On June 13, 1949, one of the largest displacements of populations in the history of mankind was attempted in the Soviet Union. Even the Greeks who experienced "death marches" by the Ottomans in Pontus in the period 1916-1923, watched their tragic fate dumbfounded. An officer and a soldier entered every Greek house along the coastline from Anapa in the Krasnodar Territory to Sokhum in Abkhazia and Vatum in Anjaria. Few of the unlucky displaced were informed by a leak of possible forced deportation. As stated by eyewitnesses of those events:
OF Vassilis Tsenkelidis
SOURCE:pontosnews.gr
"They were allowed to take with them as much as they could fit in their carry-on luggage. All other movable and immovable personal property was nationalized." Private property was prohibited from the beginning within the framework of socialist ideology. The personal homes of the Greeks were either sold or given away for free to the new residents who were transferred from the north of Russia to the Krasnodar region and from the mountainous regions of Georgia to Abkhazia and Anjaria.
Despite the secrecy of the operation it was easy to understand that the final destination of the transport through the endless railways of the USSR inherited from the last tsars of the Romanov dynasty, would be Asia. But the good and unsuspecting Greeks believed that their displacement was in the direction of Greece. All the exiles either had Greek passports, or acquired Soviet citizenship after Greek citizenship. The illusion was lost when the train crossed the Volga River in a single direction; to Asia.
Escorted by Soviet state security troops, the evacuees in closed wagons arrived after two weeks in the steppes and desert of southern Kazakhstan. Those who endured and survived arrived. Because many of them died from hardship and disease. The violent displacement of 1949 was another link in the chain of persecutions and exiles of the Greeks of the USSR. The new way of oppression was invented a few years after the so-called "Greek operation" of En-Ka-Ve-De in the period 1937-1938, which cost thousands of lives of the Greeks of the Soviet Union.
Agrippina Symeonidis-Tsengelidis with her mother-in-law and sister-in-law in Athens (archive of V. Tsenkelidis)
In 1939, the families of Greek citizens who were executed during the "Greek operation" of the Soviet Union were deported to Greece 1937-38. Wives, mothers, sisters and children were told that their husbands were already in Greece. "In Greece we did not find my father Efthimios Symeonidis. Later we learned that he was executed by the Soviets", said his son Ioannis who arrived in Athens from Odessa at the age of 10, in 1939 with his mother Agrippina (Despina) Tsengelidis, his paternal grandmother and aunt of.
Politics of mass exiles, the Greeks in the "Asian Babylon"
In the 1930s, the Stalinist Authorities started the policy of mass deportations. Siberia and Central Asia (mostly Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan) were filled with peoples of very different cultural and linguistic origins. In societies where the majority of the local population was in an almost primitive state, there lived exiled Russians, Ukrainians, Baltic peoples, Volga Germans, Chechens, Armenians, Azeris, Kurds, Koreans, Uighurs, Dugans (Chinese Muslims), etc. a.
The Greeks massively replenished the population of the "Asian Babylon" in the 1940s. The first displacement of the Greeks took place to northern Kazakhstan and Siberia in 1942. As part of the "operation to remove unarmed population" from the war front, he was exiled to Siberia and northern Kazakhstan large numbers of Greeks from the Kuban region of southern Russia and the city of Kerch in Crimea. On June 24, 1944, the Greeks of the rest of Crimea were exiled to Uzbekistan in Central Asia.
On June 13, 1949, over 40,000 people of Greek origin were exiled to southern Kazakhstan. Almost all the Greek population was from the regions of Kuban (North Caucasus, Russia), Abkhazia and Anjaria. Living expenses during their displacement were covered by themselves. From the information left by Paraskevi Pentazidis (1926, Russian Kuban – 2006, Athens), who was displaced in Kazakhstan, the following is proven once again:"In the first days, it was forbidden to open the wagons. The lack of oxygen and the non-existent infrastructure for personal hygiene created foci of infection. The first victims of transportation in the dirty animal wagons were the newborns and small children.
"In order to create the makeshift toilets, the displaced made holes in the floor of the wagons and made the shields with their bodies so that the women would not be ashamed of the men. There were cases when women, who grew up with the principles of their ancestors from Pontus, died refusing to defecate in the same place as foreign men." Paraskevi's husband Apostolos Simeonidis died in Kazakhstan in 1955 from hardship. The then young Paresa (Friday) raised their three children alone. She survived, returned to the Kuban area and in 1990 left with her children and grandchildren to Greece.
In total, from 1942 to 1949, more than 60,000 Greeks were displaced from the Caucasus region. The tortured Greeks had to find the strength to start their lives from the beginning. The local Soviet authorities did not arrange for their settlement. The makeshift houses were built by the displaced themselves during breaks during long hours of work.
"They didn't pay us until Stalin's death in 1953. Then they paid a small salary, but a lump sum. We didn't know how to manage this money. I went to the store and bought shoes for my three children. Until then they used an old pair with holes. My oldest daughter used to put on these shoes and carry the youngest sister on her back to go out of the house in the winter. In the summer, they walked around barefoot," said Paraskevi Pentazidis, like many other displaced persons.
Displaced persons were prohibited from leaving their place of permanent residence. According to the decree of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, from November 26, 1948, violators of the "special settlement zones" regulation faced a sentence of twenty years in prison. The Greeks, like other peoples, were excluded from the rest of the world.
These regulations were in force until Stalin's death. Three years later, in 1956, after the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the condemnation of the crimes of the Stalinist period, the displaced persons were allowed to repatriate to the places of their former residence, provided that this area did not belong to the zone of over-elevation population.
But in the Soviet Union there was a system of internal naturalization and moving from one region to another was difficult. Only the installation in barren areas was easy. The Greeks also encountered obstacles when registering in the local censuses of the regions from which they were forcibly exiled. The property was not returned to its rightful owners. In the Soviet archives, the names of the Greeks are no longer mentioned in the house books. The Greeks restarted their lives, once again.
The Soviet authorities restored the individual legal innocence of the unjustly exiled Greeks. In April 2014, in the framework of the law on the restoration of the exiled peoples of Crimea, the Greeks were heard for the first time as an ethnic group unjustly persecuted in the USSR. The organized Pontic space in its global dimension recognized June 13, 1949 as the Day of Remembrance of the Stalinist persecutions against the Greeks in the decades 1930-1940.