Home – Home – Jornals – Humanitarian sciences in Siberia 2016 number

The article formulates an understudied problem of classification of population migrations in the USSR during the Great Patriotic war. Contemporary historiography is skewed towards the forced deportations. During the war these deportations were of ethnic character. As a result the forced deportations were considered to be numerically prevalent and both researchers and readers viewed them as a dominant type of migrations. Undoubtedly, forced migrations had a great impact on social structure dynamics, economy, social and cultural image of the USSR. However a concrete historical research based on the new, previously neglected sources has shown that during the war along with forced deportations the Soviet Union witnessed another type of deportations which were mainly of voluntary-compulsory character. The analysis of this little-investigated subject allowed identifying among all types of territorial displacements the military and labour migrations, evacuations and re-evacuations of large masses of population, repatriations. The purposeful and planned settlement of territories that became vacant after deportations of ethnic groups played an important role in migratory movements, as well as organized agricultural resettlement. For the first time in national historiography the author characterizes military mobilizations, which meet all the classic criteria of migration, as a special form of migrations. In this aspect forced ethnic deportations are considered to be just one of the forms of migration. Quantitatively, it was not the greatest migration thread. Labor migrations remained an important type of migrations. The article determines quantitative relationships between different types of migrations.