Deportees in Society

Abstract

Abstract This paper discusses forced labour migrations in the Buryat-Mongolian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in the Stalin era. It attempts to set this regional case in the context of deportations and ‘special settlements’ in the USSR as a whole. It points out that forced labour migrants were not only sent to the Buryat Republic from western regions of the USSR; various categories of the ‘repressed’ were also deported from the Republic and displaced within it. The paper focusses on relations between forced migrants and the rest of society, with particular attention to Germans and Lithuanians sent into Buryatia and to Buryats exiled from the same regions.