as among the Volga Germans and among people like the Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians when they became part of the USSR in 1939–1940.)

Some languages that had traditionally (before 1918) used non-Cyrillic scripts were not switched to Cyrillic. Thus, both Armenian and Georgian retained their traditional scripts. Some other languages that did not use Cyrllic were not as lucky, such as Kalmyk.

Notes