Soviet citizens and its industries were evacuated eastward as a result of Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia launched by Nazi Germany in June 1941 as part of World War II. Nearly sixteen million Soviet civilians and over 1,500 large factories were moved to areas in the middle or eastern part of the country by the end of 1941.Manley, Rebecca, and Rebecca Manley. To the Tashkent Station: Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War. Cornell University Press, 2009, pp. 7-8.
Along with the eastern exodus of civilians and industries, other unintended consequences of the German advance saw the execution of previously held western civilians by Soviet NKVD units, Encyklopedia PWN, Zbrodnie Sowickie W Polsce : After the outbreak of the German-Soviet war, in June 1941, thousands of prisoners have been murdered in mass executions in prisons (among others in Lviv and Berezwecz) and during the evacuation (so-called death marches) the removal of Lenin's body from Moscow to Tyumen, and the relocation of the Hermitage Museum collection to Sverdlovsk. Kuybyshev was chosen as the alternative capital of the Soviet Union if Moscow fell to the invading Germans. During the summer of 1943, everything was moved back to Moscow. Soviet towns and cities inland or in the east received the bulk of the new refugees and high-priority war factories, with locations such as the Siberian city of Novosibirsk receiving more than 140,000 refugees and many factories due to its location away from the front lines.
Despite early German successes in seizing control of large swaths of western USSR territory throughout 1943 and sketchy contingency plans by the Soviets for mobilization in the east, Soviet industries eventually outpaced the Germans in arms production; a total of 73,000 tanks, 82,000 aircraft and nearly 324,000 artillery pieces were distributed to the Red Army in their fight against the Axis powers by 1945.Freeze, Gregory L. Russia, A History. Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 330.
Government policy Stalin and the Communist Party's Central Committee had received intelligence that Hitler would eventually turn on the Soviet Union; plans were made before Operation Barbarossa, and were launched to begin the evacuation as a precaution. Vasilii Prokhorovich Pronin, a Moscow party member on the city's evacuation committee, submitted a plan (rejected by Stalin) which would have removed about one million Muscovites. Not until the actual invasion did the party enact a real evacuation plan.
Two days after the German invasion, on June 24, 1941, the Party created an evacuation council in an attempt to develop a procedure for the evacuation of Soviet citizens living near the Eastern Front. It identified cities on major train routes from which people could be removed and brought east. By September, three months after the start of the invasion, the evacuation council had 128 centers identified and operating. Major cities which received evacuated citizens (as well as other resources and industry) included Kirov, Iaroslavl, Gorky, Ufa, Sverdlovsk, Cheliabinsk, and Kuibyshev.
Further measures were enacted by the party to help dispersed evacuees settle into life in their new location. Upon their arrival in a new city, they were instructed to contact local authorities so they could be accounted for. After this, they received certificates declaring their evacuee status which allowed them to receive lodging, food rations, and temporary employment. Evacuees were told that they were allowed to bring personal belongings with them as long as they did not hinder the ability of authorities to get them from the evacuated site to the refugee centre. Family members' belongings could not exceed 40 kilograms in weight.
Another instruction from the Central Committee in August and September was for regional governments to build temporary housing for the newcomers if there was not enough in that region already. This preceded a measure, enacted in November, in which the party established an evacuation administration; this removed power from regional authorities and centralized it within the Communist Party. Party offices popped up throughout the evacuation cities and regions to better regulate and look after the dispersed evacuees. Their agents were in charge of ensuring that the evacuees were well taken care of in their new locations and their concerns (including housing, employment, food, health care and child care) were being met. By early 1942, still less than a year since the start of the invasion, the Moscow government had already spent three billion rubles on the evacuation.
Deportation as part of evacuation
A large number of Soviet civilians who were evacuated were classified as deportees instead of evacuees, particularly those whom the party feared would switch loyalties and fight on the German side. This trend, which began with a 1941 decree dealing with the removal of Volga Germans to Siberia and Kazakhstan, eventually grew to affect as many as 3.3 million people and 52 nationalities. The rest of the evacuation of supposedly-disloyal nationalities took place later in the war, between 1943 and 1944. Because the Volga Germans were one of two deported nationalities (the other was the Crimean Tatars) who were never returned to their homeland after the war ended, modern historians interpret this as ethnic cleansing.
The Crimean Tatars were an exception to the party rule which assumed that suspected nationalities would be pro-German; the Tatars were a Muslim minority, and the party suspected that they would choose religion over state. Historians often trace the Soviet persecution and elimination of the Tatars in Crimea to the inter-war years, after the establishment of the Soviet state. It is reported that from 1917 to 1933, an estimated half of the Crimean Tatar population was eliminated by death or relocation.
The deported nationalities generally came from regions near the Eastern Front, and were settled in Kazakhstan and Central Asia during the war. In 1956, over a decade after the end of the World War II, all the groups except the Volga Germans and the Crimean Tatars were resettled in their native lands. Nikita Khrushchev absolved all blame from the Germans during his time leading the Communist Party. It is believed that the Volga Germans were not permitted to be resettled because the area had already been settled by other Soviet civilians since the end of the war. The same belief is held about why the Crimean Tatars were not granted resettlement as a part of the 1956 order. The Crimean Tatar National Movement Organization, organized during perestroika in the 1980s, finally received word from the Soviet government that their people could return to Crimea. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, about 250,000 Crimean Tatars returned and settled in Crimea (which was part of Ukraine until its 2014 annexation by the Russian Federation). Major wartime deportations were:
1941: Volga Germans 1943: Karachai 1943: Kalmyks 1944: Balkars 1944: Chechens and Ingushi 1944: Crimean Tatars 1944: Greeks 1944: Meskhetian Turks
Evacuation of industry The speed of the initial German advance threatened not only Soviet territories and factories (civilian and military), but the wholesale collapse of the nation's civilian economy.Harrison, Mark. Soviet and East European Studies, Soviet Planning in Peace and War 1938-1945, Cambridge University Press, 1985, p.79 Even with 1930s contingency plans and the formation in 1941 of evacuation committees such as the Council for Evacuation and the State Department Committee (GKO), most evacuations were handled by local Soviet organizations which dealt with industrial movements just ahead of impending German attacks.
Short-sighted preparation in the overall mobilization of the Western front led many in these councils to scour Moscow libraries for resources pertaining to evacuations during the First World War. Local committees eventually used a five-year-plan structure, with 3,000 agents controlling movement. Evacuation of industrial plants began in August 1941, and continued until the end of the year.Dunn, Walter S. Jr., The Soviet Economy and the Red Army 1930-1945, Praeger Publishers, 1995, p.32
The GKO oversaw the relocation of more than 1,500 plants of military importance to the Urals, Siberia, and Central Asia. These areas offered safety to their inhabitants due to their isolated locations (out of reach of damaging Axis airstrikes), and they offered Soviet industries a massive quantity of resources for the factories and plants associated with the war effort. The Urals, in central Russia, developed an impressive array of iron and steel factories as well as agriculture and chemical plants. Siberian industries relied on the coal mines and copper deposits in the Kuznetzk coal basin to support the Soviet war machine.Gregory L. Russia, A History, Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 330.
Some evacuations and the transfer of machine tools and skilled workers to "shadow factories" in the east began much earlier. The U.S. military attaché reported significant transfers of machinery and men from the Moscow area to the east in late 1940 and early 1941. The rapid growth in production early in 1942 suggests that the evacuation began in 1940.
Evacuation of civilians
In 1941, the word "evacuation" (, evakuatsiia) was a new word which was not used by everyone. "Refugee" (bezhenets) was far too familiar, however, given the country's history of war. During World War II, the word "refugee" was replaced by "evacuee"; the shift in wording indicated government resignation to the displacement of its citizens. Reasons for controlling the displaced population varied.Manley, Rebecca. To the Tashkent Station: Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War. Cornell University Press, 2009, pp. 7-8. Despite some preference for considering themselves evacuees, the term referred to different individuals. Some were privileged elites, such as scientists, specialized workers, artists, writers and politicians, who were evacuated to the interior of the country. Other evacuees were viewed with suspicion. The evacuation process, despite best Soviet efforts, was far from organized; the state considered most of those heading east as suspicious. Since most were self-evacuating, they had not been assigned a location for displacement. Officials feared that disorder made it easy for deserters to flee. Evacuees who did not fall into the "privileged elite" category were seen as potentially contaminating the rest of the population, epidemically and ideologically.18. Manley, Rebecca. "The Perils of Displacement: The Soviet Evacuee between Refugee and Deportee." Contemporary European History, vol. 16, no. 04, November 2007, pp. 499-500, .