Soviet deportations of Chinese people

During the 1920s and 1930s, the Soviet government forcibly transferred thousands of Chinese nationals and ethnic Chinese citizens from the USSR to Almaty, Kazakhstan (where some 4,000 remained and were kept as they were native speakers and were useful to the USSR working in translation and Soviet publishing houses). Meanwhile, the remainder (some 14,000 or more) were sent out of the country (USSR) to China. A number of memoirists (such as Israel Emiot's short chapter "With the Chinese Prisoners") mention the tight organization of the Chinese in the Soviet GULag system. Many had landed in the Soviet forced labor camps (GULag) accidentally. Some were the "Soviet" ethnic Chinese who were born in the USSR. While others were legal guest workers (laborers with visas to work in the USSR) or the unfortunate few who had accidentally crossed over the Chinese–Soviet border in the Russian Far East and the Zabaikal regions. Most of the deportees were deported to the Chinese province of Xinjiang and Soviet-controlled Central Asia. Although there were more than 70,000 Chinese living in the Russian Far East in 1926, the Chinese had become almost extinct in the region by the 1940s. To date, the detailed history of the removal of the Chinese diaspora in the Russian Far East requires more research and more articles to be written. The Chinese archives and the Russian/Soviet "off-limits" archives with materials on sensitive subject matters (such as politically sensitive topics between China and Russia and the INO, NKVD missions utilizing East Asians in Soviet intelligence) need to be opened for scholars to peruse. To date, there are eight major research articles on the Soviet Chinese deportation of 1937-1939. Two are newspaper articles written with data from the archives. The eight articles are: Karin-Irene Eiermann's "The Fate of the Chinese Population in Soviet Russia (2007)," GuangMing Yin's "A Historical Study of the Soviet Union's Handling of the Chinese Issue in the Far East (2016)," Ablazhey and Potapova's "Repressive Policy as a Tool of Resolving the 'Chinese Issue,' ", Vladimir Baturov's "The Repression of the Chinese in Stalin's Soviet Union," E.G Kalkaev's "The Place of Repression against the Chinese in the 'National' Operations of the NKVD," and Jon K. Chang's "Battling for Equality (2025)." The remaining two articles on the Chinese deportation were written by Elena N. Chernolutskaia.

The two articles by Chernolutskaia are written with very distinct and opposing views towards the Soviet Chinese. The first, "Russians and Chinese, Brothers Forever?" was written in 1993 in the period right after the collapse of the USSR during a period of deep-soul searching about the nature of repression in the USSR and the proclamation of independence and autonomy for all of the "nations" ("nations" in Russian refers to "peoples") of the former USSR. The 1993 article is very sympathetic to the suffering and repeated violations of human rights (and the 1936 Soviet Constitution) that occurred during the Sov. Chinese deportation. The second article is chapter 3 from Chernolutskaia's Forced Migration in the Russian Far East, 1920-1950. It depicts the Chinese as absolutely non-Soviet, unassimilated and a vector for opium abuse (use, distribution and proliferation) and espionage (through Japan).

Often considered strangers to Soviet society, the Chinese were more prone to political repression, due to their lack of exposure to propaganda machines and their unwillingness to bear the hardship of socialist transformation. From 1926 to 1937, at least 12,000 Chinese were deported from the Russian Far East to the Chinese province of Xinjiang, around 5,500 Chinese settled down in Soviet-controlled Central Asia, and 3,932 were killed. In the meantime, at least 1,000 Chinese were jailed in forced penal labour camps in Komi and Arkhangelsk near the Arctic. Even today, some villages in Komi are still called "Chinatown" because of the Chinese prisoners held in the 1940s and 1950s. Unlike other deported peoples, the deportation of Chinese and Koreans was carried out by the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) members of their own nationalities. While Koreans, Chinese and Japanese were forced to leave the Russian Far East, the Soviet government launched the Khetagurovite Campaign to encourage single female settlers in the Far East, which unwittingly replaced part of the deported Asian populations.

The human rights group Memorial International kept the records of over 2,000 Chinese victims of Soviet political repression, yet it has been almost impossible to recognise their original Chinese names from Russian scripts. On 30 April 2017, the Last Address set up an inscribed board in memory of Wang Xi Xiang, a Chinese victim of the Great Purge, at the Moscow Office of the International Committee of the Red Cross.