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Postwar Rebuilding and Resettlements in the Soviet Union: A Case of Azeri Migration

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 July 2022

Krista Goff
Krista Goff*
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Abstract

Mass population movements of Soviet residents—deportees, evacuees, accused kulaks, refugees, soldiers, and others—are a characteristic feature of early Soviet history. Some of these forms of migratory violence peaked during the experience of total war in the 1940s, but others continued well past the cessation of wartime hostilities. This was the case in the South Caucasus, which narrowly avoided German occupation and the mass civilian upheaval that stalked other parts of the Soviet Union, but nonetheless hosted successive wartime and postwar migrations that disrupted local communities.

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Articles
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Slavic Review , Volume 81 , Issue 1 , Spring 2022 , pp. 97 - 121
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies

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Footnotes

I would like to thank the anonymous readers for helping me improve this text and Harriet Murav, Dmitry Tartakovsky, and Meagan Smith at Slavic Review. I would also like to thank Sara Brinegar, Sarah Cameron, Bruce Grant, Jo Laycock, Douglas Northrop, Jeff Sahadeo, Lewis Siegelbaum, and Ronald Suny for their generous commentary on early versions of this article. It goes without saying that they bear no responsibility for my findings.

References

1. In the late 1930s, thousands of Kurds, Iranians, “Turks,” and Armenians were deported from the South Caucasus. In 1941, security officials expelled the local German population. In 1944, nearly 100,000 “Turks,” Kurds, and Khemshins were deported from Georgia to Central Asia. Azeris were not supposed to be targeted by this operation, but many Azeris in Georgia nonetheless were deported. Finally, in 1949, tens of thousands of so-called Dashnak Armenians, Greek and Turkish citizens, stateless Greeks and Turks, and former Greek and Turkish citizens were expelled from the South Caucasus during Operation Volna. Several thousand people with a history of Iranian citizenship were deported soon after. These are only some of the forced migrations that took place in the region at this time. For more detail on deportations from Georgia, see Claire P. Kaiser, Georgian and Soviet: Entitled Nationhood and the Specter of Stalin in the Caucasus (Ithaca, forthcoming 2022).

2. 100,000 is an estimate. According to one resettlement report, 96,000 Armenians moved to Armenia from the US, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Greece, Syria, and elsewhere between 1946 and 1948, Russian State Archive of the Economy (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv ekonomiki, RGAE), fond (f.) 5675, opis΄ (op.) 1, delo (d.) 413, list (l.) 40. Jo Laycock, meanwhile, has suggested that there were 110,000 repatriates, while Maike Lehmann puts the figure at 89,637 repatriated Armenians post-1946: Laycock, Joanne, “The Repatriation of Armenians to Soviet Armenia, 1945–1949,” in Gatrell, Peter and Baron, Nick, eds., Warlands: Population Resettlement and State Reconstruction in the Soviet-East European Borderlands, 1945–1950 (London, 2009), 156Google Scholar; and Lehmann, Maike, “A Different Kind of Brothers: Exclusion and Partial Integration after Repatriation to a Soviet ‘Homeland,’” Ab Imperio 3 (2012): 179Google Scholar.

3. Michael Herceg Westren, “Nations in Exile: ‘The Punished Peoples’ in Soviet Kazakhstan, 1941–1961,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2012), 66.

4. Kaiser, Georgian and Soviet, Chapter 3.

5. This migration is often characterized as the resettlement of 100,000 Azeris from Armenia to Azerbaijan, but the 100,000 figure reflects the target number cited in resettlement decrees rather than the number of people who were actually resettled from Armenia to Azerbaijan. As I discuss in this article, the resettlement fell far short of state goals. Only approximately half this number ended up resettling in Azerbaijan and thousands returned to Armenia soon afterward.

6. Some examples include, Alijarly, Sulejman, “The Republic of Azerbaijan: Notes on the State Borders in the Past and Present,” in Wright, John. F.R., Goldenberg, Suzanne, and Schofield, Richard, eds., Transcaucasian Boundaries (London, 1996): 112–32Google Scholar; Gasanly, Dzhamil΄, SSSR-Turtsiia: Ot neitraliteta k kholodnoi voine (1939–1953) (Moscow, 2008), 487–89Google Scholar; Ismailov, El΄dar, Ocherki po istorii Azerbaidzhana (Moscow, 2010), 348–349Google Scholar; Bəxtiyar Nəcəfov, Deportasiya (Baku, 2006); Rena Pashabekova, Bezhentsy: 1918–1920, 1948–1952, 1988–1989 (Baku, 1992); Shafiyev, Farid, Resettling the Borderlands: State Relocations and Ethnic Conflict in the South Caucasus (Montreal, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Shukurov, Karim, “Great Tragedy: Deportation of Azerbaijanis from Armenia,” Visions of Azerbaijan (Baku, November-December 2010): 61Google Scholar.

7. In 1997 and 1998, for example, the president of Azerbaijan, Heydar Aliyev, issued successive decrees portraying the resettlement as a prime example of Armenian genocidal violence and ethnic cleansing of Azeris (Nəcəfov, Deportasiya, 3–4). This anti-Armenian discourse is also aimed at an international audience. In 2009, for instance, Azerbaijan’s representative to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe sponsored an error-ridden declaration that invoked the 1948–1953 migration to try to prove a long-running, one-sided pattern of Armenian violence and Azeri victimhood. In Armenia, meanwhile, a form of historiographical erasure has developed with historians there generally leaving the resettlement and related violence committed against Azeris out of their history writing.

8. Manley, Rebecca, To the Tashkent Station: Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War (Ithaca, 2009), 5Google Scholar. Lewis H. Siegelbaum and Leslie Page Moch make a similar point in Broad is My Native Land, writing “we recognize that all forms of migration are coerced to a degree; moreover, they are often mutually constituted in the sense that the greater, or more widely spread, the use of coercion, the more likely people on the receiving end will resort to evasive action including escape, itself a form of migration,” in Broad is My Native Land: Repertoires and Regimes of Migration in Russia’s Twentieth Century (Ithaca, 2014), 9.

9. Siegelbaum and Moch, Broad is My Native Land, 17.

10. National Archives of Armenia Division of Socio-Political Documentation (Hayastani Azgayin Arkhiv Hasarakakan Qaghaqakan Pastatghteri Bazhin, HAAHQPB), f. 1, op. 27, d. 47, ll. 137–138.

11. HAAHQPB, 1.27.47.137–138. It is possible that state officials adjusted this number because the 130,000 estimate was inaccurate. Census officials had exaggerated population numbers across the Soviet Union in 1939 to mask accumulated losses from collectivization and the purges. World War II also had left its mark on Soviet population counts in the intervening period.

12. Republic of Azerbaijan State Archive (Azərbaycan Respublikası Dövlət Arxivi, ARDA), f. 411, op. 28, d. 681, ll. 113–115.

13. Arif Yunusov, for example, places all the blame on Arutiunov and Stalin, writing that the Armenian leadership found a way to “solve the ‘Azerbaijani issue’” with the March 1948 decree to move “more than 100,000” Azeris from Armenia to Azerbaijan, see Arif Yunusov, Karabakh: Past and Present (Baku, 2005), 32. Vladislav Zubok, who seems to rely on Jamil Hasanli’s work here, similarly erases Bagirov from this process, writing that Stalin accepted “Arutynov’s proposal to resettle Azeri peasants outside of Armenia,” Vladislav M. Zubok, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (Chapel Hill, 2007), 58.

14. Atakhan Pashayev, interview.

15. Ismailov, Ocherki po istorii, 348.

16. Gasanly, SSSR-Turtsiia, 488–89.

17. HAAHQPB, 1.27.47.137–138.

18. See, Tolstov, S.P., Levin, M.G., Cheboksarov, N.N., eds., Ocherki Obshchei Etnografii: Aziatskaia chast΄ SSSR (Moscow, 1960), 75–76Google Scholar, and Stalin, Iosif, “Speech Delivered by J.V. Stalin at a Meeting of Voters of the Stalin Electoral District, Moscow,” in Speeches Delivered at Meetings of Voters of the Stalin Electoral District, Moscow (Moscow, 1950), 31Google Scholar.

19. RGAE, f. 5675, op. 1, d. 413, ll. 2–3.

20. ARDA, f. 411, op. 9, d. 442, ll. 88–88ob.

21. Olivier Ferrando, “Soviet Population Transfers and Interethnic Relations in Tajikistan: Assessing the Concept of Ethnicity,” Central Asian Survey 30, no. 1 (April 2011), 41. This initiative followed earlier efforts to populate the Kura-Araks zone with people from other republics. A previous scheme discussed in 1940, for example, involved moving thousands of people (871 households) from Dagestan to the Kura-Araks lowlands: ARDA, f. 411, op. 9, d. 12, ll. 20–21.

22. See, for example, RGAE, f. 5675, op. 1, d. 534, l. 6.

23. Siegelbaum and Moch, Broad is My Native Land, 53.

24. Siegelbaum and Moch, Broad is My Native Land, 60.

25. ARDA, f. 411, op. 9, d. 601, ll. 279–280.

26. RGAE, f. 5675, op.1, d. 418, ll. 152–153.

27. Siegelbaum and Moch, Broad is My Native Land, 58. Highland Armenians were also targeted for resettlement within Armenia at this time (See, for example, RGAE, f. 5675, op. 1, d. 534, l. 6).

28. ARDA, f. 417, op. 36, d. 407, l. 86; and ARDA, f. 411, op. 26s, d. 296, ll. 63–66, 88–89.

29. RGAE, f. 5675, op. 1, d. 418, ll. 155, 159.

30. RGAE, f. 5675, op. 1, d. 418, ll. 167–171.

31. RGAE, f. 5675, op.1, d. 418, ll. 160–162.

32. ARDA, f. 411, op. 9, d. 601, ll. 150–159.

33. See, for example, Gasanly, SSSR-Turtsiia, 490.

34. ARDA, f. 411, op. 26s, d. 296, ll. 63–66 and RGAE, f. 5675, op. 1, d. 770, ll. 9-11.

35. See, for example, RGAE, f. 5675, op. 1, d. 465, ll. 2–3, and RGAE, f. 5675, op. 1, d. 471, l. 12.

36. Siegelbaum and Moch, Broad is My Native Land, 7–8.

37. In a report sent to the Main Resettlement Administration in 1950, the deputy head of the Armenian Resettlement Administration admitted that only 21,505 out of a planned 50,000 Azeris had relocated to Azerbaijan in the past two years: RGAE, f. 5675, op. 1, d. 400, l. 174. These figures are an approximation, as slightly different counts are provided in other documents, for example: RGAE, f. 5675, op. 1, d. 413, l. 9.

38. RGAE, f. 5675, op. 1, d. 465, l. 1. It is common to find statistical variance across different sources. The Azerbaijani report documented a total of 12,932 migrants from Armenia to Azerbaijan in 1950, but an Armenian resettlement report in 1951 claimed that 14,136 Azerbaijanis moved from Armenia to Azerbaijan in 1950: RGAE, f. 5675, op. 1, d. 456, l. 111. Similarly, if we add the totals from this paragraph, it seems that 34,437 Azerbaijanis moved to Azerbaijan from Armenia between 1948 and 1950, but an Azerbaijani report claims that by the end of 1950, only 33,673 people had relocated: RGAE, f. 5675, op. 1, d. 537. The difference is small, but nonetheless important to keep in mind as we often build claims based on incomplete and imperfect archival sources.

39. This figure is as of January 1, 1952: ARDA, f. 411, op. 26s, d. 296, l. 62.

40. In 1951, for example, Ukrainian SSR officials aimed to resettle 8,250 families to other parts of the USSR and move 25,000 families from the northern and western areas of the republic to both southern Ukraine and the Crimean oblast in the Russian republic, from which Crimean Tatars recently had been deported. By the end of October, however, they had only fulfilled 72% of the southern migration strategy and 43% of the other resettlement plan: RGAE, f. 5675, op. 1, d. 515, l. 13.

41. ARDA, f. 411, op. 26s, d. 18, l. 49. The student astutely reiterated a shift in state policy that had become clear in the prior decade, when the state started referring to the titular population of Azerbaijan as “Azerbaijani” rather than “Tiurk” or “Türk” in part to create distance between Azeris and Turks in Turkey.

42. ARDA, f. 411, op. 26, d. 34, ll. 67, 71.

43. ARDA, f. 411, op. 26, d. 34, ll. 65, 69.

44. Ia. Chadaev from the Council of Ministers in Moscow ordered his Yerevan counterparts to address Guliev’s concerns. The deputy head of the Armenian Council of Ministers responded that this migration was voluntary and, in any case, Guliev’s home region was not included in the migration plan. They pledged to take Guliev’s wishes into account if that changed later: National Archive of Armenia (Hayastani Azgayin Arkhiv, HAA), f. 113, op. 47, d. 769, ll. 33–35.

45. HAAHQPB, f. 1, op. 36, d. 91, ll. 7, 12, 20.

46. ARDA, f. 411, op. 26, d. 34, l. 66.

47. ARDA, f. 411, op. 26s, d. 330, l. 4.

48. Ferrando, “Soviet Population Transfers and Interethnic Relations in Tajikistan,” 42–43.

49. As Siegelbaum and Moch have put it, many resettlements in the USSR “did not involve much voluntariness,” Broad is My Native Land, 58.

50. RGAE, f. 5675, op. 1, d. 466, l. 20.

51. RGAE, f. 5675, op. 1, d. 456, l. 12.

52. RGAE, f. 5675, op. 1, d. 465, l. 4.

53. RGAE, f. 5675, op.1, d. 400, l. 86; and ARDA, f. 411, op. 26s, d. 296, l. 55.

54. RGAE, f. 5675, op. 1, d. 770, ll. 15–16.

55. RGAE, f. 5675, op. 1, d. 537, ll. 101–102.

56. In a 1997 presidential decree, Heydar Aliyev declared that “During the execution of these [resettlement] orders. . .thousands of people, including the elderly and children, perished from being unable to endure the hard deportation conditions, severe climatic changes, physical shocks and moral genocide” (Nəcəfov, Deportasiya, 3–6). The Azerbaijan Republic State Commission on Prisoners of War, Hostages, and Missing Persons has similarly claimed that “tens of thousands of deported Azerbaijanis died [in the lowlands of the Kura-Araks valley]” as a result of this migration, Azerbaijani State Commission on Prisoners of War, Hostages, and Missing Persons, “1948–1953,” at tinyurl.com/2s4ezjst (accessed February 15, 2022). Some Azeris undoubtedly did perish as a result of the harsh climatic conditions and diseases that they contracted in the Kura-Araks zone (we see a few references to this, for example, in complaints and petitions), but these government sources do not provide citations and I was unable to find evidence supporting claims of mass death in the documents that I accessed.

57. RGAE, f. 5675, op. 1, d. 770, ll. 9–10.

58. For example, RGAE, f. 5675, op. 1, d. 413, ll. 22–23; and f. 5675, op. 1, d. 400, l. 87.

59. RGAE, f. 5675, op. 1, d. 465, ll. 11–12, 29.

60. RGAE, f. 5675, op. 1, d. 465, l. 7.

61. ARDA, f. 411, op. 9, d. 377–378.

62. ARDA, f. 411, op. 9, d. 734, ll. 232–235.

63. HAA, f. 113, op. 49, d. 449, l. 73.

64. RGAE, f. 5675, op. 1, d. 584, ll. 2–3.

65. HAAHQPB, f. 1, op. 28, d. 78, l. 4.

66. HAAHQPB, f. 1, op. 27, d. 47, ll. 76–77.

67. Some repatriates were likely included in this push to depopulate mountainous areas of the republic. Many repatriates were initially settled in mountainous areas and expressed dissatisfaction with their living conditions there, leading to efforts to resettle them in lower elevations: RGAE, f. 5675, op. 1, d. 413, l. 40.

68. For example, RGAE, f. 5675, op. 1, d. 418, l. 103; and f. 5675, op. 1, d. 537, l. 181.

69. Reports document numerous migrants taking financial advantage of authorities’ mistakes and mismanagement. See, for example: RGAE, f. 5675, op. 1, d. 413, l. 10; and HAA, f. 113, op. 49, d. 440, l. 1. Documents from the Shaki Filial of the Republic of Azerbaijan State Archive (Azərbaycan Respublikası Dövlət Arxivinin Şəki filialı, ARDA SF), show that Kuliev and Azerbaijan Communist Party Secretary G.A. Seidov warned regional authorities in Azerbaijan not to accommodate “unauthorized” migrants who violated resettlement plans by settling outside the Kura-Araks region: ARDA SF, f. 261, op. 1, d. 137, l. 321.

70. HAA, 113.49.449.36; and RGAE, f. 5675, op. 1, d. 465, l. 2.

71. See, for example, RGAE 5675.1.400.99; and RGAE, f. 5675, op. 1, d. 772, ll. 64–65.

72. RGAE, f. 5675, op. 1, d. 418, l. 2.

73. As usual, this is an approximation because different sources provide conflicting figures. According to S. Matirosyan, the deputy head of the Armenian resettlement administration, 31 of the 2,188 families resettled in 1948 returned to Armenia, 229 out of 2,582 in 1949, and 191 out of 3,300 in 1950. In this source, the total number of known people who had returned by this point was 2116: RGAE, f. 5675, op. 1, d. 466, l. 29. In a report written the following year, the head of the Armenian resettlement administration, K. Mutafyan, wrote that, as of July 1951, there were 1910 unauthorized returnees in Armenia (427 households). Mutafyan did also note, however, that the number was likely higher because people were continuously returning to the republic. In addition to these unauthorized returnees, there were also Azeris who returned to Armenia because they were brought back by the government there. This includes Azeri teachers who the Ministry of Enlightenment in Armenia called back from the Kura-Araks region. People who were relocated from other areas of Azerbaijan to the Kura-Araks region also were known to flee their assigned places of resettlement. This was an issue, for example, with people who had been relocated to the Kura-Araks zone from the southern, Talysh-dominated areas of the republic: ARDA, f. 417, op. 36, d. 407, l. 86.

74. ARDA, f. 417, op. 36, d. 407, ll. 150–151. This number is lower than has been published elsewhere. Lehmann references Viktor Shnirel΄man when she writes that, “A majority of the deported Azerbaijanis returned in the 1950s to Armenia”: Lehmann, “A Different Kind of Brothers,” 186. For his part, Shnirel΄man is vague about the number of returnees. He generally downplays the effects of this resettlement, writing, “In any case, this was not a repressive measure and, after the death of Stalin, Azerbaijanis returned to their former homes”: Victor A. Shnirelman, The Value of the Past: Myths, Identity, and Politics in Transcaucasia (Osaka, 2001), 47. I disagree with this characterization. Although it was not a deportation, this was a forcible migration for many people. Further, and as I have noted in the main text, some Azeris started to return home within months of their resettlement in the late 1940s, so the phenomenon of return began before Stalin’s death.

75. HAAHQPB, f. 1, op. 36, d. 91, l. 15.

76. RGAE, f. 5675, op. 1, d. 770, l. 16.

77. HAAHQPB, f. 1, op. 28, d. 74, ll. 150–151.

78. In the Zangibasar village Ailas, for example, the all-Union Ministry of Food Industry wanted to open a sovkhoz post-migration: HAA, f. 113, op. 46, d. 394, l. 12. Similarly, the Armenian Ministry of Meat and Dairy Production created new dairy sovkhozes in 1951 after kolkhozniks from the Gukasyan region village Dashkerpi were resettled in Azerbaijan and the residents of Kotayk region villages Bezaklu, Kiullidzha, and Artis were moved to Azerbaijan and other regions of Armenia: HAA, f. 113, op. 46, d. 538, ll. 15–17. Meanwhile, in 1952, kolkhoz lands from Shugaib and Ketanlu villages in Vedi region were redistributed among several neighboring kolkhozes: HAA, f. 113, op. 46, d. 566, ll. 12–13.

79. HAAHQPB, f. 1, op. 36, d. 91, ll. 20–24.

80. ARDA, f. 411, op. 26s, d. 296, ll. 67–69.

81. ARDA, f. 411, op. 26s, d. 296, ll. 74–82.

82. ARDA, f. 417, op. 36, d. 407, ll. 159.

83. ARDA, f. 417, op. 36, d. 407, ll. 150–151.

84. ARDA, f. 411, op. 26s, d. 296, l. 62. Hasanli has a different interpretation of this history. Citing a decree extending additional benefits to Kura-Araks migrants in 1954, he claims that it came about because Armenian authorities were panicked that Azeris were returning to Armenia “and bombarded the Kremlin with desperate letters” (no citation is provided for these letters). He further speculates, “If the deportation of Azerbaijanis from the Armenian SSR in 1947 was explained as being due to the repatriation of foreign Armenians, in 1954 it was motivated by the fact that Armenian families who had been deported by the decision of the Political Bureau in 1949 as anti-Soviet propagandist Dashnaks were returning ‘home.’” Here, Hasanli doubles down on the connection between Armenian repatriation and Azeri deportation, once again eliding Azerbaijani involvement in resettlement: Jamil Hasanli, Khrushchev’s Thaw and National Identity in Soviet Azerbaijan, 1954–1959 (London, 2015), 7–8.

85. RGAE f. 5675, op. 1, d. 678, l. 59; and ARDA f. 411, op. 26s, d. 330, l. 4.

86. Russian State Archive of Contemporary History (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv noveishei istorii, RGANI), f. 5, op. 60, d. 5, l. 42.