Country of Origin Report: Russian Federation. Breaking the Empire

Russia: “a prisonhouse of nations” Vladimir Lenin

Current literature describes the scale of the social and economic transformation imposed by the USSR’s communist regime. The revolutionary leaders sought to shift large parts of the population from subsistence agriculture and animal husbandry to collectivised farming, industrial production, and mass manufacturing. What we often overlook, however, is that this transformation required the destruction of existing family control over land, labour, and local social structures. The mass transformation of peoples under Moscow’s control occurred through policies of ethnic and cultural destruction, including dekulakisation and the forced deportation of entire identity groups from their homelands.

From 1930 to 1952, Stalin and Lavrentiy Beria oversaw the forced transfer of an estimated six million people by rail, a process that may have caused as many as 1.5 million deaths. Moscow classified targeted groups under anti-Soviet categories such as “enemies of the people,” entire nationalities marked for deportation, labour-force transfers, and organised reverse migrations designed to repopulate ethnically cleansed territories. In most cases, deportees were sent to remote and underpopulated regions already inhabited by other ethnic groups. Contemporary historians classify these deportations as crimes against humanity and forms of ethnic persecution.

We describe two of the cases with the highest mortality rates as genocides. Ukraine and three other countries have recognised the deportation of the Crimean Tatars as genocide, while the European Parliament has done the same for the deportation of the Chechens and Ingush.

Today’s adults in Russia were born largely after the last major waves of ethnic and cultural cleansing, but they remain deeply shaped by the cumulative traumas of the Romanov and Soviet eras. It is therefore difficult to construct a psychosocial profile of Moscow’s federation without beginning with the foundational traumas and glories embedded in collective identity. For example, adults in the Kalmyk community in the Republic of Kalmykia still report physiological reactions—such as sweating, elevated pulse, and trembling—when exposed to the sounds and smells of steam locomotives like those used to deport their parents and grandparents. Although many Kalmykia were born only after the regime in Moscow allowed their parents to return, the returned families transmitted their traumatized, damaged reality, across generations through stories, poems, songs, and altered behavioural and psychological patterns. In the post-imperial, pre-Soviet sociocentric societies, the family functioned as the basic unit of social life, and families inherited their concepts of social order from generation to generation.

The ethnic and cultural destruction that the Kremlin conducted across the former empire altered the normal processes of psychosocial identity formation. Through intentional violence, famine, and cauterisation, the new Soviet state fractured existing social realities among ethno-cultural communities and produced a more malleable population—less able to resist and more likely to accept an artificially constructed identity alongside, however uneasily, older inherited forms of collective belonging.