Deportation of the Meskhetian Turks

Deportation of the Meskhetian Turks
Part of Population transfer in the Soviet Union, Political repression in the Soviet Union and Soviet Union in World War II
A deported Meskhetian Turk woman and her child in exile in Uzbek SSR
Location	Meskheti, Georgian SSR
Date	14–15 November 1944
Target	Meskhetian Turks
Attack type	forced transfer, deportation, ethnic cleansing
Deaths	various estimates: 1) 12,589 2) 14,895 3) 30,000 4) 50,000
Victims	115,000 Meskhetian Turks, and Hemshins deported to special settlements in the Soviet Union
Perpetrators	Soviet Union NKVD
Motive	Russification,[1] colonialism[2]

The deportation of the Meskhetian Turks (Russian: Депортация турок-месхетинцев) was the forced transfer by the Soviet government of the entire Meskhetian Turk population from the Meskheti region of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic (now Georgia) to Central Asia on 14 November 1944. During the deportation, between 92,307 and 94,955 Meskhetian Turks were forcibly removed from 212 villages. They were packed into cattle wagons and mostly sent to the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. Members of other ethnic groups were also deported during the operation, including Kurds and Hemshins, bringing the total to approximately 115,000 evicted people. They were placed in special settlements where they were assigned to forced labor. The deportation and harsh conditions in exile caused between 12,589 to 50,000 deaths.

The expulsion was executed by NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria on the orders of Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin and involved 4,000 NKVD personnel. 34 million roubles were allocated to carry out the operation. It was a part of the Soviet forced settlement program and population transfers that affected several million members of Soviet ethnic minorities between the 1930s and the 1950s. Around 32,000 people, mostly Armenians, were settled by the Soviet government in the areas cleared of Meskhetia.

After Stalin's death, the new Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev delivered a secret speech in 1956 in which he condemned and reversed Stalin's deportations of various ethnic groups, many of which were allowed to their places of origin. However, even though they were released from the special settlements, the Meskhetian Turks, along with the Crimean Tatars and Volga Germans, were forbidden from returning to their native lands, making their exile permanent. Due to the secrecy of their expulsion and the politics of the Soviet Union, the deportation of the Meskhetian Turks remained relatively unknown and was subject to very little scholarly research until they were targeted by violent riots in Uzbekistan in 1989. Modern historians categorized the crime as ethnic cleansing and a crime against humanity. In 1991, the newly independent Georgia refused to give Meskhetian Turks the right to return to the Meskheti region. The Meskhetian Turks numbered between 260,000 and 335,000 people in 2006, and are today scattered across seven countries of the former Soviet Union, where many are stateless.