this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2026
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I am not well read on these events, but i do have some thoughts.
What if the material conditions don't allow for that? What if there is no time for such a thing? What if it is absolutely crucial that this area does not fall into enemy hands or the entirety of your country gets eradicated?
Were any of the alternatives, if they exist at all, actually viable?
Imma go into this with the knowledge that i could be completely wrong, but this just sounds like empty moralism. Also, it is not clear to me that any of this was a "punishment" at all and actually rather a defusing of traitors that they knew existed because this group had already shown it, but don't know who exactly it is. Instead of just killing everyone that they thought tipped too far into the potential enemy side, they just sent everyone somewhere where they couldn't harm anyone.
Not sure if my thought process is missing something though
You raise some good points, thank you. Honestly I don't have the mental resources to think about it now deeply, but boiling down the choice to "forced relocations and winning the war against nazis vs. no forced relocations but losing the war to nazis" I would choose the forced relocations too, even if out of harm minimization. However I can't decide if this is a false dichotomy or not. I suspect the truth is somewhere in the middle.
It's not even this that is the problem. We look at it in the retrospect and we still don't really know. However at the height of biggest war ever things do look very different. It's not even dichotomy, if you look at the time, even the most unjustified relocation, that is the Koreans, does not look that unnecessary considering that it was 1937, year before Japan really invaded USSR. And while Koreans were a nation opressed by Japan, collaboration there was also high (and during WW2 over 7 million Koreans were mobilised by Japan, though most of them were used as forced labour and not soldiers).
Also the definition of relocation as genocide is made up specifically to bash USSR since it equals expulsions with coordinated relocation, including the post war relocations which (again in retrospect) definitely saved eastern Europe from becoming Yugoslavia 2.0 just worse in 90's.