Kalmyk deportations of 1943



The Kalmyk deportations of 1943, codename Operation Ulussy, was the deportation of most people of the Kalmyk nationality in the Soviet Union (USSR), and Russian women married to Kalmyks, but excepting Kalmyk women married to another nationality. The decision was made in December 1943, when NKVD agents entered the homes of Kalmyks, or registered the names of those absent for deporation later, and packed them into cargo wagons and transported to various locations in Siberia: Altai Krai, Krasnoyarsk Krai, Omsk Oblast, and Novosibirsk Oblast.

Under the USSR, the Kalmyks were forcibly settled from the nomadic lifestyle and Kalmyk Buddhist monks and nuns were persecuted. Thus, during the Nazi invasion and occupation of Kalmykia in 1942, German forces uniquely found volunteers among the Kalmyks for the Kalmykian Voluntary Cavalry Corps, which killed many Soviet partisans. The occupying Germans and their puppet regime also destroyed much of the agriculture of the region and executed close to 20,000 people in Kalmykia, including 100 Jews. After the war, Kalmyks were one of the "punished peoples" who were officially accused of military collaborationism with the Nazi army against the Red Army during World War II, of providing the Germans with livestock, of dismantling kolkhozes and sovkhozes with the Germans, of terrorizing the population, etc. At the same time, the Kalmyk Autonomous Republic (ASSR) was abolished, its territory given to neighboring republics. A new decree allowed Kalmyks to return and reestablished the ASSR in 1956.