HISTORY OF REPRESSION OF CZECHS AND CZECHOSLOVAKS IN THE USSR

Hitherto historical research on political repression in the Soviet Union has revealed that in the period from the 1920s to the 1950s it affected, in various forms, around 15,000 Czechoslovak citizens and people of Czech ethnicity settled on Soviet territory. The vast majority of those impacted (around 10,000) passed through Gulag camps, while the overall estimate naturally also includes victims of execution and forced resettlement. Czechoslovak citizens or expatriates were persecuted in the USSR for various reasons. The most common related to the political development of the Soviet Union and the whole of Europe, which led to the Soviet security agencies carrying out waves of repression against both the local population and nationals of other states.


The Sovietisation of Russia and the Bolsheviks’ consolidation of power in the interwar period

The first cases of the persecution of expatriates can be dated to the advent of the Bolshevik regime in 1917. For the most part this concerned individuals that the revolutionary Red forces regarded as enemies in view of their political orientation or social status. However, in subsequent years other classes of the Soviet population (mainly farmers, a section of the working classes) and in the end essentially the whole of Soviet society, regardless of class origin, gradually fell victim to repression. At the turn of the 1930s Stalinist repression reached a pinnacle during the collectivisation of agriculture. This naturally affected members of the Czech minority who had settled on the territory of tsarist Russia in the second half of the 19th century. Successful farmers (especially in Soviet Volhynia), regarded by the Soviet authorities as kulaks, were the first target of class hatred. Many were arrested, convicted and sent to forced labour camps or into internal exile. Executions were not unusual. Similar repression was meted out on traders, entrepreneurs and successful craftsmen who were dubbed exploiters or bourgeois elements. Victims also included Czech legionaries and WWI POWs who had remained in Russia for a variety of reasons. Immigrants who had left Czechoslovakia for the USSR during the 1920s and 1930s, chiefly for economic or political reasons, comprised a no less significant group. These included members both members of emigrant cooperatives, qualified specialists and specialist in various manufacturing sectors and Czechoslovak Communists who had moved to Russia to take up posts in the Comintern. Some were on the run from criminal prosecution in Czechoslovakia.


The Great Terror

Though the severity of this persecution had greatly paralysed Soviet society, what is known as the Great Terror of the years 1936 to 1938 can be regarded as the most tragic phase of Soviet repression. During this period almost three-quarters of a million people were executed, while hundreds of thousands more innocent people were imprisoned. The extreme wave of violence also had a devastating impact on all of the referred to population groups comprising Czech expatriates and citizens. It was just their differentness – foreign ethnicity or citizenship, activities in expatriate groups and associations, etc. – that was the most frequent reason for their arrest and summary sentencing, on the basis of rigged charges of anti-Soviet, counterrevolutionary activity, espionage in the service of a foreign state, etc., to death or jail terms of many years. To date it has been confirmed that over 1,350 persons of Czech origin or Czechoslovak citizenship were executed in the interwar period for political reasons – the majority falling victim to repression during the Great Terror. Hundreds of others were jailed in the Gulag or were expelled to remote regions of the USSR.


World War Two

In connection with the gradual demise of Czechoslovakia in 1938–1939, resulting from German and Hungarian occupation and the inception of the Slovak state, thousands of Czechoslovak citizens threatened with political repression headed for the Soviet Union. Some ended up on Soviet territory as a result of the USSR’s occupation of the eastern part of Poland. While the refugees included hundreds of Czechs and Slovaks, the most numerous group comprised Ruthenes (estimates today suggest they numbered 6,000) fleeing most frequently from compulsory recruitment in the Hungarian army and Czech Jews (around 2,000) seeking refugee from racial discrimination. Hundreds of Protectorate Jews deported by the Nazis in October 1939 to Nisko in the eastern part of the General Government, from where they were immediately expelled by the Nazis onto Soviet territory, can also be included among them.
While the refugees did avoid Nazi or Hungarian persecution by fleeing to the east, the majority of them became victims of the Soviet regime. They were arrested while crossing the border itself or later on Soviet territory during NKVD crackdowns on “unreliable elements” in the border regions between 1940 and 1941. Those detained were charged most frequently with crossing the border illegally, being on the territory of the USSR unlawfully or espionage. For this sentences of three to five years (though sentences of eight or even 15 years were no rare) forced labour were typically meted out by NKVD extra-judicial bodies. Roughly 15 percent of the Czechoslovaks did not survive internment. Most of the remainder were released in 1942 under an amnesty for Czechoslovak citizens. Expatriates sentenced for alleged spying or other relatively serious anti-Soviet activities, or persons detained for various reasons by individual camp commanders, died doing forced labour at the same time that their released mates were fighting on the front, or even after the war.


Post-war repression

From the liberation of the first territory of the pre-war Czechoslovakia by the Red Army in autumn 1944 until the early 1950s, thousands of people were hauled off to the USSR from Czechoslovak territory by the Soviet security agencies. These came for the most part from predetermined groups of the population that the Soviet regime regarded as hostile and included representatives of the “White” anti-Bolshevik exile community, persons linked to the occupying regime or the Slovak state and leading political representatives of Carpathian Ruthenia, who could have threatened the Soviet annexation of the territory. Abduction also impacted some Czechs accused of committing offences against the Soviet regime in the past. In addition, thousands of Germans, Hungarians and Slovaks, who were mobilised extra-judicially within the framework of war reparations as labour for the war-ravaged Soviet economy, were abducted from Slovakia and in particular Carpathian Ruthenia. Abductees from the ranks of Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian and Ruthenian politicians, intellectuals and specialists, just like collaborators with Nazi Germany, were sentenced on Soviet territory to high punishments of 10–25 years in jail and sent to Gulag camps. Some of them died while being arrested in Czechoslovakia and others met their deaths during interrogation and subsequent internment in the USSR. Estimates suggest around 300 people were abducted from the territory of today’s Czech Republic, of whom over 200 were from Russian or Ukrainian exile circles. Only 70 persons returned to Czechoslovakia following their release. Political repression in the post-war Soviet Union also impacted thousands of former Czechoslovak citizens of Carpathian Ruthenia, which was surrendered to the USSR in 1945. Persons regarded as Ukrainian or Ruthenian nationalists, church representatives, victims of collectivisation and persons who had tried to leave the Soviet Union illegally were victimised alongside ethnic minorities (Hungarians, Germans) persecuted as a consequence of WWII.