Like carve out a place between Russia, Belarus and Ukraine in the former Pale of Settlement. Establish a bunch of Yiddish language schools there. Have it become a center of Jewish culture. Sure, there are already Ukrainians, Russians and Belorussians there but there were already people in the far east too.

  • TrashCompact [none/use name]
    ·
    2 years ago

    There was, for various reasons, forced relocation of Tatars, Chechens, Germans in what would later be designated Poland, (I think) Polish in what would later be designated Ukraine, and I think a few others.

    The deaths from these events get wildly overstated (the German one in particular, in my experience), but they weren't fantastic. At least some of them might have been necessary and all of them that I know of had some real level of justification, but there were still issues.

      • TrashCompact [none/use name]
        ·
        edit-2
        2 years ago

        No, sorry, I'd probably have more to say about it if I actually read about them to any meaningful degree. When I talk about the German one being "wildly overstated" I'm referring to times I've seen it brought up somewhere like :reddit-logo: and in a conversation with a very reactant historian who said "some" estimates of the death toll are six-figures.

        Regarding that last part, the estimate he was referring to turned out to be one that came from the West German government, literally the most negatively-biased source you could get on the topic. [I believe it was prior to reunification, West] Germany even later produced another study that lowered the estimate by an entire order of magnitude. Obviously that's still not exactly the lowest estimate, but it shows how hysterical the six-figure one is that it was abandoned even by motivated sources.

        • Vncredleader
          ·
          2 years ago

          Most of the Germans literally still live in Central Asia or their children do iirc

      • Vncredleader
        ·
        2 years ago

        Very biased given its the Stalin Society, and it mostly exists to talk about Khrushchev selectively talking about the crimes of resettlement yet funnily forgetting to mention the ones he was involved in

        https://www.marxists.org/archive/bland/1993/07/enforced-resettlements.pdf

    • regul [any]
      ·
      2 years ago

      The Kalmyks also got moved around a lot. Ostensibly for support of the White Army and later the Nazis, but Stalin seemed to really not like pastoral nomads generally.

      • Anemasta [any]
        hexagon
        ·
        2 years ago

        It is sort of an axiom of anarchist historiography that state projects, especially ambitious ones, really don't like nomads and itinerant people.