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Specificities of Soviet Repatriation in Slovakia in 1944–1952
Authors: Michal Smigel
Number of views: 605
The paper provides insights into the practical implementation of the Soviet repatriation operation in Slovakia between 1944 and 1952. It reveals mechanisms employed to carry out the repatriation, the degree of coercion, the role of the Slovak party and its security agencies.The paper offers a general analysis of the methods and fields of action that the bodies involved in the repatriation of Soviet citizens worked in.
Materials used include documents of central, military and several regional archives in Slovakia. Additionally, it makes use of modern foreign and Russian scientific publications on the research topic.
To address research goals, the work applies general scientific and traditional methods of analysis, synthesis, induction, deduction and the historical ad comparative method. Particular importance in the paper is attached to the methods of concretization and generalization, which allowed us to extend the general framework of the Soviet repatriation operation in 1944-1952 using the example of one country – Slovakia with the focus on the operation's practical implementation.
In conclusion, the authors point out that the Soviet authorities performed arbitrary actions, first of all, in the march of the front when actual Soviet citizens and people of “Soviet origin” from Slovakia (including opponents of the Soviet system and communist ideology) were forcibly taken away. As the war ended, the situation in the country normalized and the Soviet troops withdrew from Czechoslovakia, repatriation was already conducted in the interpretation of the Slovak security agencies and army authorities (often with numerous violations in a gross and hostile manner). It was aimed to clear the territory of Russian emigrants and all sorts of wartime refugees from the USSR (in a broader sense, all foreigners who did not have a residence permit) and it was brought about by the country's subordinate and lackey relations with the USSR and the influence of the left forces in society that generally accepted a concept of an ethnically pure national state of Czechs and Slovaks, which had no minorities and various foreign elements.