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Shortly before, during and immediately after World War IIWorld War II was the most extensive and costly armed conflict in the history of the world, involving the great majority of the world's nations, being fought simultaneously in several major theatres, and costing tens of millions of lives. The war was fough, Stalin conducted a series of deportationDeportation is the expelling of someone from a country. In general it refers to the expulsion of foreigners (the expulsion of natives is usually called banishment, exile, or transportation). Almost all countries reserve the right of deportation of foreigns on a huge scale which profoundly affected the ethnic map of the Soviet UnionThe Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR ( Russian: ; tr. Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik (SSSR) also called the Soviet Union ( ; tr. Sovetsky Soyuz , was a state in much of the northern region of Eurasia that existed from 1922 until 1. Over 1.5 million people were deported to SiberiaSiberia ( Russian: , common English transliterations: Sibir Sibir' is a vast region of Russia and northern Kazakhstan, constituting all of northern Asia, and extending eastward from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, and southward from the Arctic Oc and the Central Asian republics. Separatism, resistance to Soviet rule and collaboration with the invading GermansNazi Germany or the Third Reich commonly refers to Germany in the years 1933 1945, when it was under the firm control of the totalitarian and fascist ideology of National Socialism with Adolf Hitler as dictator. The term Nazi is a short form of the German were cited as the main official reasons for the deportations, although an ambition to ethnically cleanseThe term ethnic cleansing refers to various policies of forcibly removing people of another ethnic group. At one end of the spectrum, it is virtually indistinguishable from forced emigration and population transfer, while at the other it merges with depor regions may have also been a factor.
The deportations started with Poles from Belorussia, Ukraine and European Russia (see Polish minority in Soviet Union) 1932-1936. Koreans in the Russian Far East were deported in 1937. Volga Germans and seven nationalities of the Crimea and the northern Caucasus were deported: the Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Karachays, and Meskhetian Turks. Other minorities evicted from the Black Sea coastal region included Bulgarians, Greeks, and Armenians. From the newly conquered Eastern Poland 400,000 people were deported. The same followed in the Baltic republics of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia (over 200,000 people were deported). The death toll from these deportations was huge: 60% of the Baltic deportees were estimated to have perished, and nearly half of the entire Crimean Tatar population died of hunger in the first eighteen months after being banished from their homeland. Overall, 40% of those deported are estimated to have perished.
After the WWII, the population of East Prussia was replaced by the Soviet one, mainly by Russians.
In February 1956, Nikita Khrushchev in his speeech On the Personality Cult and its Consequences condemned the deportations as a violation of Leninist principles, asserting that the Ukrainians avoided such a fate "only because there were too many of them and there was no place to which to deport them." His government reversed most of Stalin's deportations, although it was not until as late as 1991 that the Tatars, Meskhs and Volga Germans were allowed to return en masse to their homelands. The deportations had a profound effect on the non-Russian peoples of the Soviet Union and they are still a major political issue - the memory of the deportations played a major part in the separatist movements in the Baltic republics, Tatarstan and Chechnya.