Alain Blum

INED senior researcher Alain Blum, a specialist of the demography of Russia, tells us about his latest book, Déportés pour l’éternité. Survivre à l’exil stalinien, 1939-1991 [Deportees for eternity: Surviving exile under Stalin, 1939-1991], written together with Emilia Koustova.

(Interview conducted in June 2024)

I began working on demography dynamics in the Soviet Union in 1984, at a time when there were a lot of questions about them since they were often kept secret. We also knew very little about the country’s demographic history. I was lucky, as I started investigating these questions just before Perestroika in 1985, when researchers were at last granted access to contemporary statistics and a massive quantity of archives, all of which could be used to reconstitute the demographic history of the Soviet Union and its individual republics, which have since become independent states.

Deportations during Stalin’s regime had an enormous impact on that history, and we actually know less about them than many other forms of Soviet repression. This led us to develop a project of interviews with former Soviet deportees, launched in 2007, which I ran jointly with two colleagues: Marta Craveri, now at the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, and Valérie Nivelon, who produces the Radio France Internationale program “La Marche du Monde.”

In August of 1939, Nazi Germany and the USSR under Stalin concluded the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact, whereby the two countries agreed to divide up central and eastern Europe between them. The Soviet Union annexed western Ukraine and western Belarus (Polish lands at the time), and a few other areas, then invaded eastern Poland barely a month after signing the pact, in September 1939, and then annexed the Baltic States in July 1940. After which the Stalinist authorities deported a large number of families to “special villages” in the Far North, Siberia, and other remote regions of the USSR to consolidate their control over, and “Sovietize” the USSR’s new acquisitions. The deportations began in 1940-1941 and were resumed in 1944, once the Red Army had reoccupied those areas. 

Emilia Koustova and I collected accounts from people—mainly Ukrainians and Lithuanians—who had been deported to Siberia, in the Irkutsk region, either in 1940-1941 or at some time between 1944 and 1952. We identified them thanks to colleagues in Irkutsk. We would call a school principal or librarian in a particular village, and they would indicate former deportee families still living there. Those families were well known, and they readily agreed to tell their stories, especially since it was the first time anyone had shown any interest in them. To collect accounts from people who had gone back to Lithuania or Ukraine after Stalin’s death—and there were many more of them than people who had remained in the same place they had been interned—we proceeded differently. A lot of former deportees in those countries—particularly in Lithuania­—belonged to deportee associations, making it fairly easy to identify them and ask them to tell us about their lives. In many cases, they had already narrated their stories in other frameworks that were not research projects, given that the experience of deportation and internment are a fundamental component of national memory in those countries.

After the interviews, we plunged into the archives kept in Ukraine, Lithuania, and the Irkutsk region of Russia in order to fit together present-day accounts of experiences from a distant past with documents produced at the time of deportation. We found a considerable number of written traces in the archives, both from persons involved in running the deportation process and their victims. With this material we were able to study the political and repression mechanisms operative in deportations, as well as people’s migration trajectories, how they were reintegrated or excluded, stories of their return. 

The supposed “referendums” organized by the Russian authorities in Crimea in 2014 and in the self-proclaimed “republics” of Lugansk and Donetsk in 2022 recall the annexation processes of 1939 and 1940. And Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, launched on February 24, 2022, involved displacements of Ukrainians toward and into Russia. The memory of annexation and deportation under Stalin was still quite present in Ukraine in 2022; the Russian invasion and the new waves of violence may be seen as a grim “updating” of that memory.