This Week in Class

This week we discussed Stalinist deportations in all three of my classes. In Migration and Borders we covered the exile of the Kalmyks to Siberia by Stalin from 1943 to 1957 as a case study of forced migration. In my Politics of Genocide course we discussed the deportation of the Russian-Germans, Karachais and Crimean Tatars as three examples of Soviet genocide during the 1940s. Finally, in my Political History of the USSR class we discussed the mass deportation of farmers branded as "kulaks" to special settlement villages in the Soviet Far North in 1930. In this last class we discussed the relationship between dekulakization, collectivization and industrialization. Between the three classes we covered a pretty good representative sample of Soviet mass deportations during the Stalin regime.