#Circassian genocide

[crazysodomite]

its insane how you literally can't talk about the oppression caucasians face (what was the last time you read about the genocide or imperialist aggression caucasian people went through? actually?) without an american/westerner piping up with "umm... lol... you think White people are oppressed? lol"

Isn't it crazy how people use caucasian to make fun of white people while literally Completely erasing the struggles of a racialized group? Isn't it crazy how no one cares and people keep doing it without batting an eye? And isn't it crazy when you try to look up something about caucasians you get stupid ass articles about "are white people opressed or not? are white people entitled? are white people this or that?"

[awnowimsad]

Wikipedia isn't perfect, but let's take a look, shall we? I added emphasis because I found it easier to read. (I'm sorry if it's too much for you).

Russian conquest of Siberia - Wikipedia

Under the leadership of Vasilii Poyarkov in 1645 and Yerofei Khabarov in 1650 many people, including members of the Daur tribe, were killed by the Cossacks. 8,000 out of a previous population of 20,000 in Kamchatka remained after the first half century of the Russian conquest.

In the 1640s, the Yakuts were subjected to violent expeditions during the Russian advance into the land near the Lena River, and on Kamchatka in the 1690s the Koryaks, Kamchadals, and Chukchi were also subjected to this by the Russians [...]. When the Russians did not obtain the demanded amount of yasak [fur tribute] from the natives, the governor of Yakutsk, Piotr Golovin, who was a Cossack, used meat hooks to hang the native men. In the Lena basin, 70% of the Yakut population declined within 40 years, native women were raped and, along with children, were often enslaved in order to force the natives to pay the yasak.

According to John F. Richards: "Smallpox first reached western Siberia in 1630. In the 1650s, it moved east of the Yenisey, where it carried away up to 80 percent of the Tungus and Yakut populations. In the 1690s, smallpox epidemics reduced Yukagir numbers by an estimated 44 percent. The disease moved rapidly from group to group across Siberia. Death rates in epidemics reached 50 percent of the population. The scourge returned at twenty- to thirty-year intervals, with dreadful results among the young."

In Kamchatka, the Russians crushed the Itelmen uprisings against their rule in 1706, 1731, and 1741. [...] The Russians faced tougher resistance when from 1745 to 1756 they tried to subjugate the gun and bow equipped Koryaks until their victory. The Russian Cossacks also faced fierce resistance and were forced to give up trying to wipe out the Chukchi in 1729, 1730–1731, and 1744–1747. After the Russian defeat in 1729 at Chukchi hands, the Russian commander Major Pavlutskiy was responsible for the Russian war against the Chukchi and the mass slaughters and enslavement of Chukchi women and children in 1730–1731, but his cruelty only made the Chukchis fight more fiercely. Cleansing of the Chukchis and Koryaks was ordered by Empress Elizabeth in 1742 to totally expel them from their native lands and erase their culture through war. The command was that the natives be "totally extirpated" with Pavlutskiy leading again in this war from 1744 to 1747 in which he led the Cossacks "with the help of Almighty God and to the good fortune of Her Imperial Highness", to slaughter the Chukchi men and enslave their women and children as booty. However the Chukchi ended this campaign and forced them to give up by decapitating and killing Pavlutskiy.

The Russians were also launching wars and slaughters against the Koryaks in 1744 and 1753–1754. After the Russians tried to force the natives to convert to Christianity, the different native peoples like the Koryaks, Chukchis, Itelmens, and Yukaghirs all united to drive the Russians out of their land in the 1740s, culminating in the assault on Nizhnekamchatsk fort in 1746. Kamchatka today is European in demographics and culture with only 5% of it being native, around 10,000 from a previous number of 150,000, due to the mass slaughters by the Cossacks after its annexation in 1697 of the Itelmens and Koryaks throughout the first decades of Russian rule. The killings by the Russian Cossacks devastated the native peoples of Kamchatka. In addition to committing massacres the Cossacks also devastated the wildlife by slaughtering massive numbers of animals for fur. 90% of the Kamchadals and half of the Vogules were killed from the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries and the rapid slaughter of the indigenous population led to entire ethnic groups being entirely wiped out, with around 12 exterminated groups which could be named by Nikolai Yadrintsev as of 1882. Much of the slaughter was brought on by the Siberian fur trade.

The Slavic Russians outnumber all of the native peoples in Siberia and its cities except in the Republics of Tuva and Sakha, with the Slavic Russians making up the majority in the Buryat and Altai Republics, outnumbering the Buriat, and Altai natives. The Buryats make up only 33.5% of their own Republic, the Altai 37% and the Chukchi only 28%; the Evenk, Khanty, Mansi, and Nenets are outnumbered by non-natives by 90% of the population. The natives were targeted by the tsars and Soviet policies to change their way of life, and ethnic Russians were given the natives' reindeer herds and wild game which were confiscated by the tsars and Soviets. The reindeer herds have been mismanaged to the point of extinction.

The Ainu have emphasized that they were the natives of the Kuril Islands and that the Japanese and Russians were both invaders.

That's what it says about Siberia. What about Alaska? The previous linked webpage says this:

The Aleuts in the Aleutians were subjected to genocide and slavery by the Russians for the first 20 years of Russian rule, with the Aleut women and children captured by the Russians and Aleut men slaughtered.

And @lookninjas linked this Politico article in another reblog chain:

It didn’t take long after the Russian landing for the familiar pattern of colonial crimes to play out, sending Indigenous populations reeling. Almost immediately, Russian colonizers began implementing the same playbook they’d perfected across Siberia. The first step was known as iasak, in which Russian representatives demanded tribute — furs, typically — from Indigenous populations. In order to assure compliance, Russian traders implemented the playbook’s second element: amanaty, in which Russians would seize hostages from Indigenous populations, held until the iasak requirements were completed. Often, Russian representatives would kidnap the children of local leaders — all the better to ensure compliance. In some cases, as historian Anne Hyde has written, the Russians would abduct the children of up to half of the male populations of a given community.

Nor did they stop there. As the U.S.’s National Institute for Health notes, such an arrangement allowed the Russians to effectively “enslave” local populations. Demanding “furs in exchange for [the] lives” of women and children, Russians would “sexually exploit the hostages” — and even “execute the hostages” should the fur intake fall short. All of it, just “to set an example” for other recalcitrant Indigenous populations.

[...]

The total number of Aleuts killed remains unknown, but one Russian observer estimated that Solovyev alone oversaw the massacring of over 3,000 Aleuts. Given that there were only 17,000 inhabitants of the Aleutian Islands upon the Russian arrival, Solovyev may have been largely responsible for the annihilation of nearly one-fifth of the entire Aleut nation. Whatever the final number, Solovyev’s rampage was, said historian Katherine Johnson Ringsmuth, “the beginning of the end of [Indigenous] sovereignty.”

But Solovyev was far from the only Russian guilty of mass slaughter. Not long later, near Alaska’s massive Kodiak Island, Russian colonizers shelled fleeing Alutiiq men, women and children sheltering on the appropriately named Refuge Rock. Aiming cannonade at the defenseless Alutiiqs, the Russians “carried out a terrible bloodbath,” one Alutiiq elder later remembered, with “the stench of the corpses lying on the shore [that] polluted the air so badly that none could stay there.” Hundreds died — some shot, some flinging themselves into the sea from nearly 10 stories up. Other remembrances place the number of deaths even higher, reaching into the thousands. And all of it, without the Russians suffering a single casualty.

But obviously, it doesn't stop here either. Here is an incomplete list of other genocides, ethnic cleansings, mass killings and mass deportations carried out by Russia or the Soviet Union - under the cut because the post is getting pretty long.

Content warning for... more war and genocide, famine, mass murder, mass deportation, forced labor, rape, graphic violence and more disturbing things you can expect from this topic.

Kumyks - colonization by Russia & ethnocide by Soviet Union

The tsarist and Soviet government pursued a policy of settling the Kumyk lands with other peoples from the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century.

[...]

In the 1850s, the Kumyk princes of the Kumyk district of the Terek region voluntarily gave up half of their lands in favor of the Kumyk people, however, documents confirming the relevant rights were issued only to the princes and uzdens, and the rights of the rest of the population were not documented. Local authorities, using various pretexts, moved newcomers to Kumyk lands. This policy of neglecting the right of the Kumyk population was recorded as continuing in 1907.

[...]

Due to the continuous resettlement policies by the Russian Empire, then the Soviet government, and continuing today in the modern Republic of Dagestan of the Russian Federation, during the 19th through 21st century the native territories of Kumyks have been dramatically reduced; Kumyks became a minority in their own lands.

By the decree of Stalin's government, on the 12 of April 1944 the Kumyk population of historical Kumyk capital Tarki and adjacent villages were entirely deported to the Central Asian SSRs [...]. The reason was stated as "freeing the area for the agricultural needs" of mountain peoples being resettled in the region. The deportation, despite the historical record in Russian law, is still not acknowledged by the Russian government. As a result of this event, the local population lost for years their ancient capital of Tarki, which led to the permanent destruction of most of the Kumyk cultural heritage.

Circassian genocide - Wikipedia

The Circassian genocide, or Tsitsekun, was the Russian Empire's systematic mass murder, ethnic cleansing, and expulsion of 95–97% of the Circassian population, resulting in 1 to 1.5 million deaths during the final stages of the Russo-Circassian War. The peoples planned for extermination were mainly the Muslim Circassians, but other Muslim peoples of the Caucasus were also affected. Killing methods used by Russian forces during the genocide included impaling and tearing the bellies of pregnant women as means of intimidation of the Circassian population. Russian generals such as the ethnically Baltic German Grigory Zass described the Circassians as "subhuman filth", and glorified the mass murder of Circassian civilians, justified their use in scientific experiments, and allowed their soldiers to rape women.

De-Cossackization - Wikipedia

De-Cossackization was the Bolshevik policy of systematic repression against the Cossacks in the former Russian Empire between 1919 and 1933, especially the Don and Kuban Cossacks in Russia, aimed at the elimination of the Cossacks as a distinct collectivity by exterminating the Cossack elite, coercing all other Cossacks into compliance, and eliminating Cossack distinctness.

[...]

Special commissions in charge of de-Cossackization condemned more than 6,000 people to death in October 1920 alone. The families and often the neighbors of suspected rebels were taken as hostages.

[...]

Many Cossack towns were burned to the ground, and all survivors deported on the orders by Sergo Ordzhonikidze who was head of the Revolutionary Committee of the Northern Caucasus.

[...]

The deportations and exterminations are recognized as genocide by modern scholars. While there were more than a million Cossacks before 1917, very few people consider themselves Cossacks today. Shane O'Rourke states that the de-Cossackization "was one of the main factors which led to the disappearance of the Cossacks as a nation".

The actual death toll from de-Cossackization is highly debated. I'm sure tankies have extremely normal opinions about this...

Genocide of the Ingrian Finns - Wikipedia

The genocide of the Ingrian Finns was a series of events triggered by the Russian Revolution in the 20th century, in which the Soviet Union deported, imprisoned and killed Ingrians and destroyed their culture. In the process, Ingria, in the historical sense of the word, ceased to exist. Before the persecution there were 140,000 to 160,000 Ingrians in Russia and today approximately 19,000 (including several thousand repatriated since 1990.)

[...]

During World War II, the Ingrian people were once again forcibly deported from their homeland for ethnic reasons, and even after the war they were prevented from returning to their homeland until 1954. The Ingrian people deported to Siberia were placed in prison camps. The Soviet Union was silent about the Ingrians and they did not officially exist. It was not until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1990 that Russia sought to improve their situation with new legislation. By 1970, the Ingrian Finn population decreased by 50,000 people, a 43% decline from the 1928 population, which political scientist Rein Taagepera described as a "clear case of genocide".

Kazakh famine of 1930–1933 - Wikipedia

The Kazakh famine of 1930–1933, also known as the Asharshylyk, was a famine during which approximately 1.5 million people died in the Kazakh Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic, then part of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic in the Soviet Union, of whom 1.3 million were ethnic Kazakhs. An estimated 38 to 42 percent of all Kazakhs died, the highest percentage of any ethnic group killed by the Soviet famine of 1930–1933. Other research estimates that as many as 2.3 million died. A committee created by the Kazakhstan parliament chaired by Historian Manash Kozybayev concluded that the famine was "a manifestation of the politics of genocide", with 1.75 million victims.

The famine began in the winter of 1930, a full year before the famine in Ukraine, termed the Holodomor, which was at its worst in the years 1931–1933. The famine made Kazakhs a minority in the Kazakh ASSR; it caused the deaths or migration of large numbers of people, and it was not until the 1990s, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, that the Kazakhs became the largest ethnicity group in Kazakhstan again. Before the famine, around 60% of the republic's residents were ethnic Kazakhs, a proportion greatly reduced to around 38% of the population after the famine.

The Holodomor - Wikipedia, Britannica

From Wikipedia:

The Holodomor, also known as the Ukrainian Famine, was a man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 that killed millions of Ukrainians. The Holodomor was part of the wider Soviet famine of 1930–1933 which affected the major grain-producing areas of the Soviet Union.

From Britannica:

The origins of the famine lay in the decision by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to collectivize agriculture in 1929. Teams of Communist Party agitators forced peasants to relinquish their land, personal property, and sometimes housing to collective farms, and they deported so-called kulaks—wealthier peasants—as well as any peasants who resisted collectivization altogether. [See Wikipedia's article on Dekulakization here.] Collectivization led to a drop in production, the disorganization of the rural economy, and food shortages. It also sparked a series of peasant rebellions, including armed uprisings, in some parts of Ukraine.

[...]

That [1932] autumn the Soviet Politburo, the elite leadership of the Soviet Communist Party, took a series of decisions that widened and deepened the famine in the Ukrainian countryside. Farms, villages, and whole towns in Ukraine were placed on blacklists and prevented from receiving food. Peasants were forbidden to leave the Ukrainian republic in search of food. Despite growing starvation, food requisitions were increased and aid was not provided in sufficient quantities. The crisis reached its peak in the winter of 1932–33, when organized groups of police and communist apparatchiks ransacked the homes of peasants and took everything edible, from crops to personal food supplies to pets. Hunger and fear drove these actions, but they were reinforced by more than a decade of hateful and conspiratorial rhetoric emanating from the highest levels of the Kremlin.

The result of Stalin’s campaign was a catastrophe. In spring 1933 death rates in Ukraine spiked. Between 1931 and 1934 at least 5 million people perished of hunger all across the U.S.S.R. Among them, according to a study conducted by a team of Ukrainian demographers, were at least 3.9 million Ukrainians.

[...]

The famine was accompanied by a broader assault on Ukrainian identity. While peasants were dying by the millions, agents of the Soviet secret police were targeting the Ukrainian political establishment and intelligentsia. The famine provided cover for a campaign of repression and persecution that was carried out against Ukrainian culture and Ukrainian religious leaders. The official policy of Ukrainization, which had encouraged the use of the Ukrainian language, was effectively halted. Moreover, anyone connected to the short-lived Ukrainian People’s Republic—an independent government that had been declared in June 1917 in the wake of the February Revolution but was dismantled after the Bolsheviks conquered Ukrainian territory—was subjected to vicious reprisals. All those targeted by this campaign were liable to be publicly vilified, jailed, sent to the Gulag (a system of Soviet prisons and forced-labour camps), or executed.

Of course, tankies don't give a shit because they deny the Holodomor anyway.

Mass operations of the NKVD - Wikipedia

Mass operations of the People's Comissariate of Internal Affairs (NKVD) were carried out during the Great Purge and targeted specific categories of people. As a rule, they were carried out according to the corresponding order of the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs Nikolai Yezhov.

[...]

The operations of this type in this period targeted "foreign" ethnicities (ethnicities with cross-border ties to foreign nation-states), unlike nationally targeted repressions during World War II. [...]

Minutes of the January 31, 1938 Politburo meeting list the following ethnicities against which NKND operations were to be continued: Poles, Latvians, Germans, Estonians, Finns, Greeks, Iranians, Harbinites, Chinese, and Romanians. It was also suggested to carry out similar NKVD operations against Bulgarians and Macedonians. From August 1937 to October 1938, 353,513 people were arrested and 247,157 were shot in the national operations of NKVD. It is estimated that this would make up 34% of the total victims of the Great Purge.

The German Operation of the NKVD

NKVD Order № 00439, signed by Nikolai Yezhov on July 25, 1937, was the basis for the German operation of the NKVD in 1937–1938. The operation was the first in the series of national operations of the NKVD. The order commanded to arrest citizens of Germany, as well as former German citizens who assumed the Soviet citizenship. [...]

During the first month of the operation, 472 persons were arrested; the total number was around 800 persons, or about 20% of the whole number of registered German citizens at the time. The order also instructed to be prepared for the second wave of repressions against Soviet citizens of German ethnicity. Indeed, the national operation against Soviet citizens of German descent resulted in the sentencing of at least 55,005 persons, including 41,898 sentenced to death.

The Polish Operation of the NKVD

The Polish Operation of the NKVD (Soviet security service) in 1937–1938 was an anti-Polish mass-ethnic cleansing operation of the NKVD carried out in the Soviet Union against Poles (labeled by the Soviets as "agents") during the period of the Great Purge. It was ordered by the Politburo of the Communist Party against so-called "Polish spies" and customarily interpreted by NKVD officials as relating to 'absolutely all Poles'. It resulted in the sentencing of 139,835 people, and summary executions of 111,091 Poles living in or near the Soviet Union.

The Greek Operation

The Greek Operation was an organised mass persecution of the Greeks of the Soviet Union that was ordered by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, primarily motivated by widespread distrust of Greek populations living in the Black Sea Region and also for the availability of resources. [...]

It began on December 15, 1937, and marked the beginning of the repressions against Greeks that went on for 13 years. Depending on the sources, it is estimated that between 15,000 and 50,000 Greeks died during this campaign. Tens of thousands more were persecuted during the Deportation of the Soviet Greeks. Some scholars characterize the operation as a "genocide" against Greeks.

Deportation of Koreans in the Soviet Union - Wikipedia

The deportation of Koreans in the Soviet Union was the forced transfer of nearly 172,000 Soviet Koreans (Koryo-saram) from the Russian Far East to unpopulated areas of the Kazakh SSR and the Uzbek SSR in 1937 by the NKVD on the orders of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the Soviet Union Vyacheslav Molotov.

124 trains were used to resettle them 6,400 km (12,000 miles) to Central Asia. The reason was to stem "the infiltration of Japanese espionage into the Far Eastern Krai", as Koreans were at the time subjects of the Empire of Japan, which was the Soviet Union's rival. However, some historians regard it as part of Stalin's policy of "frontier cleansing".

Estimates based on population statistics suggest that between 16,500 and 50,000 deported Koreans died from starvation, exposure, and difficulties adapting to their new environment in exile.

The Latvian Operation of the NKVD

The Latvian Operation was a national operation of the NKVD against ethnic Latvians, Latvian nationals and persons otherwise affiliated with Latvia and/or Latvians in the Soviet Union from 1937 to 1938 during the period of the Great Purge.

[...]

The convictions of 22,369 Latvians are known, 16,573 or 74% of whom were shot. Various estimates are based on 73,000 Latvian casualties. The exact number of the victims are unknown because many other people who were executed during the operation were not ethnically Latvian or Latvian nationals: These included spouses of persons sent to the Gulag because of their marriage with a member of the "enemy nation" as well as the children from such unions, who were sent to orphanages were not included in the statistics. The operation resulted in the vast majority of remaining Latvians abandoning their culture out of fear of further repression, and the descendants of the Latvians in Russia barely speak Latvian today. The victims of the operation were rehabilitated during the Khrushchev Thaw; however, the exact information about specific deaths and dates could only be obtained after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The perpetrators of the operation, often known by name, have never been tried.

The Estonian Operation of the NKVD

The Estonian Operation of the NKVD was a mass arrest, execution and deportations of persons of Estonian origin in the Soviet Union by the NKVD during the period of Great Purge (1937–1938). It was a part of the larger mass operations of the NKVD which targeted many minority nationalities in the Soviet Union. A total of 4,672 were killed during the repression.

The Finnish Operation of the NKVD

The Finnish Operation of the NKVD was a mass arrest, execution and deportations of persons of Finnish origin in the Soviet Union by the NKVD during the period of the Great Purge (1937–1938). It was a part of the larger mass operations of the NKVD which targeted many minority nationalities in the Soviet Union. Different estimations range from 8,000 to 25,000 of Finns killed or disappearing during the repression.

Soviet deportations of Chinese people - Wikipedia

During the 1920s and 1930s, the Soviet government forcibly transferred thousands of Chinese nationals and ethnic Chinese Soviet citizens  from the Russian Far East. Most of the deportees were relocated to the Chinese province of Xinjiang and Soviet-controlled Central Asia. Although there were more than 70,000 Chinese living in the Russian Far East in 1926, the Chinese had become almost extinct in the region by the 1940s. To date, the detailed history of the removal of Chinese diasporas in the region remains to be uncovered and deciphered from the Soviet records. Often considered strangers to Soviet society, the Chinese were more prone to political repression, due to their lack of exposure to propaganda machines and their unwillingness to bear the hardship of socialist transformation. From 1926 to 1937, at least 12,000 Chinese were deported from the Russian Far East to the Chinese province of Xinjiang,  around 5,500 Chinese settled down in Soviet-controlled Central Asia, and 3,932 were killed. In the meantime, at least 1,000 Chinese were jailed in forced penal labour camps in Komi and Arkhangelsk near the Arctic.

Soviet repressions of Polish citizens (1939–1946) - Wikipedia

In September 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland, and its territory was divided between them.

The Soviet Union never officially declared war on Poland and ceased to recognise the Polish state at the start of the invasion. [...] Approximately 250,000 Polish prisoners of war were captured by the USSR during and after the invasion of Poland. As the Soviet Union had not signed international conventions on rules of war, the Polish prisoners were denied legal status. The Soviet forces murdered almost all captured officers, and sent numerous ordinary soldiers to the Soviet Gulag. In one notorious atrocity ordered by Stalin, the Soviet secret police systematically shot and killed 22,000 Poles in a remote area during the Katyn massacre.

[...]

The Soviet authorities regarded service to the prewar Polish state as a "crime against revolution" and "counter-revolutionary activity" [...]

In the two years between the invasion of Poland and the 1941 attack on USSR by Germany, the Soviets arrested and imprisoned about 500,000 Poles. This was about one in ten of all adult males.

The number of Poles who died due to Soviet repressions in the period 1939-1941 is estimated as at least 150,000.

Approximately 100,000 Polish citizens were arrested during the two years of Soviet occupation. The prisons soon got severely overcrowded, with all detainees accused of anti-Soviet activities. The NKVD had to open dozens of ad-hoc prison sites in almost all towns of the region. The wave of arrests and mock convictions contributed to the forced resettlement of large categories of people ("kulaks", Polish civil servants, forest workers, university professors, "osadniks") to the Gulag labour camps and exile settlements in remote areas of the Soviet Union. Altogether the Soviets sent roughly a million people from Poland to Siberia. According to Norman Davies, almost half had died by the time the Sikorski-Mayski Agreement had been signed in 1941. Around 55% of the deportees to Siberia and Soviet Central Asia were Polish women.

[...]

The documents of the era show that the problem of sexual violence against Polish women by Soviet servicemen was serious both during and after the advance of Soviet forces across Poland. Joanna Ostrowska and Marcin Zaremba of the Polish Academy of Sciences estimate that rapes of Polish women reached a mass scale following the Winter Offensive of 1945. Whether the number of victims could have reached or even exceeded 100,000 is only a matter of guessing, considering the traditional taboos among the women incapable of finding "a voice that would have enabled them to talk openly" about their wartime experiences "while preserving their dignity."

To this day, the events of those and the following years constitute stumbling blocks in Polish-Russian foreign relations. In 1989, the Soviet Union under the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev apologized for its crimes against Poland. However, in 2020, Russian President Vladimir Putin went as far as blaming Poland for starting World War II.

Deportation of Azerbaijanis from the Armenian SSR - Wikipedia

The relocation of the Azerbaijani population during the Stalinist era happened after the establishment of the Armenian SSR. [...]

Look, the explanation of Turkish-Soviet relations etc was getting pretty long so let's get to the part where they want to deport Azerbaijanis so diaspora Armenians can move back to the Armenian SSR (into the houses of the deportees).

According to historian Vladislav Zubok, due to calls from Grigory Arutinov, the First Secretary of Armenian SSR's Communist Party's Central Committee, Stalin ordered to deport Azerbaijani population from the Armenian SSR to the Azerbaijan SSR. At the same time, he gave consent for the repatriation of 90,000 Armenians to settlements of the newly deported Azerbaijanis. The resettlement was not voluntary.

[...]

Numerous reports were received of Azerbaijanis stating their unwillingness to leave the Armenian SSR. [...] On the other hand, some groups decided it was better to leave as, in the case of a war with Turkey, they were convinced they would be massacred by Armenians. [...]

According to Arsene Saparov, more than 100,000 Azerbaijanis were forcibly resettled to Kura-Aras Lowland of the Azerbaijan SSR in three stages: 10,000 people in 1948, 40,000 in 1949, and 50,000 in 1950. Krista Goff, however, has contested that based on the available documentation only a total of 45,000 were resettled through the period 1948-53.

Deportations of Kurds from Transcaucasia - Wikipedia

The Kurds were deported from Azerbaijan SSR, Georgian SSR, and Armenian SSR by the Soviet secret police NKVD in 1937 and 1944 and sent to special settlements in Central Asia. During the July 1937 deportation, approximately 1,325 Kurds were deported. In March, 3,240 Kurds and Azerbaijanis were deported from Tbilisi. In November 1944 the Kurds of Georgian SSR were also sent to the "special colonies", including those in Siberia, and were resettled there, as part of the deportation of the Meskhetian Turks, when 8,694 Kurds were deported. Most adult males were deported separately from females and children with their fate unknown.

Deportation of the Balkars - Wikipedia

The Deportation of the Balkars was the expulsion by the Soviet government of the entire Balkar population of the North Caucasus to Central Asia on March 8, 1944, during World War II. [...] All the 37,713 Balkars of the Caucasus were deported from their homeland in one day.

[...] The entire operation lasted about two hours. The entire Balkar population was evicted without exception. 17,000 NKVD troops and 4,000 local agents participated in this operation. By 9 March, 37,713 Balkars were deported in 14 train convoys. They arrived at their destinations in the Kazakh and Kyrgyz Soviet Socialist Republic by 23 March. After the end of World War II, Karachay and Balkar officers of the Red Army were discharged and later also deported. Official Soviet documents reveal that 562 people died during the deportation. Many more died during the harsh years in exile and in labor camps. In total, it is estimated that 7,600-11,000 Balkars died as a consequence of the deportation, amounting to 20-25% of their entire ethnic group.

Soviet deportations from Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina - Wikipedia

The Soviet deportations from Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina took place between late 1940 and 1951 and were part of Joseph Stalin's policy of political repression of the potential opposition to the Soviet power. The deported were typically moved to so-called "special settlements". The deportations began after the Soviet occupation of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, which occurred in June 1940. According to a secret Soviet Ministry of Interior report dated December 1965, 46,000 people were deported from the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic for the period 1940−1953. Moldovan historian Ion Varta referred to the events that occurred in Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina after their occupation, including the deportations but also the famine and murders, as a "genocide in all law".

On June 12–13, 1941, 29,839 members of families of "counter-revolutionaries and nationalists" from the Moldavian SSR, and from the Chernivtsi (of Northern Bukovina) and Izmail oblasts of the Ukrainian SSR were deported to Kazakhstan, the Komi ASSR, the Krasnoyarsk Krai, and the Omsk and Novosibirsk oblasts. For the fate of such a deportee from Bessarabia, see the example of Eufrosinia Kersnovskaya.

During 1940 and 1941, 53,356 people from Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina were mobilized for labour across the entire territory of the Soviet Union; though the mobilization was presented as voluntary, refusal to work could result in penal punishment, and living and working conditions were generally poor.

On April 6, 1949, the Political Bureau of the Central Committee issued decision number 1290-467cc, which called for 11,280 families from Moldavian SSR to be deported as kulaks or collaborators with Nazi Germany during World War II. Ultimately, 11,239 families, comprising 35,050 people, were detained and deported on July 6, 1949, with the rest either escaping or being exempt due to their contribution to the Soviet war effort or their support for collectivisation.

Deportations of the Chechen and Ingush - Wikipedia

The deportation of the Chechens and Ingush, or Ardakhar Genocide, and also known as Operation Lenti, was the Soviet forced transfer of the whole of the Vainakh (Chechen and Ingush) populations of the North Caucasus to Central Asia on 23 February 1944, during World War II. The expulsion was ordered by NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria after approval by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and Anastas Mikoyan, as a part of a Soviet forced settlement program and population transfer that affected several million members of ethnic minorities in the Soviet Union between the 1930s and the 1950s.

The deportation was prepared from at least October 1943 and 19,000 officers as well as 100,000 NKVD soldiers from all over the USSR participated in this operation. The deportation encompassed their entire nations, as well as the liquidation of the Checheno-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. The demographic consequences of this eviction were catastrophic and far-reaching: of the 496,000 Chechens and Ingush who were deported, at least a quarter died. In total, the archive records show that over a hundred thousand people died or were killed during the round-ups and transportation, and during their early years in exile in the Kazakh and Kyrgyz SSR as well as Russian SFSR where they were sent to the many forced settlements. Chechen sources claim that 400,000 died, while presuming a higher number of deportees. A higher percentage of Chechens were killed than any other ethnic group persecuted by population transfer in the Soviet Union. Chechens were under administrative supervision of the NKVD officials during that entire time.

Deportation of the Crimean Tatars and de-Tatarization of Crimea

The deportation of the Crimean Tatars or the Sürgünlik ('exile') was the ethnic cleansing and the cultural genocide of at least 191,044 Crimean Tatars that was carried out by Soviet Union authorities from 18 to 20 May 1944, [...] ordered by the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. Within those three days, the NKVD used cattle trains to deport the Crimean Tatars, even Soviet Communist Party members and Red Army members, from Crimea to the Uzbek SSR, several thousand kilometres away. They were one of several ethnicities that were subjected to Stalin's policy of population transfer in the Soviet Union.

Several modern scholars believe rather that the government deported them as a part of its plan to gain access to the Dardanelles and acquire territory in Turkey, where the Turkic ethnic kin of the Tatars lived, or remove minorities from the Soviet Union's border regions. By the end of the deportation, not a single Crimean Tatar lived in Crimea, and 80,000 houses and 360,000 acres of land were left abandoned. Nearly 8,000 Crimean Tatars died during the deportation, and tens of thousands subsequently perished due to the harsh living conditions in which they were forced to live during their exile. After the deportation, the Soviet government launched an intense detatarization campaign in an attempt to erase the remaining traces of Crimean Tatar existence.

According to Wikipedia, the de-Tatarization campaing included things like renaming towns and other places, creating anti-Tatar propaganda, and claiming renowned Crimean Tatar pilot Amet-khan Sultan was actually Dagestani (to the point that an airport was named after him... in Dagestan.)

Deportation of the Kalmyks - Wikipedia

Deportation of the Kalmyks, codename Operation Ulusy was the Soviet deportation of more than 93,000 people of Kalmyk nationality, and non-Kalmyk women with Kalmyk husbands, on 28–31 December 1943. Families and individuals were forcibly relocated in cattle wagons to special settlements for forced labor in Siberia. Kalmyk women married to non-Kalmyk men were exempted from the deportations. [...]

The deportation contributed to more than 16,000 deaths, resulting in a 17% mortality rate for the deported population. [...] By 1959, more than 60% of the remaining Kalmyks had returned home. The loss of life and socioeconomic upheaval of the deportations, however, had a profound impact on the Kalmyks that is still felt today. On 14 November 1989 the Supreme Council of the Soviet Union declared all of Stalin's deportations "illegal and criminal". Contemporary historical analyses consider these deportations an example of persecution and a crime against humanity. [...] Of the ethnic groups subjected to forced deportation by Soviet authorities, the Kalmyks suffered the greatest relative losses. The 1959 census listed 106,100 Kalmyks, down from 134,400 as of the 1939 census, meaning a more than 20% decline within a single generation.

Deportation of the Karachays - Wikipedia

The Deportation of the Karachays, codenamed Operation Seagull, was the Soviet government's forcible transfer of the entire Karachay population from the North Caucasus to Central Asia, mostly to the Kazakh and Kyrgyzstan SSRs, in November 1943, during World War II. The expulsion was ordered by NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria, after it was approved by Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin. Nearly 70,000 Karachays of the Caucasus were deported from their native land. The crime was a part of a Soviet forced settlement program and population transfer that affected several million members of non-Russian Soviet ethnic minorities between the 1930s and the 1950s.

[...] The deportation contributed to 43,000 deaths, resulting in a over 60% mortality rate for the deported population. The Karachays were the first North Caucasus ethnic group to be targeted by Stalin's policy of complete resettlement, which later encompassed five other ethnic groups.

Deportations from Lithuania - Wikipedia

Soviet deportations from Lithuania were a series of 35 mass deportations carried out in Lithuania, a country that was occupied as a constituent socialist republic of the Soviet Union, in 1941 and 1945–1952. At least 130,000 people, 70% of them women and children, were forcibly transported to labor camps and other forced settlements in remote parts of the Soviet Union, particularly in the Irkutsk Oblast and Krasnoyarsk Krai. Among the deportees were about 4,500 Poles. [...] Approximately 28,000 of Lithuanian deportees died in exile due to poor living conditions. After Stalin's death in 1953, the deportees were slowly and gradually released. The last deportees were released only in 1963. Some 60,000 managed to return to Lithuania, while 30,000 were prohibited from settling back in their homeland.

Deportation of the Meshketian Turks - Wikipedia

The deportation of the Meskhetian Turks 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.

[...] Around 32,000 people, mostly Armenians, were settled by the Soviet government in the areas cleared of Meskhetia.

[...]

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.

June deportation - Wikipedia

The June deportation of 1941 was a mass deportation of tens of thousands of people during World War II from Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, present-day western Belarus and western Ukraine, and present-day Moldova – territories which had been occupied by the Soviet Union in 1939–1940 – into the interior of the Soviet Union.

[...]

The deportation program served three Soviet goals: to remove dissidents, to change composition of population through Russian migration, and to have cheap slave labor in Gulag camps.

The June deportation campaigns resulted in genocidal levels of depopulation.

[...]

People were deported without trials in whole families, which were then split. Men were generally imprisoned and most of them died in Siberia in Gulag camps. Women and children were resettled in forced settlements in Omsk and Novosibirsk Oblasts, Krasnoyarsk, Tajikistan, Altai Krais, and Kazakhstan. Thousands of people were stuffed into cattle cars, usually 30–40 under unsanitary conditions leading to casualties, especially among elderly and children. Due to poor living conditions at the destination, the mortality rate was very high. For example, the mortality rate among the Estonian deportees was estimated at 60%.

Following Stalin's death in 1953, Khrushchev began a program of limited return. In Lithuania, for example, 17,000 people returned by 1956 and 80,000 returned by 1970. Many people deemed nationalist or of non-white ethnic descent were not allowed to return until the 1980s. When survivors did return they faced discrimination and loss of property.

Operation North (deportation of Jehova's Witnesses) - Wikipedia

Operation North was the code name which was assigned by the USSR Ministry of State Security to the massive deportation of Jehovah's Witnesses and their families to Siberia in the Soviet Union on 1 and 8 April 1951.

In total, 9,973 persons were deported. They were allowed to take 150 kg of property, the rest was confiscated and sold.

Operation Priboi - Wikipedia

Operation Priboi was the code name for the biggest Stalin-era Soviet mass deportation from the Baltic states on 25–28 March 1949. Also known as the March deportation. More than 90,000 Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians, labeled as "enemies of the state", were deported to forced settlements in inhospitable Siberian areas of the Soviet Union. Over 70% of the deportees were either women or children under the age of 16.

But hey, at least this time the mortality rate was allegedly "under 15%", whatever that's supposed to mean.

Child abductions in the Russo-Ukrainian War - Wikipedia

During the Russo-Ukrainian War, Russia has forcibly transferred almost 20 thousand Ukrainian children to areas under its control, assigned them Russian citizenship, forcibly adopted them into Russian families, and created obstacles for their reunification with their parents and homeland.

[...]

Ukrainian authorities have verified the identities of over 19,000 abducted children, compiling and actively updating the data as part of an online platform: "Children of War". Russian authorities have claimed that over 700,000 Ukrainian children have been "evacuated" by mid-2023, and Ukraine's ombudsman on children's rights believes that the actual number of abducted children may be in the hundreds of thousands.

This isn't even all of it! I just got exhausted👍

I hope someone may find this informative - I hadn't heard about most of these, so writing this was a bit of an educational experience for me.

[russianreader]

Shopsh: Circassian Vocal Tradition of Zhiu

As the sun rises on 21 May, marking the Day of Remembrance for the Circassian Genocide, we invite you to listen beyond the silence that often surrounds the wounds of colonialism. In the following article, Bulat Khalilov, co-founder of Ored Recordings – a label dedicated to traditional and post-traditional music from the North Caucasus – reflects on a paradox within Circassian music today: how a…

[gisidaronta]

Armavir, Krasnodar Krai, Russia. Bust of the organizer of the Circassian genocide, Grigory Zass.

[tatarstani]

in russia landback is a usa american metaphor that cannot be applied to the vastly different history that has led to the present day russian federation.

[hamletiana]

[incognitopolls]

We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

[strawberryc4nes]

Recently, I've been getting back to the grishaverse and the whole trilogy.

I couldn't help but wonder, what is Leigh Bardugo's inspiration for the Ravkan clothing? Don't get me wrong, I loved seeing it especially since it looks like the clothing of the Kavkaz people, Circassians, Chechens etc etc. Kind of brought joy to my heart that our culture is recognized after the circassian genocide (Tsitsekun) happened, which I hope grishaverse fans will also recognize our culture like Leigh if that were her inspiration!

I'm only writing this because I was curious after searching "Ravkan clothing" and seeing some of our traditional clothing in the search, even one fanart of a grishaverse oc in it (no hate it looked beautiful), so simply its curiosity.

Edit: this is Circassian clothing if anyone is confused

Our culture is dying, since our country doesn't exist anymore and It would be so appreciated if everyone knows it as it is and not as "Ravkan clothing", I'm pretty sure it is also inspired by Chechen culture too.

Another Edit because I seriously can't believe it 😭: I've gone through some posts and it seems to be Imperial Russia, how do you mix circassian clothing and imperial russia?? Literally the ones who waged war and a genocide on us.

[redjaybathood]

No, you are. Like, that ugly muppet of a serial killer also had ppl obsess over 'im. Like, you are not alone does not equal not being batshit crazy.

In my opinion.

The most insane part of this is acting like it's so strange so quirky 😜 so unheard of, when you got entire disciplines devoted to it - russian studies AND Slavic studies AND Eastern European studies (with russia dominating all three of the subjects, whereas in two of these cases it is but a small part of the subject).

You got the quote unquote most powerful man in the world simping after russia, publically, online and in a very undignified fashion ruining both his own prestige in the eyes of voters and the rest of the world - and his country's security.

You got the thirst for russian presence on the big screen, from propaganda thinly veiled as a documentary on the most prominent film festivals around the world, to Oscar flicks, and beyond.

You got aestetisation of imperialist cultural expansion through insta pinterest photo of Tolstoyesky books. Girls and boys of all ages around the globe (USA, mostly) use it to flex their intellectual prowess, hinting that they managed to read it without falling asleep. (Like, for all my criticism of russian culture from anti colonial and anti imperialist perspective... There are actually decent writers there! And y'all choose Tolstoyesky because it had been marketed to you, even before marketing was a thing).

Academics and humanitarians look, and look, and look for the mysterious russian soul, enjoy their self inflicted sufferings and learned helplessness for ages. You are nothing new!

russian culture is not counter culture. It's just as prevalent as Japanese or Chinese nowadays, and of course American/British culture outside of the US and UK. It's for a reason! And that reason is imperialism! (except, in Japan's case, also anime).

You are brainwashed through tik tok trends with their russian girl aesthetic looks, with viral songs, with yet another film about a sex worker and a gangster with the heart of gold... You're crazy for enjoying being les by the nose, for not looking deeper. You have a russian obsession, you like their deep history? When why do you not study how did they colonize themselves the biggest country on Earth? The details, please. I'm sure you heard about European settlers intentionally selling infected blankets to Native Americans. Do you know what russians did with Siberia? I'm sure you know about the genocide of Native Americans. Have you heard about genocide of Circassians? You know about slavery and cross Atlantic slave trade, do you know about serfdom russians put the nations they subjugated under? You know about Great russian Literature, do you know how they banned languages of other people? Killed off the writers, the scientists, the artists for not being russian? Have you per chance read anything from the people who suffered under russian empire, soviets, or federation? What makes russian culture so great, greater than everyone it hurt - their sheer number, or their world wide popularity that is paid for by the pain inflicted by russia onto others, whom you deem lesser, not deserving your attention?

Or, what makes you be so obsessed with it, you ignore all bad and dig through a big, stinky, eye watering pile of shit for a fool's gold?

It's propaganda. Its propaganda.

[russianreader]

Ored Recordings: May 21st, Again (Abkhazian and Circassian Music from Turkey)

May 21st. Again. For several years now, almost every May 21st, we release a statement that speaks more clearly about memory, colonialism, defiance against repressive mechanisms, and resistance to assimilation. For the Circassians, this day is a day of mourning, marking the end of the Russo-Caucasian War in 1864, the loss of independence, and the mass expulsion from their historical…

[tatarstani]

one time a circassian man from jordan told me with a completely straight face that the soviet union was responsible for the tsitsekun and therefore communism bad.

i was so baffled, i didn’t even know how to respond or tell him that the circassian genocide was committed decades before socialists were even a political force in russia.

he was kabardian iirc and one of those people who thinks everything bad to ever happen in the caucasus was the fault of the ussr and definitely not anyone else. i’m like 90% sure he also thought stalin was russian and not georgian.

thought you’d enjoy this anecdote lol

i think all of you are trying to kill me. stop this madness were are you finding these people 💔💔🥀🥀🥀

[girlactionfigure]

Disclaimer: the intent of this post is not to delegitimize the right of either Israelis or Palestinians to sovereignty, dignity, and self-determination. There is no future in Israel and Palestine without both Israelis and Palestinians. Nor is this post an endorsement of any Israeli policy.

Rather, after a conversation in the comment section of a recent one of my posts regarding population density in Mandatory Palestine, I decided to rework an older post into this. Personally, I find it really interesting, and I think it’s a key piece in understanding the continuing conflict. It’s also important to dispel false propaganda about the Jewish presence in Israel that has now been accepted as fact.

POPULATION OF PALESTINE

For various centuries, the population of what is now Israel and the Palestinian Territories had remained stagnant. Travelers at the time described Palestine as an abandoned backwater province of the Ottoman Empire. That’s not to say that it was empty or that nobody lived there, of course, but it was sparsely populated, according to the official Ottoman censuses. However, the sudden population boom between 1850 and 1900 did not come from natural population growth but rather, from Arab immigration.

"Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes. Over it broods the spell of a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies."

Mark Twain, 1867

"Many are Israel's forsaken places, and great is the desecration. The more sacred the place, the greater the devastation it has suffered. Jerusalem is the most desolate place of all."

Moses ben Nachman (Nachmanides), 1267

During the Ottoman period (1517-1917), modern-day Israel and the Palestinian Territories were a part of the Ottoman province of Syria, which was further divided into smaller vilayets (administrative divisions). Palestinian Arabs would not identify as “Palestinians,” but rather, identified primarily with their religion and clan. At best, they would call themselves “southern Syrians.” Until 1920, Palestinian Arabs advocated for Palestine to become a part of an Arab state in Greater Syria.

IMMIGRATION FROM EGYPT

The most significant factor in the population growth in Palestine between the turn of the 19th century and the turn of the 20th century was Arab immigration, particularly from Egypt. At the turn of the 19th century, a famine prompted as much as 1/6 of Egypt’s population out of Egypt, with a significant percentage settling in Palestine.

The wave of Egyptian immigration continued in 1829, after thousands of peasants fled harsh labor laws imposed by the Egyptian ruler, Mehmmet Ali Pasha. Travelers during this period wrote that Bedouin tribes accompanied the peasants as well. In 1831, Egypt invaded Palestine. Over 6000 Egyptian peasants crossed into Palestine during the invasion; various Bedouin tribes also arrived with the Egyptian army. Others fled to Palestine as a result of blood feuds between different clans. Many Egyptian soldiers and administrators also chose to stay in Palestine.

By the late 19th century, the city of Jaffa had Egyptian neighborhoods all over town.

When the British invaded Egypt in 1882, scores of Egyptians fled to Palestine. A news report from the time stated: “Many of the people come here from Egypt to wait until the danger passes.” But very few actually returned to Egypt. To this day, the third most common Palestinian surname is El Masry, literally translating to “the Egyptian.”

IMMIGRATION FROM NORTH AFRICA

Following a rebellion against French rule of Algeria in 1850, a number of Arabs and Imazighen from North Africa settled in Palestine, particularly in the Galilee region and Safed.

IMMIGRATION FROM CIRCASSIA

Between 1863-1878, Russia murdered between 1.5-2 million Circassians in the Circassian Genocide. Another 1-1.5 million were expelled from their homes in Circassia. The Ottoman authorities then settled many of the deportees in the Levant, hoping that their presence would curb Bedouin and Druze influence, as the Druze were not always receptive to Ottoman rule, and the Ottomans hoped to squash sentiments of Arab nationalism.

The Circassians, who are Muslim, developed a good relationship with the Yishuv -- the Jewish community in pre-state Israel -- and are now one of the groups with mandatory conscription into the IDF. Like Jews once did, however, Circassians still dream of returning to their homeland, from which they were stolen.

SLAVERY

The Ottoman Empire began issuing decrees to reduce and ultimately terminate slavery in 1830, but these laws were rarely strictly enforced, especially in places such as Palestine. Throughout the 19th century, slave ships continued docking on the shores of Palestine, with the majority of the slaves coming from Ethiopia and Sudan, with a minority coming from Circassia. The last slave ship to arrive to Palestine docked on the shores of Haifa in 1876, though Arabs in Palestine continued holding slaves well into the 1930s.

JEWISH IMMIGRATION (19TH CENTURY)

Between 1881-1903, some 25,000 to 35,000 Jews -- most of them Ashkenazi Jews escaping massacres in Eastern Europe -- immigrated to Ottoman Syria, to the region now encompassing Israel and the Palestinian Territories. Only 15,000 of them stayed, due to harsh economic conditions and disease.

Between 1880-1914, about 8% of all Bukharian Jews immigrated from modern-day Uzbekistan to Jerusalem, escaping brutal persecution. In that same time span, 10% of all Yemenite Jews immigrated to Palestine. Most settled in Jerusalem and Jaffa.

THE "THREAT" OF JEWISH IMMIGRATION

The Ottoman Empire did not abolish the “dhimmi” status for Jews -- that is, second-class citizenship -- until 1856. Dhimmi taxation in Palestine was especially brutal, economically marginalizing religious and ethnic minorities. The Jews in Palestine relied on charity from Jews in the Diaspora for survival. The Samaritans, our closest ethnoreligious cousins, did not have a Diaspora community to come to rely on. Thanks to harsh persecutions, they were nearly wiped out during Ottoman rule.

Though dhimmi status was abolished in 1856, the Arab Muslim majority in Palestine had become accustomed to a certain social order, in which Jews were tolerated so long as we were subjugated. Thus, Zionism and Jewish immigration presented a threat to the status quo.

In 1899, the Arab mayor of Jerusalem, Yousef al-Khalidi, wrote to the chief rabbi of France, “Who can deny the rights of the Jews to Palestine? Good lord, historically it is your country!…But in practice you cannot take over Palestine without the use of force…” The chief rabbi of France forwarded al-Khalidi's letter to Theodor Herzl, who was quick to send a reply, assuring al-Khalidi that the Zionist movement had no intention of displacing the Muslim and Christian populations. It’s worth noting that during this period the mass influx of immigrants -- predominantly Muslim immigrants -- didn’t seem to bother al-Khalidi. It was Jewishimmigration that felt like a threat.

In 1882, the Ottomans prohibited Jews from immigrating to the Ottoman Empire. In 1893, the Ottomans prohibited all Jews -- “Palestinian” or not -- from purchasing land in Palestine. Thus, Jews in the region “enjoyed” less than four decades of equality under the law. No such restrictions existed for Arabs.

IMMIGRATION IN THE 20TH CENTURY

Unlike the population boom in the second half of the 19th century, the huge spike in the population of Palestine in the 20th century did come primarily from Jewish immigration. Between 1904-1914, some 35,000 Jews fled violence, mostly in Eastern Europe, and sought refuge in the region under the Ottomans. Between 1919-1923, another 40,000 Jews arrived to Palestine -- now under the British -- from Europe. Another 70,000 Ashkenazi immigrants arrived in the 1920s, as well as some 10,000 Mizrahi immigrants, predominantly from Yemen and Iraq. 

Prior to the Holocaust, another massive influx of Jewish immigrants — between 225,000-300,000 — arrived from Europe. This angered the Arab leadership in Palestine, which responded with violence. To appease the Arabs, the British passed the 1939 White Paper, which limited Jewish immigration to 75,000 people over a period of five years and limited Jewish land purchases to 5% of the Mandate Palestine Territory. 

Between 60,000-100,000 Arabs immigrated to Palestine between the two world wars. There are numerous reasons for this migration, most notably, new economic opportunities. In March of 1926, a railroad from Egypt to Palestine was completed, which prompted many young Egyptians to leave by train to seek employment in Palestine. In the 1920s and especially in the 1930s, the coastal plain between Gaza and Jaffa, as well as the area between Gedara and Ness Ziona, Ramle, and Lod became densely populated with Egyptian immigrants. 

During World War II, when Jewish immigration was essentially squashed, the British brought Syrian and Lebanese laborers to Palestine. Civilians also employed foreign contractors, many of whom came to Palestine without the legal paperwork. Government records from this period state that there were some 14,000 Egyptian and Lebanese laborers. The population increase along the southern coastal plain during this period was almost completely due to Arab immigration. In the area of Israel now known as “the Triangle,” over 35% of the population consisted of immigrants from Egypt. 10-15% of the Israeli Palestinian population today lives in that region.

LAND OWNERSHIP

Jewish land purchases took place in sparsely populated areas and as a matter of official Zionist policy, the Zionists avoided purchasing land occupied by fellahin, or Arab farmers. Out of the lands Zionists purchased, 52.6% were unoccupied, belonging to foreign landowners; 24.6% belonged to Palestinian Arab landowners; 13.4% belonged to the government, churches, or foreign companies; and only 9.4% belonged to Palestinian Arab fellahin.

In the 1920s, David Ben Gurion, the future first prime minister of Israel, wrote, “Under no circumstances must we touch land belonging to fellahs or worked by them...Only if a fellah leaves his place of settlement should we offer to buy his land, at an appropriate price.”

The 1937 Peel Commission corroborated this, stating: “Much of the land now carrying orange groves was sand dunes or swamp and uncultivated when it was purchased.” In 1931, the British created a register for landless Arabs; only 664 Arabs out of a total of nearly 900,000 met the criteria.

For a full bibliography of my sources, please head over to my Instagram and  Patreon. 

[thomasthetankieengine]

Engaging in ethnic cleansing, cultural genocide, and full-blown killing style genocide was the favorite hobby of practically all 19th and 20th century nationalists.

But since papa-smoke and tamamita lack any interest in a broad look at history or in the history of ideas, you're not going to hear from these two geniuses about what Macedonian, Bulgarian, Russian, Italian, Turkish, Chinese, Arab, Japanese, Croatian, Khmer, and Serbian nationalists of the same period were up to. Unless it's Zionists or American, German, or Ukrainian nationalists, they generally could not care less.

An honest analysis would conclude that it's less than any one type of nationalism is bad and more that nationalism is, at best, a double-edged sword and at worst, a plague on mankind.

But honest analysis is beyond these two campists, so in their world only are a few types of nationalism are inherently bad. Since they unconditionally loooooove Russian and Arab nationalism, you'll never hear about the Tsarist Russification policies, Circassian genocide, Simele massacre, population transfer in the Soviet Union, Jewish exodus from Muslim countries, Arab Belt program, or the Palestinian exodus from Kuwait from these two chucklefucks -- or from any of their buddies.

[hero-israel]

What's so annoying about this constant uwu I'm baby leftist refrain of "just because you're indigenous to a place doesn't mean you have the right to displace people" that's coming from goyim and antizionist self hating Jews alike is that... Jews decolonizing Eretz Yisrael did not have to displace anyone. That was never the intended goal of even the most conservative, if you can call them this, racist Zionist leaders?

Jews resettling our homeland en masse does not fucking mean displacing anyone. These are two separate events. And blaming Jewish immigration for the displacement of Arabs is ignorant at best. It's a clear red flag they don't know the complexities of the Nakba, the different (if concurrent) factors for different groups of Palestinians to flee or be forced out in waves.

In any event, had Palestine accepted the partition plan, no displacement would have occurred. No war = no ethnic cleansing. Even though Jewish communities were routinely destroyed leading up to the partition, there still was no general will to cleanse the land of Palestinians among Jews. Many of the 750,000 Palestinians were displaced as a military exigency by a nascent Israel. This would not have occurred had the partition plan gone as intended. This would not have occurred had their been no partition plan at all.

Jewish resettlement =/= cleansing Arabs.

And at worst, acting like Jewish decolonization itself is an act of displacement, that all this was inevitable because of the mere presence of Jews increasing in Palestine, or some character of ~European~ Kha- I mean- Jew-ish people, or that their was some secret Zionist committee who all got together to drink blood in their Bank Palaces and circle jerked at the idea of cleansing Palestine... I mean then you're just antisemitic. Jews moving anywhere is not a crime, it is not a plague, it is not a humanitarian catastrophe. Jews should not be barred from any country. Human migration, at least when it's not military and financially expediated by an imperial power, is never immoral.

I don't think the Ottomans resettling Circassians and Balkan Muslims in the region was bad. I don't think Egyptians and other Arabs immigrating to Palestine in the 19th century was bad. The pro Palestinian side denies that these groups even came to Palestine, but if they were forced to acknowledge it, I doubt they would say they were displacing the totally real and indigenous Palestinian People? Probably because Arabs/Muslims are granted inherent legitimacy to them. This was always about "The Ummah 💪" to them. A Malaysian has more of a right to live in Palestine than a Jew from the Old Yishuv. They just hate Jews.

The Jewish resettlers built towns on empty land. They bought as much land as they could legally from the Ottomans. There were zero pogroms against Arab communities. There was space and economic opportunity for Jews and Arabs alike, and every Zionist leader acknowledged this. Does this mean everything was perfect and the Jews were totally faultless? Of course not. But the Zionists set out with a clear code of conduct for Zionism to occur. This is historical fact.

Even if not all of the 750,000 Palestinians who became refugees were specifically cleansed by the proto IDF, 200,000 or so people being cleansed is still a crime against humanity. Almost a million people fleeing their country at once is still a tragedy. But this was not an inevitable and direct consequence of Jews rebuilding Israel. There is a timeline where Zionism still occurred and was successful, and no Nakba occurred. This was 100% always a possible outcome.

Insisting otherwise means you think Zionism itself is a genocidal colonial mindset, which clearly all these people do believe wholeheartedly. But we'll never get anywhere as long as people don't recognize the umbrella of connotations and ideas that Zionism held and still holds. We'll never get anywhere while people still treat Jews living in our homeland as foreign suspicious duplicitous dangerous interlopers. Why should Jews come to the table if we're treated as the enemy no matter what? If the very core of Israeli identity is treated as rotten and not worthy of, not just respect, but life?

Excellent points throughout!

Retconning Zionism into being only about refugee displacement is also done to stifle discussion of the partition plans of 1947 (or 1937). Palestiners want to have their cake and eat it too - nonstop crying over the decisions of 1940s Jews, disregard and denialism of those of 1940s Arabs. The talking point is always "Why should they have given an equal share of the land / the best land / ANY land to new immigrants?" Funny how Jewish immigration was such a threat that it was perfectly understandable and natural for Arabs to riot and massacre to make it stop, yet not enough of a threat to consider that maybe it would get bigger and that a negotiated compromise would be a good idea. The only thought, the only goal, was killing.

(Similar: "there can't be a 2SS because of the settlers, let's make a 1SS" - the settlers would still be there in a 1SS, so they aren't the block. The block is refusing to allow for any Israel at all. Winning is the Jews losing.)

[alpaca-clouds]

Indigenous people of Europe

Let me talk about something that really is not talked and thought about in general: The indigenous people of Europe. Because, well, it is something that kinda tends to get ignored often enough, as we think of indigenous cultures as something that existed outside of Europe, before being settled by Europeans.

But it is a lot more complicated than that. Because there were indigenous people in Europe - and there still are to this day. The best known example are probably the Sami in northern Russia and the Scandinavian countries. And be it just because they got depicted in Frozen and in the Klaus Netflix movie.

To quote Wikipedia:

Some groups that claim indigenous minority status in Europe include the Uralic Nenets, Samoyed, and Komi peoples of northern Russia; Circassians of southern Russia and the North Caucasus; Crimean Tatars, Krymchaks and Crimean Karaites of Crimea (Ukraine); Sámi peoples of northern Norway, Sweden, and Finland and northwestern Russia (in an area also referred to as Sápmi); Galicians of Galicia, Spain; Catalans of Catalonia, Spain and southern France; Basques of Basque Country, Spain and southern France; and the Sorbian people of Germany and Poland.

Indigineity in Europe is a complicated thing, because even the non-indigenous people here have been around in this area for a long while. It also is closely related to the artificiality of "whiteness" (I am gonna talk about that a bit more next week).

In the end the "western European culture" as we know it is mostly a result of colonialism through the Romans. Only that this happened 2000 years ago and in a process that was not quite comparable to how colonialism of the non-European regions went.

Though then again, there was a phase during which similar genocide happened within Europe, when it came to the indigenous cultures and religions: The heathen hunts in the 4th century, which did involve the killing of followers of older religions, destruction of temples and religious places of worship and the forceful conversion of the "heathens" to Christianity.

But, again, this happened a long, long time ago. Which is why it tends to not be remembered as such. (In fact, I doubt most people know about this happening.)

There were more indigenous people in Europe before that, but one by one most of those cultures just disappeared.

Still, those that remained often face often similar problems to non-European indigenous people. As minorities they tend to be discriminated against, at times even by law. The borders often do not allow them to move through what has originally been their territory. And many have had their land taken away from them - or still get their land taken.

And given that most people are not even aware that those groups exists, this topic tends to get ignored by a lot of people.

So, yeah, I just wanted to talk about this. Because we really need to be aware about what is happening everywhere. And how those things have happened over thousands of years.

[philsmeatylegss]

Just finished my BA in history, and to celebrate, here’s some genocides on my to-do list to learn more about that I highly recommend y’all to also do:

Palestinian genocide (Palestine, ongoing)

Estimated death toll: 52,00-400,000

Masalit genocide (Sudan, ongoing)

Estimated death toll: 15,000-130,000

Rohingya genocide (Myanmar, ongoing)

Estimated death toll: 9,000-43,000

Tigray Genocide (Ethiopia, 2020-2022)

Estimated death toll: 162,000-600,000

Iraqi Turkmen genocide (northern Iraq, 2014-2017)

Estimated death toll: 3,500 (likely much higher)

Yazidi genocide (Iraq and Syria, 2014-2017)

Estimated death toll: 2,100-5,000

Darfur genocide (Sudan, 2003-2005)

Estimated death toll: 98,000-500,000

Bambuti genocide (DRC, 2002-2003)

Estimated death toll: 60,000-70,000

Rwandan genocide (Rwanda, 1994)

Estimated death toll: 491,000-800,000

Bosnian genocide (Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1992-1995)

Estimated death toll: 31,107-62,013

Isaaq genocide (Somalia and Somaliland, 1987-1989)

Estimated death toll: 50,000-200,000

Anfal campaign (Kurdistan, 1986-1989)

Estimated death toll: 50,000-182,000

Ndebele genocide (Zimbabwe, 1983-1987)

Estimated death toll: 8,000-30,000

Cambodian genocide (Cambodia, 1975-1979)

Estimated death toll: 1,386,734-3,000,000

East Timor genocide (East Timor, 1974-1999)

Estimated death toll: 85,320-196,720

Ikiza (Burundi, 1972)

Estimated death toll: 80,000-300,000

Bangladesh genocide (Bangladesh, 1971)

Estimated death toll: 300,000-3,000,000

Zanzibar genocide (Tanzania, 1964)

Estimated death toll: 13,000-20,000

Maya genocide (Guatemala, 1962-1966)

Estimated death toll: 166,000

Tamil genocide (Sri Lanka, 1956-2009)

Estimated death toll: 154,022-253,818

Deportation of the Chechens and Ingush (Soviet Union, 1944-1948)

Estimated death toll: 100,000-400,000

Deportation of the Crimean Tatars (Soviet Union, 1944)

Estimated death toll: 34,000-195,471

The Holocaust (Nazi Germany occupied Europe, 1941-1945)

Estimated death toll: 6,000,000-7,000,000

Genocide of Serbs in Croatia (Croatia, 1941-1945)

Estimated death toll: 217,000-500,000

Romani Holocaust (German occupied Europe, 1939-1945)

Estimated death toll: 130,000-1,500,000

Parsley massacre (Dominican Republic, 1937)

Estimated death toll: 12,000-40,000

Holodomor (Ukraine and Kuban, 1932-1933)

Estimated death toll: 3,000,000-5,000,000

Libyan genocide (Libya, 1929-1932)

Estimated death toll: 83,000-125,000+

Armenian genocide (Ottoman Empire, 1915-1917)

Estimated death toll: 600,000-1,500,000

Assyrian genocide (Ottoman Empire, 1915-1919)

Estimated death toll: 200,000-750,000

Greek genocide (Ottoman Empire, 1915-1922)

Estimated death toll: 300,000-1,200,000

Herero and Nama genocide (Namibia, 1904-1908)

Estimated death toll: 34,000-110,000

Hamidian massacres (Ottoman Empire, 1894-1896)

Estimated death toll: 200,000-300,000

Hazara genocide (Afghanistan, 1888–1893)

Estimated death toll: 15,700+

Selknam genocide (Tierra del Fuego, Chile, Argentina, 1880-1910)

Estimated death toll: 2,500-4,000

Putumayo genocide (Colombia, 1879-1913)

Estimated death toll: 32,000-40,000+

Circassian genocide (Circassia, 1864-1867)

Estimated death toll: 1,000,000-2,000,000

California genocide (USA, 1846-1873)

Estimated death toll: 9,492-120,000

Queensland Aboriginal genocide (Australia, 1840-1897)

Estimated death toll: 10,000-65,180

Trail of Tears (USA, 1830-1850)

Estimated death toll: 12,000-16,000

Dzungar genocide (China, 1755-1758)

Estimated death toll: 480,000-600,000

Taíno genocide (Hispaniola, 1492-1514)

Estimated death toll: 68,000-968,000