All events · The World Wars

The Russian Empire's Wartime Deportation of Jews, Germans and Others

1914–1917 · Europe & Northern Eurasia

Open on the interactive map →

What happened

From the first months of the war the Russian high command treated whole categories of the population of the western borderlands as security risks and ordered their removal. Ethnic Germans were expelled from the Polish provinces in December 1914, Jews were driven from the front zone in large numbers in the spring and summer of 1915 amid hostage-taking and army pogroms, and the Russian occupation administration in Galicia and Bukovina deported civilians including Ukrainian Greek Catholic clergy and Jews into the interior. Gatrell puts German colonists expelled at about 420,000 and Jews displaced at about 600,000. The deportations were carried out at short notice, often with the destruction of property, and combined with voluntary flight to create a refugee population of nearly 5 million by January 1917, which strained the empire's administration and contributed to the political crisis of 1917. One consequence was the effective collapse of the Pale of Settlement, as expelled Jews were permitted to live in interior provinces previously closed to them.

Parties

The Russian army command deported Jews, ethnic Germans, Poles, Roma and others from the western borderlands and from occupied Galicia into the interior of the empire as suspect populations

Disputed

The denominator

The 1897 imperial census counted 5.2 million Jews, almost all confined to the Pale of Settlement, and about 1.8 million ethnic Germans. By 1914 these had grown to roughly 5.5 and 2.4 million. Poles, Roma, Muslims and others were also deported and are not in this denominator.

Where the baseline comes from

• Pale of Settlementopen-edited
• Russian Census of 1897official

On the death toll

No reliable death toll exists for the deportations as such. Mortality among deportees and refugees from typhus, cholera and exposure during transport and in reception points was substantial and is documented in relief agency reporting, but was never counted separately from wartime civilian mortality generally.

Documented forms of violence

Deportation orders, hostage-taking from Jewish communities and property destruction during the 1915 retreat are documented in Russian army orders and relief-agency records analysed by Gatrell and Peeling.

Movements mapped

• Western borderlands -> deportation into the Russian interior
• Occupied Galicia -> deportation to the Volga provinces120,000

Countries touched, on present-day borders

Poland, Lithuania, Russia, Ukraine

Sources

• Peter Gatrell, 'Resettlement', 1914-1918-Online International Encyclopedia of the First World Warpress
• Siobhan Peeling, 'Refugees (Russian Empire)', 1914-1918-Onlinepress