Thomas Chopard, historian
The invasion of Ukraine by the russian army triggered a massive exodus of ukrainian populations towards the west of the country. This is yet another tragic episode in the long history of war and forced population displacements on ukrainian territory.
The history of Ukraine in the contemporary era is indissociable from the wars and mass violence that have profoundly scarred its territory and its population. World wars, civil wars and Soviet repression have constantly redefined its borders and triggered vast forced population movements under varying degrees of constraint, be it flight, evacuation or deportation, all bearing witness to the predatory policies of neighbouring states.
The reasons for such movements of flight appear incomprehensible if we fail to grasp the massive scale of human and material destruction that recurrent conflict has inflicted upon Ukraine. Some 5.5 million people were killed or went missing during the First World War and the civil war that followed the revolution : 3.5 million between 1914 and 1917, and 2 million between 1917 and 1921. The Second World War, for its part, produced a death toll of over 7 million on the current territory of Ukraine : 1.4 million combattants and around 6 million civilians, including 1.58 million Jews.
Access to former Soviet archives, a substantial renewal of research interest in the various sequences of population movement, and the inclusion of Ukraine in broader historical developments now provide a clearer vision of the chronology and scale of these movements, their trajectories and organization.
From one conflict to the next : From the First World War to the civil war
The invasions of 1914 and 1941 both triggered similar vast movements of flight to the east, often via makeshift evacuation convoys set up by the authorities. Sanitary conditions were poor and resettlement was difficult : refugees were housed wherever a roof could be found, meals were frugal in times of shortage and the displaced populations, sometimes stigmatized, were generally left to fend for themselves. These massive departures profoundly destabilized the areas concerned and formed part of the scorched earth policy decreed by the military authorities : crops were burnt in the fields, industrial infrastructure was transferred elsewhere, and vast territories were emptied of their populations.
During the First World War, evacuations began on a local scale, towards the regions of central and eastern Ukraine, but then extended farther afield, towards central Russia and sometimes as far as the Urals and Siberia. In all, almost six million people fled the fighting in the Russian empire, and the historian Liubov Zhvanko estimates that around one million left their homes in Ukraine. In November 1916, the refugee welfare committees counted more than 760,000 refugees in the Ukrainian regions of the empire. And they still numbered almost 850,000 when the revolution began in 1917. Half were from Poland, Belarus or Lithuania – Ukraine was both a sending and a receiving country for refugees.
Ukraine, its western regions especially, now a vast battlefield, were largely populated by ethnic minorities, qualified as “nationalities” by the imperial rulers. Civilian populations fleeing the war were joined by others – Germans and Jews – forced backwards because deemed “suspicious” on mainly ethnic criteria. While citizens of enemy foreign powers were interned, 200,000 subjects of the Russian Empire with German nationality were deported to Volhynia in north-western Ukraine, mainly by rail, at the outset of the war. At the same time, entire Jewish communities were expelled, initially from occupied Austro-Hungarian Galicia then, during the Great Retreat of the summer of 1915, from a vast zone under military administration extending from the Baltic to the Black Sea and including large swathes of central and western Ukraine. Out of almost 700,000 Jews forced by the army to leave their homes, generally on foot, one-third came initially from Ukraine.
On Austro-Hungarian territory, 300,000 people from Galicia and Bukovina, regions now in Ukraine, half of whom were Jews fearing expulsion by the Russian army, fled to the interior of the Habsburg empire. At the same time, almost 5,700 people from Galicia and suspected of pro-Russian separatism were brutally interned in the Thalerhof concentration camp near Graz.
Russian, Ukrainian and Jewish exiles after the revolution
The aftermath of wars, like their outbreak, led to vast migrations across Ukraine following the installation of Soviet rule in 1920, and the border redefinition in 1945.
Some political figures of Ukrainian nationalism had fled the Russian Empire before 1914 to take refuge in western Ukraine under Austro-Hungarian domination. This movement grew in scale after the failure of the Ukrainian proclamation of independence in 1918 : almost 80,000 soldiers and former independentist leaders took refuge in western Ukraine annexed to Poland, forming part of the vast exodus of the former anti-Bolshevik armies in 1920. At the same time, almost 200,000 Jews fled the anti-Semitic violence and pogroms that were ravaging Ukraine, sometimes crossing paths in exile with their former Polish or Romanian persecutors.
Made stateless in many cases by the redrawing of territorial boundaries and the emergence of new states, most Ukrainian refugees were protected by the League of Nations. It was difficult, however, for the Ukrainians, like the Jews of Ukraine, to emerge as a population distinct from that of “Russian refugees” in general. These populations assumed their separate identity later, when they emigrated. The persecuted Jews joined those who had earlier fled the Russian Empire and established communities elsewhere, notably in the United States, while the interwar period saw the emergence of a specific Ukrainian diaspora, with its own institutions, cultural life and press, often tinged with anti-Soviet sentiment. This emigration in the aftermath of the civil war also included the handful of Ukrainian populations that managed to escape a country turned into fortress by Stalin’s repressive policies : collectivization and the Great Famine in 1930–1933, the Great Terror and border security operations in 1937–1938.
Deportation, evacuation, persecution : Ukraine in the Second World War
As in 1914, Ukraine witnessed different types of forced movement during the Second World War. In 1941, the Soviet leadership organized a massive human and material evacuation, sending rail convoys to far distant destinations in central Asia and Siberia, thousands of kilometres from Ukraine. Nearly four million people were evacuated. Alongside the movements of evacuation and flight, a major operation was set in place to deport all the German minorities of the Soviet Union, including 110,000 Germans from southern Ukraine who were deported to Kazakhstan in September 1941.
“DESTRUCTION AND WAR FORCED MILLIONS OF PEOPLE TO FLEE UKRAINE, MAINLY TOWARDS THE EAST. FOR THE FIRST TIME ON SUCH A LARGE SCALE IN MODERN TIMES, THE MOVEMENT IN 2022 IS WESTWARD.”
Thomas Chopard, historian
The populations who stayed in occupied Ukraine were subject to brutal forced displacement policies. During the Shoah, the majority of Ukrainian Jews were exterminated on the spot, generally by a firing squad, although some 200,000 Jews from western Ukraine, notably those interned in city ghettos, were deported in 1942, most to the Belzec extermination camp, and some to Sobibor. Almost 6.5 million people were forced to work for the German war economy : 4.5 million came from eastern Europe and were qualified as Ostarbeiter, and 2.5 million Ukrainians were forced to work in all areas of the economy under inhuman conditions. Three-quarters of these workers across occupied Europe did not survive the war.
Inside the new borders of Ukraine
The end of the Second World War was marked by exodus as much as by the vast Ukrainian population restructuring exercise decreed by Stalin even before the cessation of hostilities. In Ukraine, this policy involved removing minorities from across the entire republic, starting in May 1944 with the deportation to central Asia of 200,000 Crimean Tatars collectively accused of collaborating with the enemy. All Crimean minorities were simultaneously deported or dispersed : alongside the Tatars, 15,000 Greeks and 12,000 Bulgarians were deported to Siberia in 1944, followed in 1947 by 27,000 other Greeks from the Black Sea region. Some 50,000 Armenians were also forced out of Ukraine between 1945 and 1947. The largest ethnic cleansing operation took place between 1944 and 1947, with the exchange of Polish-Ukrainian populations. Almost a million Ukrainian Poles and half a million Ukrainians from Poland were exchanged to make the political and ethnic boundaries coincide.
This ethnic engineering was accompanied by political and social engineering. The Sovietization of the western regions of Ukraine, annexed initially in 1939, and definitively in 1945, took the form of deportations targeting population categories deemed incompatible with the new socialist order : presumed political opponents, former government employees, property owners, Polish farm settlers, etc. Almost 300,000 people, mainly Poles and Jews, were deported from western Ukraine in 1940. Deportations resumed between 1947 and 1948 with the forced movement of more than 250,000 people in operations that also aimed to crush any form of rural resistance and to complete the process of land collectivization, i.e. to Sovietize the annexed territories.
“THE LARGEST ETHNIC CLEANSING OPERATION TOOK PLACE BETWEEN 1944 AND 1947, WITH THE EXCHANGE OF POLISH-UKRAINIAN POPULATIONS. ALMOST A MILLION UKRAINIAN POLES AND HALF A MILLION UKRAINIANS FROM POLAND WERE EXCHANGED TO MAKE THE POLITICAL AND ETHNIC BOUNDARIES COINCIDE.”
Thomas Chopard, historian
Outside the Ukrainian border
At the end of the war and its mass population movements, 220,000 Ukrainian displaced persons (or DPs) were living in central Europe. They formed a heterogeneous population that included former Soviet prisoners of war, former forced labourers, civilians who had fled the advance of the Soviet armies, defeated antiSoviet partisans or former collaborators fearing retribution, all of whom refused repatriation to Soviet Ukraine. Around 110,000 emigrated to North America while 40,000 remained in western Europe (United Kingdom, Belgium and France), and the remainder headed to South America, Australia and New Zealand.
In contrast to the early 1920s, the status and situation of these DPs was distinct from that of the other displaced Ukrainian populations classified on ethnic criteria : Jewish, Russian or Polish. The administrative categories and the work of emigrant welfare associations formalized this division of Ukrainian emigrants into separate groups. In this brief overview of Ukrainian migration, we should not forget the other episodes of forced migration from Ukraine, Jewish migration in particular. After a largely unquantifiable first wave of departures in the aftermath of the Shoah and the war, 120 to 130,000 Jews fled discrimination in Soviet Ukraine between Stalin’s death in 1953 and the 1980s, often after lengthy administrative battles, and generally settled in Israel.
Destruction and war forced millions of people to flee Ukraine, mainly towards the east. For the first time on such a large scale in modern times, the movement in 2022 is westward. These massive movements of flight are systematically associated with deportations and expulsions that also bear witness to the brutality of successive wars and occupation policies in Ukraine through the 20th century. With the imposition of identities, the dispersal and regrouping of populations, the impact of these movements on the country’s demography has been profound. Warring states have always behaved with brutality, suspicion, repression and rapacity towards the diverse Ukrainian populations. Forced displacements were also a key instrument in the shaping of Ukraine : deportation policies sought to homogenize a territory long inhabited by minorities and to engineer its political and economic destiny.
To find out more
- Gousseff C. 2015. Échanger les peuples. Le déplacement des minorités aux confins polono-soviétiques (1944–1947), Paris, Fayard.
- Isajiw W. W., Boshyk Y. & Senkus R. (eds.). 1992. The Refugee Experience : Ukrainian Displaced Persons After World War II, Edmonton, Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta.
- Polian P. 2004. Against their Will : The History and Geography of Forced Migrations in the USSR, Budapest, CEU Press.
- Zhvanko L. 2012. Beženci Peršoi svitovoi vyjny : ukrainskyj vymir [First World War refugees : the Ukrainian perspective], Kharkiv, Apostrof.
The author
Thomas Chopard is a postdoctoral researcher at CREE, University of Languages and Civilizations (INALCO), and assistant director of the Centre d’études franco-russe. He is a fellow of CI Migration.
Quote this article
Thomas Chopard, “Ukraine at war : flight and forced migration in the contemporary era”, in : Antonin Durand, Thomas Chopard, Catherine Gousseff and Claire Zalc (eds.), Feature “Migration and the borders of Ukraine at war”, De facto [Online], 33 | June 2022, posted online on 24 June 2022. URL : https://www.icmigrations.cnrs.fr/en/2022/11/07/defacto-033–03/
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