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Kalmyk DPs and the Narration of Displacement in Post-World War II Europe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 September 2021

Elvira Churyumova  and
Edward C. Holland Open the ORCID record for Edward C. Holland [Opens in a new window]
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Abstract

Based on interview files and archival materials, this paper reconstructs the experiences of Kalmyk displaced persons (DPs) against the backdrop of the shifting international refugee regime in post-World War II Europe. Kalmyks came to western Europe in two waves: at the conclusion of the Russian Civil War in 1920 and during the German retreat from the Soviet Union in 1943–44. After the war, the majority of Kalmyks were repatriated; those who remained in Europe primarily ended up in DP camps in the American zone of western Germany. This paper details the strategies used by Kalmyk DPs to avoid repatriation to the Soviet Union and eventually secure resettlement in the United States in 1951. Individual histories offer insight into how the Kalmyks as a group made themselves legible to the international community in light of a changing geopolitical environment and evolving racial regimes.

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Articles
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Slavic Review , Volume 80 , Issue 2 , Summer 2021 , pp. 341 - 362
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies

For the Soviet peoples, the first three decades of the Union's existence was an age of displacement.Footnote 1 The upheaval of the Russian Civil War and the exodus of members of the old regime and its supporters was followed by rapid urbanization and the forced collectivization of those who remained in the countryside. The campaigns against social classes—most prominently, the kulaks—set the stage for the deportation of entire national groups beginning in the mid-1930s through the course of World War II.Footnote 2 Populations ebbed and flowed with the combatant armies across eastern Europe during the war; in 1945, the Soviets forcefully repatriated citizens and those claimed as such who were in Europe at war's end.

The Kalmyks, a historically nomadic population of Oirat-Mongol descent living in southwestern Russia, were buffeted by each of these processes of displacement. When the Whites were defeated in the western part of the Soviet Union in 1920, a first wave of Kalmyks fled along with the army's survivors through Constantinople to Europe, settling primarily in Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and France. Under Nazi occupation during 1942 and early 1943, some Kalmyks collaborated with the Germans and followed the army west during its retreat. In response, on December 28, 1943 the Soviet government deported the Kalmyk nation en masse to Siberia and Central Asia and abolished the nation's territory within the Russian republic.Footnote 3 Most of the 7,000 Kalmyks in Europe in May 1945 had come with this second wave that left Kalmykia during the course of the war; roughly 90 percent of all Kalmyks were soon repatriated, part of the estimated 5.2 million people who were sent back to the Soviet Union from late in the war through early 1946.Footnote 4

The Soviets were insistent on repatriation for ideological and practical reasons, including the need for a workforce to restore the war-ravaged economy, to punish collaborators and traitors, and to prevent the build-up of communities abroad that could oppose the Soviet Union from without. Though the Allies initially acceded to Soviet insistence on repatriating the displaced under the terms of Yalta, divisions soon emerged. The United States first amended its policy towards the use of force in repatriation and later rejected repatriation as mandatory. This volte-face occurred in the context of rising cold war tensions between the US and Soviet Union. Approximately 1.2 million people—colloquially referred to as “the last million”—remained in displaced persons (DP) camps in the western sectors of Germany after these policy changes in late 1945. The term “DP” as employed in this article refers to precisely these individuals, who during the war were forced laborers, prisoners of war, and concentration camp internees, and who either refused or avoided repatriation. The DPs carved out a precarious existence in the camps and cities of the western sectors of Germany between 1945 and 1951.Footnote 5

The Kalmyks were but a small fraction of the total DP population. Like other, larger groups, they eventually left Germany and settled elsewhere: by 1951, nearly all DPs had been resettled in the US (400,000), Australia (182,150), western Europe (150,000), Israel (132,000), Canada (123,500), and Latin America (100,000).Footnote 6 After the war, the Kalmyks had to operate in a political-social environment where notions of human rights and racial equality were only just being articulated by fledgling international organizations such as the United Nations. This adds an important racial dimension to the Kalmyk case, which made their experience of displacement and resettlement distinct and their methods of resisting repatriation unique in the European context. In late 1951 and early 1952, following the decision to reclassify Kalmyks as a European population—despite their Asian origins and Asian appearance—most Kalmyk DPs immigrated to the US.Footnote 7 This move was facilitated by a number of non-governmental organizations, including the Tolstoy Foundation, the Church World Service (CWS), the Brethren Service Commission, the International Rescue Committee, the New York-based Russian American Union for Protection and Aid to Russians, and the Flatbush Unitarian Church in Brooklyn.Footnote 8 Five hundred sixty Kalmyks arrived in the US between November 17, 1951 and April 26, 1952, settling mainly in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.Footnote 9

The Kalmyks have eluded substantive treatment in the burgeoning literature on displaced persons, which foregrounds Jewish, Ukrainian, Polish, and Baltic populations, inter alia.Footnote 10 The small size of the Kalmyk DP population allows for the fine-grained reconstruction of their experience as DPs, including how individuals avoided repatriation using strategies that drew into question their legibility as Soviet citizens and instead facilitated their categorization as displaced. The second wave of Kalmyks—those who left with the retreating German army in 1943—were Soviet citizens prior to the start of hostilities and thus, in Soviet eyes, should have been repatriated. However, second-wave Kalmyk DPs avoided repatriation through the invocation of consistent, if fabricated, personal narratives and a reliance on social and cultural networks developed in the camps with members of the first wave, among other strategies. We recount these strategies using the archives of the International Tracing Service (ITS), which includes 1946–1947 T/USA screening forms carried out by the US Army on behalf of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) and subsequent screening forms for the International Refugee Organization (hereafter, IRO; usually dated 1948 and/or 1951).Footnote 11 The resulting database is complete for all ethnic Kalmyks listed in the ITS digital archive.Footnote 12

The paper proceeds as follows. We first detail the origins of Kalmyk DPs, providing a history of the group and outlining the two waves of Kalmyks who left the Soviet Union prior to and during World War II. The next section reviews repatriation as practiced during the first year after the war's end and subsequent changes in western approaches. This overview builds towards a consideration of the unrepatriated Kalmyk remnant in the DP camps of western Germany. Relying on the ITS archives, in this part we foreground the question of legibility and the choices made by refugees in negotiating the post-war DP regime. The final section reflects on how the practices of Kalmyk DPs continued through the course of their resettlement, in an attempt to counter the uncertainties and racial hierarchies that came to define their condition of displacement.

The Origins of Kalmyk DPs

The Kalmyks are a historically nomadic population with origins in Dzungaria, today Xinjiang and eastern Kazakhstan. Migrating west during the early seventeenth century, the Kalmyks settled on the banks of the lower Volga River and formed the Kalmyk Khanate. Beginning in the late seventeenth century, a number of Kalmyks moved further westwards to join Cossack military regiments in the Don region.Footnote 13 In 1771, under the leadership of Ubashi Khan, the majority of Kalmyks embarked on a return journey to their historic homeland.Footnote 14 Those who remained, primarily on the right bank of the Volga River, were further incorporated into Russian imperial structures through a series of legal codifications.

After the October Revolution of 1917 many Kalmyks, especially those serving in the Don and Astrakhan Cossack regiments, fought on the side of the White Army against the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War and left the country after the Whites’ defeat. This first wave of emigres were mainly members of the Buzava group, who lived on the western steppe and are often referred to as Don Kalmyks.Footnote 15 The cultural and linguistic background of the first wave played a crucial role in the Kalmyks’ reclassification as a “European population” in 1951 and their subsequent resettlement in the US. The Don Kalmyks were hereditary soldiers who had served in Don Cossack regiments since the late seventeenth century. By the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, they were bilingual (Russian was the language in which they conducted daily business, while Kalmyk was their domestic tongue) and were closely acquainted with the Russian way of life. Many Don Kalmyks lived in wooden houses (although some kept traditional yurts in summer), had adopted Cossack diet and dress, and most importantly identified as Cossacks, which was a privileged social class.Footnote 16 Like many other nationalities in the Russian empire, diverse Kalmyk groups inhabiting various places never saw themselves as belonging to the same nation until well after the October Revolution. The fact that the Don Kalmyks were Buddhist by faith did not clash with their Cossack identity.

Belgrade emerged as one of the nodal points for the fledgling Kalmyk diaspora.Footnote 17 The majority of first-wave Kalmyks came to Europe after passing through Constantinople following the evacuation of Piotr Wrangel's army from Crimea in November 1920 and numbered approximately 3,000 persons in total.Footnote 18 Adelman gives slightly lower numbers, and estimates that 2,000 Kalmyks left Russia in 1920 as part of the first wave of emigration, of whom 450 settled in and around Belgrade.Footnote 19 The opening of Europe's first Buddhist temple in Belgrade in December 1929 invigorated Kalmyk life in Yugoslavia and soon became a center for Kalmyk religious and cultural life on the continent. Economic conditions in interwar Yugoslavia were difficult, however, and at the start of the 1930s the Kalmyk population numbered around 300, a decline from a decade earlier.

The second wave of Kalmyk emigration from the USSR consisted of forced laborers, Wehrmacht soldiers, and their families, who mainly cared for livestock; among them were also members of the first wave who had returned to the Soviet Union since 1920.Footnote 20 The Kalmyk group was part of a larger movement of Soviet citizens westward during World War II, which coincided with the German army's retreat; by January 1943 the Germans had left Kalmyk territory. In total, more than 10,000 people from the North Caucasus, the Kalmyk steppe, and the Donbas region left the USSR with the Germans.Footnote 21 The Kalmyks went west through Ukraine, Romania, and Poland, at times finding temporary work on farms during lengthy journeys that lasted up to a year. Many men served in the Kalmyk Cavalry Corps or the cavalry units of Andrei Vlasov's army.Footnote 22 The former was formed in the fall of 1942 during the Nazi occupation of Kalmykia and was led by a German Intelligence Officer, Otto Rudolf Werba, known as Doctor Doll. The Corps covered the retreat of the German army from southern Russia and later guarded the German crossing of the Dnieper River, engaging with Soviet and Polish partisans during the course of the retreat. Towards the end of the war, Corps members surrendered to British soldiers who handed them over to the Soviet army. Estimates for the size of Corps that retreated with the Germans range from 1,500 to 5,000.Footnote 23 Beyond this, little is precisely known about the experience of this second wave of Kalmyk emigres en route from the Soviet Union to Germany, except for some sketchy accounts provided by people like Dorzha Arbakov, a member of the Corps.Footnote 24

Distinct from the first wave of Kalmyk emigration to Europe, second-wave Kalmyks primarily came from the Kalmyk steppe of what had been Astrakhan gubernia in the Russian empire, on either side of the lower Volga River. Following the establishment of the Soviet state, the Kalmyk Autonomous Oblast was created in 1920, which was subsequently elevated to the Kalmyk Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR) in 1935. On December 28, 1943—while the second wave was on its way to Europe—the entire Kalmyk population of the ASSR was exiled to Siberia. The deportation was widely viewed as retribution for Kalmyk collaboration with the Nazis during occupation. By 1948 Kalmyks had been scattered across fifteen oblasts and krais in Siberia and the Russian Far East, thirteen oblasts in Kazakhstan, as well as in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan.Footnote 25 The initial reaction to deportation was shock for both those Kalmyks who had left with the Germans and those who remained in the Soviet Union. Many Soviet Kalmyks, especially those whose male family members fought in the Red Army, viewed deportation as unjustified, as the entire nation was punished for the actions of a few.Footnote 26 This mass deportation made displaced Kalmyks resolute in their resistance to repatriation to the Soviet Union after the war.

Soviet DPs and the Practice of Repatriation

Many of the millions awash on the European continent in the spring and summer of 1945 were claimed by the Soviets as citizens who had been displaced by the war.Footnote 27 Most were repatriated in the months following the end of fighting. A plan on population transfers was formalized between the Soviets, Americans, and British in May 1945 at Halle, and included conditions about care, feeding, and allowances for repatriates. The legal basis for repatriation hinged on the February 1945 Yalta agreement between the Allied powers, which sanctioned the Soviet position that all prisoners of war or displaced persons identified as citizens of the USSR and liberated by Allied forces were to be returned to the Soviet Union “regardless of his [sic] personal wishes.”Footnote 28 While the Yalta agreement did not contain any reference to the use of force in the repatriation of Soviet prisoners of war or civilians, in April 1945 the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force under General Dwight D. Eisenhower adopted a principle that acknowledged the use of force during repatriation as legitimate.Footnote 29 In order to implement the Yalta agreement, in August 1945 both the US and British militaries came to define Soviet citizens based on the following criteria: geographical-temporal, self-identification, and claims made by Soviet repatriation representatives. Those who either lived within the borders of the Soviet Union before September 1, 1939 or self-identified as Soviet citizens or were claimed as such by the Soviet authorities were regarded as Soviet citizens. Disputes, however, for example against Soviet claims and often made on the basis of nationality, were referred to the authorities in charge of the respective military zones.Footnote 30

From May to November 1945, a total of 2,272,000 Soviet citizens in the Allied zone were handed over by American and British soldiers to Soviet authorities.Footnote 31 Subjected to discrimination and mass purges by the Stalinist regime in their homeland, the USSR's national minorities in Europe—such as Latvians, Estonians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians—were repatriated in “disproportionately large numbers” and felt especially vulnerable.Footnote 32 In some cases, fear of repatriation led to suicides and escape attempts from the camps.Footnote 33 This fear was exacerbated by the fact that the western and southern parts of the USSR, where many of these groups had lived, were occupied by the German Army during the war, which made repatriates subject to accusations of disloyalty or collaboration.

As Soviet-American relations deteriorated, on December 20, 1945 the American State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee decided that repatriation of Soviet civilians was not mandatory, which came after the ban on the use of force in repatriating military collaborators and ex-prisoners of war on September 4, 1945.Footnote 34 With the onset of tensions between the Soviets and the west—and because most Soviet citizens had already been returned—the number of repatriates began to fall from the beginning of 1946. However, DPs remained afraid of repatriation throughout their time in the camps: Wyman writes that “[repatriation] kept rising to the surface just when DP life seemed to be improving, tearing at the facade of cheerful camp existence, a continuing source of fear and tension.”Footnote 35

Many of the estimated 5,000 to 7,000 Kalmyks in Germany and environs at war's end were repatriated to the Soviet Union. Zemskov gives the total number of Kalmyk repatriates as 6,405 as of March 1, 1946: 2,318 civilians and 4,087 soldiers.Footnote 36 Maksimov reports that 6,442 Kalmyks were repatriated by July 1949, an increase of only 37 persons from Zemskov's number.Footnote 37 These numbers are very high, given that the total Kalmyk population in Europe could not have been much more than 7,000 based on the estimated size of the first and second waves. However, the idea that the majority of surviving Kalmyks in post-war Europe were repatriated to the Soviet Union is partially corroborated by the number of Kalmyk DPs in Germany and Austria in September 1951, which stood at 847 according to representatives of the Brethren Church.Footnote 38

Some Kalmyk repatriates, presumably civilians, passed first through filtration camps and were subsequently sent either to Siberia to join their families in exile or were transported to labor camps.Footnote 39 After an amnesty issued by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet on September 17, 1955, Kalmyks in labor camps were released to join their families in their places of deportation in Siberia, the Far East, Far North, and Central Asia.Footnote 40 The fate of the rest is unknown.

The experiences of Kalmyk repatriates passing through filtration camps echoed the experiences of wider Soviet citizenry; as Baron writes: “The filtration procedure served to reconstitute postwar Stalinist society by inculcating in its subjects the officially sanctioned set of values, normative modes of self-identification and self-presentation and a reinforced awareness of their individual obligations in relation to the state.”Footnote 41 Soviet repatriates consciously developed new identities and loyalties to the Soviet state as an adaptation strategy.Footnote 42 Former Soviet citizens who managed to avoid repatriation also developed similar strategies during DP screenings and in the camps. Presenting themselves as victims of Nazism and later of communism, these individuals re-adjusted their stories and adopted identities to fit the emerging western political order opposed to the Soviet bloc. The next section explores these strategies among Kalmyk DPs.

Kalmyk DPs and the Narration of Displacement

Those DPs who remained in western Europe once repatriation was curtailed initially came under the administrative aegis of the UNRRA and the US Army in the American sector of post-war Germany. Files from the International Tracing Service provide a window into how personal stories and histories evolved during the period of displacement, in an attempt to avoid repatriation and to craft narratives acceptable to the international community in managing the camps and determining resettlement. The majority of ITS files used in this study contain two or three main forms: (1) Records of US Army questionnaires (T/USA forms) completed in the DP camps in the US zone in Germany in 1946–47; (2) International Refugee Organization Care and Maintenance forms (IRO CM/1), completed in assembly centers in the US zone in Germany, as well as in Italy and Austria, in 1947–49 (mainly 1948); and (3) IRO Resettlement Registration Forms completed in DP Camps in 1949–51. Each type of form is a four-page document, which was filled out on both sides. Seen as standardized compulsory screening questionnaires, IRO forms included biographical information on adults only (“heads of families,” their spouses and children), including their pre-war and wartime activities and places of residence for the last twelve years. As most IRO interviews with Kalmyks started in 1948, this chronology included the period from 1936 to the date when the form was completed. The timeline on the T/USA forms starts from September 1, 1939. Similar in terms of structure, IRO forms were used mainly to assess the credibility of applicants’ stories and whether they and their family members were eligible for IRO support and resettlement. Those DPs with an IRO Resettlement Registration Form in their files were those whose narratives changed over time; such emendations—as discussed in more detail below—commonly included places of residence, activities before the war, date and place of birth, and nationality.

These forms provide a picture of how individuals negotiated the institutional structures that emerged around the management of displaced persons in post-war Europe. Contra some recent work on DPs that foregrounds elite and top-down narratives, our approach aims to recover the narratives and stories told by individual DPs—echoing the bottom-up approach that characterized the earliest work on the DP question.Footnote 43 However, these life histories are filtered through the structure of forms used by the US Army and later the International Refugee Organization, and dependent on the choices made not only by the DPs but also by their interviewers. The camps and their regimes emerged as a system of governance and organization; through processes such as documentation and segregation of nationalities, “the modern, postwar refugee emerged as a knowable, nameable figure and as an object of social-scientific knowledge.”Footnote 44 These caveats notwithstanding, with this paper we aim to recover another part of the DP story and provide an interpretation of how life histories changed depending on circumstances both for individuals and in the wider geopolitical frame.

In July 1947, the IRO took over the responsibilities of the UNRRA. Under both organizations, “[t]he “care and maintenance” of displaced persons democratized the organization of refugee welfare but also widened the scope of humanitarian aid.”Footnote 45 Refugees were now supposed to learn new trades or be employed if they wished to be resettled. The definition of “displaced person” or “refugee” was broadened to include political refugees, which included a person “unable or unwilling to avail himself of the protection of the Government of his country of nationality or former nationality.”Footnote 46 Previously defined as a “stateless” person, who is unable to return to the country of their nationality, the category of refugee after April 1946 came to include those unwilling to accept protection from their national government, which gave such individuals agency and a choice to “sever their belonging with a state and change their nationality.”Footnote 47 This new legal interpretation gave Kalmyk DPs, who saw themselves as either stateless or Yugoslavian, the opportunity to express their wishes—although with some inconsistency—within a framework that was acknowledged by the international community as legitimate.

Seen in this legal framework, DPs as political refugees were now also victims of “human rights violations [who were] entitled to international protection.”Footnote 48 Since this new category encompassed mainly refugees from communist countries, it prompted the Soviet Union to not sign the IRO Constitution.Footnote 49 This decision played into the hands of Kalmyks, however, who could now claim political refugee status and be protected from repatriation, irrespective of their wave or history of immigration. In turn, Kalmyk DPs felt encouraged to make their case as strongly as possible when the IRO started to interview a subset of Kalmyk DPs in 1948. Notes from these interviews were recorded on the IRO Care and Maintenance forms (CM/1) by eligibility officers regarding DPs’ biography and personality. In terms of the life stories related, DPs offered similar narratives to those that Kalmyks told to the US Army in 1946. Balint suggests that CM/1 forms and DP records more broadly are often unreliable; “The answers DPs gave to the authorities, and the testimonies and petitions they wrote, were crafted for a certain purpose and a specific audience.”Footnote 50

Kalmyks in the American Zone and DP Camps

Before the end of the war, in hope of avoiding arrest, many Soviet refugees fled to Bavaria, expecting it to be occupied by the western Allies. A contingent of first-wave Kalmyks arrived in Schongau, Bavaria in February 1945 by train from Berlin; in late May 1945 second-wave Kalmyks joined them there.Footnote 51 This transport was organized by the so-called Kalmyk National Committee, based in Berlin and headed by Shamba Balinov, himself a first wave émigré. The Committee was founded in 1943 under the auspices of Ostministerium, the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territory, which also supported similar Turkestani and Caucasian committees. During the war, its tasks included “the freeing of [Kalmyk] osterbeiters from compulsory labor and an effort to get them status equal to that of the other workers [e.g. western Europeans],” “providing clothing and shows [sic, shoes] for our refugees, mostly through pull and personal connections,” and generally assisting Kalmyk POWs.Footnote 52

The first round of systematic screenings in the American occupation zone was carried out jointly by the US Army and UNRRA between June 1946 and July 1947. By mid-1946, while repatriation rates slowed, screening procedures were increasingly aimed at identifying collaborators and war criminals, with the practical aim of reducing the western burden of DP support.Footnote 53 Broadly speaking, first-wave Kalmyks, particularly those born in Europe, did not view the Soviet Union as their home. Born in tsarist Russia and having spent more than two decades in Europe, the older generation also had difficulty identifying with what they termed on their IRO CM/1 forms “Bolshevik Russia.” Those of the second wave opposed repatriation for other reasons, including the group's mass deportation to Siberia in 1943. In the main, Kalmyks tried either to prove legally their non-Soviet status (in the case of the first wave) or to strategically contest their citizenship status (in the case of the second wave).

Preliminary work on the case files identified consistent and inconsistent narratives among Kalmyk DPs, as the questionnaires ask those interviewed to recount their personal histories from the interwar period through the end of World War II. Did an individual's story change from when they were first interviewed by the US Army in 1946 to a second or third round of interviews by the IRO (mainly 1948 and/or 1951)? Of the 441 Kalmyk adults with records in the ITS archive, 175 narratives were inconsistent, 228 consistent, and 38 undetermined due to lack of relevant T/USA or IRO documents.Footnote 54 There are a number of files that lack both T/USA and IRO forms, but instead contain only medical documents. This absence is due to a range of reasons. Some refugees were too old, others too young; some died in the DP camps. Still others who are mentioned in the documents lack their own unique records of their migration history. That more than half of the narratives are consistent reflects the fact that the majority of DPs who initially avoided repatriation were part of the first wave of emigration, meaning that these individuals did not have to invent stories and could more easily maintain their original narratives throughout their time in the camps.Footnote 55

Legibility and Truth: Strategies for Avoiding Repatriation

Below, we explore a set of strategies that emerge from a close reading of the narratives that Kalmyk DPs provided to camp administrators and interviewers. Post-war Europe was a space, as Tara Zahra notes, of “confused identities.”Footnote 56 This formulation was particularly apposite to the Kalmyks, not least because of the ever-changing legal definitions and new rights that offered new opportunities to construct or reconstruct one's identity to fit the rapidly changing times. While this gave DPs some optimism, it also created uncertainty and fear that the situation could quickly reverse. Many American soldiers who processed DPs were “on the verge of demobilization, poorly trained and seldom able to understand Slavic languages, [and] struggled to grasp Eastern European complexities.”Footnote 57 DPs reinvented identities and took advantage of the “linguistic and geographic ignorance of Allied GIs.”Footnote 58 To convince their interviewers that they had left the Soviet Union before September 1, 1939 (which would have exempted them from the category of Soviet citizen), Kalmyks of the second wave resorted to claiming to have arrived in Europe in 1920 or to being born in emigration by amending their dates or places of birth. All expressed their wish not to be returned to their “former place of residence” on grounds of being stateless (bespodannii) or as holders of a Nansen passport, which gave them the right to apply for protected status as displaced persons.Footnote 59 In their T/USA forms completed in 1946–47, most Kalmyk refugees alleged to have held a Nansen passport or stamps, often without providing a physical copy. A typical set of reasons for not having these documents was given, such as “confiscated by the Germans” or “lost during an air raid.”

Changes to dates of birth to bring biographies in line with the necessary timeline for DPs were widespread. Many Kalmyks had their date of birth registered as May 15 while increasing their age—in one extreme case by twenty-one years.Footnote 60 Other strategies of dissembling included stating Mongolia, Tibet, or Manchukuo as place of birth or residence prior to displacement. Mongolian toponyms that figure in narratives include Khovdo, Altn Bulug, Khalkhin-Gol, Buyntyumn, Bayan-Tyulgi, and Ulasta (perhaps Uliastai), while there is only one Tibetan toponym—Lhasa. In cases where Mongolia or Tibet were indicated as place of birth, stories were later found to be inconsistent.

Kenze Adunov is an example of changing both date of birth and nationality. His T/USA form stated that he was born in 1892 in “Ulast,” Mongolia. Later in 1948, however, his birthdate, place of residence before the war, and ethnicity were changed to “1913,” “kolkhoz in Ketchenery, USSR,” and “Kalmook,” respectively. Kalmyks tried to pass as Mongolian nationals presumably because they shared with Mongolians the same language, religion, and phenotype. It is possible that they had learned about Mongolia from Kalmyks who had been there (a number of Kalmyk Bolsheviks were stationed in Mongolia following the People's Revolution of 1921, which the Soviet government assisted). Buddhist Kalmyks likely heard about Tibet from their monks, some of whom studied in monasteries there.

Shared Stories, Repetition, and Forgeries

An important contextual element in the negotiation of DP status was the sharing of stories among the Kalmyks in the camps. Striking similarities in Kalmyks’ stories from 1946 imply that a standard narrative about life in pre-war Europe widely circulated among the Kalmyk community across the first and second waves. The consistency and repetition hints at a concerted effort to craft a narrative acceptable to western governments and camp administrators despite an individual's actual experience during and prior to the war. The fact that the IRO interview teams often included young and middle-aged Kalmyks who commonly had university-level education and were able to speak multiple languages seems to have helped in the cultivation and reproduction of consistent and rather uniform narratives.Footnote 61

In our database we identified repeating information concerning certain addresses, places of birth and residence, dates of birth, and occupations provided by Kalmyk DPs on their T/USA forms. These addresses include street names in Belgrade such as Buddistichka (Budistička) and Uchitelska (Učiteljska); common settlement names include Debeljača or Mali Mokri Lug in Belgrade, with some names distorted or miswritten that we could not find on the map. Information on occupations corresponded to the settlements that DPs provided in their forms. For example, those who alleged to have been from Belgrade and Sofia most commonly indicated their occupations as coachmen, tailors, seamstresses, or farm workers.

Another technique that the DPs used in distancing themselves from the Soviets was completing their T/USA forms in foreign languages (in Serbian, for example) or signing their forms in Old Kalmyk or presumably Tibetan scripts (this was common among DPs who claimed to have been born in Mongolia or Tibet, or among Buddhist priests). This may have raised some suspicions on the part of the interviewers. In one documented case the interviewer asked a Kalmyk man named Andrei Burlakov whether he could speak Serbian and whether he knew any streets in Belgrade. Getting nowhere with his inquiry, the interviewer reached the conclusion that Burlakov might not be a Nansen person, noting that “He can't say a single word in Yugoslavian language, doesn't know any street in Belgrade, where he says he was living from 1936 to 1944.”Footnote 62

All these emendations were made against the backdrop of the extensive forgery of personal documents, where it was difficult to establish the identities of displaced individuals. Further complicating the situation was the tacit support that DPs received from camp administrators and NGOs in acquiring fakes; Jayne Persian writes that “[t]he underground industry for false documents consisted of individual entrepreneurs as well as emigrant institutions such as the Tolstoy Foundation. DP employees of UNRRA were also involved.”Footnote 63 By 1948, IRO interviewers more frequently verified Nansen passports—and hence the “non-Soviet identity” of their holders—noting such confirmations on CM/1 forms.

The screening procedure continued through 1951. Ever on the alert, Kalmyks kept each other updated on the status of DPs as practices changed—or remained the same. In the camps, the Kalmyk newspaper Mana Zyang reiterated the words of General Joseph McNarney, commander of the United States forces in Europe, that no DP could be forcefully repatriated except for the following categories of individuals: “persons who had worked for the Nazi regime, war criminals, quislings, persons convicted of certain crimes, persons who had served in the German army and those who are still on the Soviet Army list.”Footnote 64 The IRO itself acknowledged the continuing fear of repatriation; though there were no “objective grounds” for such concerns, an internal manual attributed them to the refugees’ distrust towards the IRO and their own governments.Footnote 65

Avoidance, Patronage, Marriage

Another tactic among Kalmyks of the second wave was to avoid DP camps altogether.Footnote 66 There are a number of individuals without a T/USA form, implying that they must have avoided the 1946–47 screenings in camps only to appear in the camps in the period between 1948 and 1951, when they completed IRO resettlement forms.Footnote 67 While the number of Kalmyks residing outside refugee centers—so-called “free-livers”—cannot be confirmed based on our analysis, what is known is that living in the camps was not mandatory and DPs were free to move in and out. The generally lax travel regulations were often violated by Kalmyks especially in camps located close to urban centers such as Munich.Footnote 68

Not all Kalmyks ended up in DP camps in Germany, as some remained in other European countries and avoided being screened in refugee centers. For example, in France prior to the war Kalmyks had worked in the Lorraine region's mines, at shipyards and foundries in the Nantes region, and at the port of La Rochelle. In the 1930s they moved to metallurgy and mines in the northeast of the Massif Central (including Paray-le-Monial, Moulins, Vichy, Montceau-les-Mines, and Le Crousot). With the decline of metallurgy in the Lyon region, Kalmyks moved to the silk industry in Décines. From 1945, Kalmyks became more concentrated in the Paris suburbs.Footnote 69

That said, many such Kalmyks later joined their compatriots in the DP camps in the hope of resettling with them in new countries. Vasilii Zandanov, for example, was registered with the IRO only in July 1951 as he was “busy working” for a dredging firm in Regensburg, Germany. A standard story, Vasilii alleged that he was a White Army soldier who left Russia with Wrangel in 1920. Before being forcefully transported to work in Germany in 1941, he lived in Belgrade as a Nansen citizen. After the war, in 1947, he married a Yugoslav woman. Finding Vasilii's story “credible,” the IRO interviewer classified him eligible for IRO care.Footnote 70 While we cannot ascertain Vasilii's story, his case is indicative of many other Kalmyks, who had avoided screening by living outside the DP camp system and who turned up for the final screening just before the Kalmyks were resettled to the US.

Another strategy in this vein was for second-wave immigrants to pair with other Kalmyks who were part of the first wave and had support networks due to their pre-war European experience. One such case is Ivan Saspinov, who in his Declaration in lieu of an oath in May 1951 admitted to appropriating the surname of Achremov, an old Kalmyk emigrant family whom he had previously met in DP Camp Altenstadt in 1945. By inventing a new genealogy for himself, Ivan claimed that he lived in Yugoslavia before the war and was a stateless person. Along with his Declaration Ivan offered his ‘Life history,’ which provides detailed information on how he ended up in Germany:

In March, 1942 I was called for Military Service to the Red Army and I served with it till July, 1942. On the 4th of July, 1942 on the front of Kursk I was taken by Germans prisoner of war. Since July, 1942 till November, 1943 I was in POW-camps at Cherson and Nikolajew in Russia. In November, 1943 I was deported to Vienna, Austria, where I worked as a prisoner of war until the liberation by the British Army. In May, 1945 after the liberation I went to Germany, where I found in the Refugee Camp Altenstadt near Schongau the old Kalmook emigrants who escaped from other countries.Footnote 71

Outside the camps Kalmyk men not infrequently married women of non-Kalmyk (including German, Polish, and Russian) descent, something which also occurred throughout the interwar period in Europe. These marriages were often strategic decisions for both sides involved. For Kalmyk men—and all mixed marriages in our database are men—marriage increased their chances of resettlement, since families were regarded as “economic units” by destination countries.Footnote 72 Our analysis of case files shows that few Kalmyk men were single, the majority of whom were either priests or old men. Widows or divorcees of marriage age for both sexes tended to remarry. Marriages of Kalmyk men—especially of the second wave—to foreign women can also be explained by the demographic fact that the Kalmyk male population in the camps outnumbered that of the female population by about 100, which led men to seek partners outside their community.Footnote 73 Between the ages of 41 and 60, there were twice as many Kalmyk men as women (ninety-three to forty-nine).Footnote 74

As mentioned, these marriages had mutual benefit. With its economy destroyed and overcrowded with refugees fleeing violence in eastern Europe, post-war Germany was not a safe place, especially for single women. Many women who married Kalmyks were people displaced by war and often afflicted with health problems such as venereal disease. In the case of ethnic German wives, although they were not eligible for DP camp care (which meant that they had to live outside the camps), they were eligible for resettlement, which was an attractive prospect for many as German nationals on their own were barred from emigration. As noted on Walburga Chapurtinov's CM/1 form, “German wife of DP husband in possession of new DP Identity card.…Within the mandate for resettlement with husband together only.”Footnote 75 By marrying Kalmyk DPs, these women presumably hoped to leave Germany and build a new life elsewhere. Such marriages most commonly took place after the war, between 1946 and 1950. Of course, we should not dismiss the possibility that such marriages also had an emotional element.

Though the Kalmyks were a close-knit community, with many families related to one another, there were some orphans. These children often maintained that they had no relatives; in other cases, they chose not to join their relatives in the belief that as orphans they stood a better chance of resettlement or that their applications would be processed faster. In fact, children faced the same set of challenges as adults. The case of the brothers Nikolai and Alexander Goripov exemplifies this. The brothers were born in Kuteinikovskaya stanitsa, Russia, in 1932 and 1937 respectively, and their parents died either on the way to or once in Germany.Footnote 76 Like many Kalmyks of the second wave, however, the brothers alleged in their 1948 IRO interview that they were born in Europe and that their parents were White Army refugees who had fled Russia in 1920 for Belgrade. They also said that their parents both died in Belgrade in 1944. Despite having two uncles among the DP population, the brothers did not join their relatives and instead lived in children centers. Meanwhile, the IRO's continuous attempts at arranging the brothers’ emigration to a number of countries, including the Netherlands, Norway, Australia, Canada, and the US, proved to be unsuccessful “because of their nationality—Calmooks [sic].”Footnote 77 Eventually, the brothers immigrated to the United States in 1952 with their uncle's family.

In traditional Kalmyk society, Buddhist priests constituted a separate social class. There were seventeen priests in the DP camps, fourteen of whom were refugees from the Soviet Union who came with the second wave.Footnote 78 To avoid repatriation, all priests maintained that they were White Army refugees from the 1920s. Most of the priests of the second wave also had a history of persecution in the Soviet Union during anti-religious campaigns, having spent time in labor camps, mainly during the second half of the 1930s.Footnote 79 In DP camps in Germany, many of them continued to practice their religion, receiving acknowledgement and material support from the community, which was how laity and the clergy interacted in a traditional setting (upon resettlement in the US, these priests were instrumental in perpetuating religion and traditions among the diaspora).

Redefining the Alien Body

Among the DP populations, the Kalmyks stood out for their Asian ethnicity, which rendered their status not only inferior in relation to other displaced groups but also negatively affected their resettlement prospects. For example, in 1950 the IRO failed to negotiate the Kalmyks’ resettlement with the government of Paraguay.Footnote 80 A plan between the Paraguayan government and the IRO concerning Kalmyk resettlement was eventually dropped, despite the fact that the IRO had allocated funds for it.Footnote 81 Apart from Paraguay, the Kalmyks were considered for resettlement to a number of other locations, including Argentina, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Canada, Australia, Alaska, Madagascar, Siam, Ceylon, and French Morocco, all of which were unsuccessful. Although the easiest path for the Kalmyks would have been to stay in Europe and settle there, this option also proved to be problematic. Several Kalmyks who went to France and Belgium found living conditions there unsatisfactory and work inconsistent, which stopped potentially larger migration to these countries. Where DPs were asked to indicate their preferred resettlement destination on CM/1 forms, the United States was commonly a top choice; out of 441 Kalmyk adults with individual records in our database, 195 indicated on their CM/1 forms the US as either their first or second choice for resettlement. But this also had its hurdles due to the 1940 US Nationality Act, Section 303, which limited the right to naturalization “only to white persons, persons of African nativity or descent, and descendants of races indigenous to the Western Hemisphere,” thus excluding the Kalmyks.Footnote 82

For Kalmyk DPs, the question of race was ultimately decided in mid-1951, when Dorzha and Samsona Remilev had their appeal to be classified as European upheld. Members of the first emigration wave, the Remilevs were Russian speakers of the Buzava group (Don Kalmyks). On behalf of the Remilevs, the counsel for the IRO carried out research on the Kalmyks’ “race,” their biological origins, history, and language. Blood tests showed that Samsona was 50% Kalmyk and Dorzha 75% Kalmyk.Footnote 83 This “biological proof” of their non-Asianness was corroborated by the argument that the Don Kalmyks had been assimilated into European Russian culture by virtue of having lived in southwest Russia for more than 300 years, during which time they had intermarried with Russians, learned the language, and sedentarized. A dialect of the Mongolian language, Kalmyk was also creatively reclassified as part of the Finno-Ugric language family. Based on these “facts,” the Remilevs argued that the Kalmyks should be considered “whiter” than Afghans, Syrians, and non-European Arabs, who were eligible for naturalization in the US. The case seesawed through the courts in the first half of 1951 and was eventually decided for the Remilevs with Deputy US Attorney General Peyton Ford's intervention. With this decision, the Kalmyks were reclassified from alien, Asian bodies into a European people. It was arguably the first case in modern history when an Asian population was legally transformed into a different race without changing their phenotype.

This reclassification had repercussions for the final 1951 IRO interviews when, in anticipation of being resettled in the US, Kalmyk DPs fully revealed the scale of the tactics discussed above. Many Kalmyks, whose stories were inconsistent in their previous documents, made a so-called “Statement in lieu of an oath” in which they confessed to giving false information about their biographies in order to avoid “forced repatriation to the USSR.” Signed by the applicant and two witnesses (usually both Kalmyk) and notarized by an IRO Legal Counsellor, these statements resemble an oath pledging to provide truthful information on one's legal status, nationality, and residence before the war. These statements are strikingly similar; here is an example: “I, Mr. Narmajew Alexi, herewith state that having been afraid of forced repatriation to the USSR I have given false information concerning my biographies. Now wishing to emigrate to the United States of America, I don't want to deceive American authorities and desire to tell truth. My nationality is USSR, and not Nansen as I mentioned before in all my DP documents. From 1939 till 27.12.1942 I was living in Altn-Bulug, USSR, and not in Belgrad [sic] Yugoslavia, as I mentioned it before in all my DP documents.”Footnote 84

Legibility as an analytic refers to how states and other actors in the international system arrange populations to facilitate functions such as taxation, conscription, or resettlement.Footnote 85 States displace populations, but also make legible those displaced. Individuals respond to these processes with their own set of strategies that eschew a rigid “truth-fiction” binary. Individuals can accede to or challenge the attempts of states and international actors to make them legible through such arrangements or categories. The success of the Kalmyks in distancing themselves from the category of Soviet citizen and making themselves legible to the international community is recorded in the narrations found in the ITS documents.

Fearful of repatriation to the Soviet Union, where the best possible outcome that individual Kalmyks could have hoped for was exile, Kalmyk DPs in post-war Europe deployed a range of strategies to stay on in the camps managed by the western powers, including narration and performance at IRO interviews, exemption, marriage, and the deployment of group-specific social and cultural networks. The reception of their narratives by camp authorities and interviewers evolved along with the changing geopolitical environment of the time. From 1946 onwards, screening procedures were conducted in the spirit of humanitarianism more as inquiries of truth telling and recording DPs’ narratives than as exercises in lie detection. Some transcripts by IRO interviewers include comments about the Kalmyks’ sincerity: “He is a very simple man and his story is believable. Too old for being in Army. No collaborator;”Footnote 86 and “No documentary proof but story plausible. Very simple person, displaced to Germany as POW in 1943.”Footnote 87 These comments convey positive evaluation, based mainly on intuition; in this context, truth is not a given, but rather is the product of the reaction and interpretation of the interviewer, who does not operate in a political vacuum but is always embedded in a geopolitical environment.

On the question of resettlement, Kalmyks were marginalized because of their racial, national, and historical background, not to mention their small numbers. This resulted in their applications for resettlement being consistently denied by immigrant-receiving countries. This dilemma could be resolved only through the racial reclassification of the Kalmyks as “European” by US authorities. Reclassification was key to the extension of the right to resettlement to the Kalmyks, and allowed the group access to humanitarian treatment in the community of nation-states that was previously denied. This legal decision was the culmination of the strategies that Kalmyk DPs employed to make themselves legible in certain ways to camp administrators, soldiers, NGO workers, and the international community more broadly during their time in the DP camps.

As the age of displacement evolved into an age of migration, this decision should be seen as a point of convergence between the moral ideals enshrined in the 1951 Geneva Convention (which promoted humanitarianism limited in scope to the victims of events occurring before January 1, 1951), the emergent geopolitics of the cold war, and the material interests of the United States in acquiring labor for its post-war economic development.Footnote 88 The aftermath of World War II was one such critical moment for the Allied forces when they had to re-evaluate many concepts, including that of legibility against the backdrop of a fast-changing international ideological climate. The decisions made by the international community at all levels—from interviewing US Army officers to international organizations to the US Attorney General's office—concerning the categorization, management, and resettlement of DPs generated a unique set of responses by Kalmyk DPs. It was in this context that racial reclassification was possible, and the Kalmyks’ experience with displacement came to a close.

Footnotes

Prior versions of this paper were presented at the conference “A Century of Movement: Russian Culture and Global Community Since 1917” at the University of North Carolina (2017), the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers (2019), and the Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit at the University of Cambridge (2019). The authors would like to acknowledge support and feedback from the following people during the course of this project: Elizabeth Anthony, Valeriy Badmaev, Melissa Chakars, David Cooper, Joshua and Diana Cutler, Mackenzie Holland, Caroline Humphrey, Bill Kostlevy, Sanj Altan and Erdne Kuldinow, Joseph Lenkart, Harriet Murav, Daniel Newman, Stephen Norris, Erdne Ombadykow, Georgina Ramsay, Elena Remilev, Svetlana Rukhelman, Daniel Scarborough, Jackie Shearman, Anatol Shmelev, Baasanjav Terbish, and three anonymous reviewers for Slavic Review. All remaining errors are the authors’.

References

1. On population movement in Russia and the Soviet Union in the late imperial period and onwards, see Gatrell, Peter, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War I (Bloomington, 2005)Google Scholar; Siegelbaum, Lewis H. and Moch, Leslie Page, Broad Is My Native Land: Repertoires and Regimes of Migration in Russia’s Twentieth Century (Ithaca, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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6. The numbers cited here are given in Gerard Daniel Cohen, In War’s Wake: Europe’s Displaced Persons in the Postwar Order (New York, 2011), 107, 110. See also Wyman, DPs, 2, who gives the same number for the United States and a figure of 158,000 for the number of DPs resettled in Canada.

7. Case A-7841784, 5. The eligibility decision and legal arguments that preceded this decision are detailed at United States Department of Justice, Administrative Decisions Under Immigration & Nationality Laws, Volume 4, February 1950 to January 1953 (Washington D.C., 1954), 275–86, available online at: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015047779650&view=1up&seq=5 (accessed May 2, 2020).

8. After the court decision reclassifying the Kalmyks, the Church World Service and the Tolstoy Foundation had joint responsibility for resettling the group on behalf of the International Refugee Organization (IRO); see Jessica Johnson, “The Labor of Refuge: Kalmyk Displaced Persons, the 1948 Displaced Persons Act, and the Origins of United States Refugee Resettlement,” (PhD diss., Brown University, 2013), 50–51. The CWS further delegated the resettlement of the Kalmyks in the US to the Brethren Service Commission, a social service of the Brethren Church; see J. Kenneth Kreider, A Cup of Cold Water: The Story of the Brethren Service (Elgin, IL, 2001), 104–06. The last three organizations listed here were involved in successfully lobbying the Kalmyk case to the IRO at the request of the Kalmyk DP community leadership.

9. “Kalmuk Arrivals,” Brethren Historical Library and Archive (hereafter, BHLA), “Kalmuck Refugees,” Series 4/1/6, Box 1, Folder 2: Arrivals.

10. Cohen, In War’s Wake; Holian, Anna, Between National Socialism and Soviet Communism: Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany (Ann Arbor, 2009)Google Scholar; and Wyman, DPs. For a synthesis of the recent scholarship, see Ballinger, Pamela, “Impossible Returns, Enduring Legacies: Recent Historiography of Displacement and the Reconstruction of Europe after World War II,” Contemporary European History 22, no. 1 (February 2013): 127–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11. The digital copy of the ITS archive accessed for this research is held by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (hereafter, USHMM) and governed by US privacy laws, meaning names can be used with proper citation. In the interests of reproducibility and transparency, we have maintained all original names when citing the ITS archive in this paper.

12. The ITS archive was established by the Allies after the end of the war in 1945. It was initially run by UNRRA and was taken over by IRO in 1948. From 1955, the archive was administered by the Red Cross and was only opened to researchers and the general public in 2007 after a campaign for access by the USHMM and others. Since 2012, the archive has been jointly owned by the governments of Germany and eleven other countries. The digitization of the archive’s thirty million original documents is still in progress. According to Dan Stone, 85% of the documents have been digitized (its collections are available online at: “Arolsen Archives,” https://collections.arolsen-archives.org/en/search/); see Dan Stone, “The Memory of the Archive: The International Tracing Service and the Construction of the Past as History,” Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust 31, no. 2 (May 2017): 69–88. For a detailed guide to the ITS archive with an emphasis on its use in Holocaust research, see Suzanne Brown-Fleming, Nazi Persecution and Postwar Repercussions: The International Tracing Service Archive and Holocaust Research (Lanham, MD, 2016).

13. Utash Ochirov, Kalmykia v period grazhdanskoi voiny (1917–1920 gg.) (Elista, Russia, 2006), 29; Elena Remilev, Oirat-Mongoly. Obzor istorii evropeyskikh kalmykov (Bingen-Büdesheim, Germany, 2010), 339–41.

14. Michael Khodarkovsky, Where Two Worlds Met: The Russian State and the Kalmyk Nomads, 1600–1771 (Ithaca, 1992).

15. On the ethnic composition of the Don Kalmyks, see Praskovia Alekseeva and Arash Bormanshinov, Ob etnicheskom sostave donskikh kalmykov (Elista, 1999).

16. Kim Shovunov, Kalmyki v sostave rossiiskogo kazachestva (Elista, 1992), 100–8.

17. Toma Milenkovic, Kalmici u Srbiji, 1920–1944 (Belgrade, 1998).

18. Ivan Borisenko and Andrey Goryaev, Ocherki istorii kalmytskoi emigratsii (Elista, 1998), 46. The authors refer to an excerpt from an interview with I.B. Mikhalinov, which was initially published in the Far Eastern newspaper Slovo in its October issue, no. 2364 (the year is unknown, presumably 1935) and later reprinted in the Kalmyk émigré journal Kovylnye Volny. According to Mikhalinov, out of 3,000 Don Kalmyks who evacuated from Crimea to Constantinople, 2,000 returned to Russia. See “K Voprosu o Pereselenii v Mandzhuriiu,” Kovylnye Volny 12 (February 1936), 19–20. Georgij Sanji Zagadinow Collection of Kalmyk Materials (1834–1999), Ms. Coll. 1318, Box 5, Folder 12: Unidentified Russian Publications, circa 1930s, University of Pennsylvania: Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts.

19. Fred Adelman, “Kalmyk Cultural Renewal,” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1960).

20. One such man is Andrei Burlakov who, according to his 1946 T/USA and 1948 IRO forms, emigrated with the White Army in 1920 and was among those who returned from Constantinople to Russia in 1922 where he worked on a kolkhoz in Chonos, in a coal mine in Karaganda, and later was a soldier until he was captured by the Germans in June 1943; T/USA form for Andrei Burlakov, July 25, 1946, 3.2.1.1/78978661#1–2/ITS Digital Archive, USHMM; IRO “Case of family data” for Andrei Burlakov, January 30, 1948, 3.2.1.1/78978663#1/ITS Digital Archive, USHMM. His story is corroborated in the BHLA, which provides a detailed account of Andrei’s return to the Soviet Union; BHLA, “Donald F. Durnbaugh Papers (1927–2005),” Series 18/, Box 8, Folder 23: Kalmuck Narrative Reports.

21. Malcolm J. Proudfoot, European Refugees: 1939–1952. A Study in Forced Population Movement (Evanston, 1956), 38. Proudfoot cites Joseph Schechtman, European Population Transfers: 1939–1945 (New York, 1946), 206–25; Appendix 1.

22. Vlasovites were members of the Russian Liberation Army (ROA, Russkaia osvoboditel΄naia armiia) led by the Soviet general Andrei Andreievich Vlasov, a Soviet general captured during the siege of Leningrad who subsequently defected to the German side. Catherine Andreyev, Vlasov and the Russian Liberation Movement: Soviet Reality and Émigré Theories (New York, 1989).

23. Alexander Statiev, for example, cites a Kalmyk Communist Party report that puts the number of Corps members at 1,500, including former Cossacks and members of several ethnic minorities. By the time the Corps left Kalmykia it “numbered about 3,000 men.” See Alexander Statiev, “The Nature of Anti-Soviet Armed Resistance, 1942–44: The North Caucasus, the Kalmyk Autonomous Republic, and Crimea,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 6, no. 2 (March 2005): 285–318, 304. Mark Elliott, Pawns of Yalta, 15, gives the 5,000 figure. Nekrich also discusses the size of the Kalmyk Cavalry Corps. Citing Hoffmann and Kichikov, he puts the number of Kalmyk Corps personnel at approximately 3,000 men after the German retreat from Kalmykia; in July 1944, there were 2,917 rank-and-file soldiers, 374 non-commissioned officers, and 147 officers of Kalmyk nationality in the Corps. See Nekrich, The Punished Peoples, 77; Joachim Hoffmann, Deutsche und Kalmyken: 1942 bis 1945 (Freiburg, Germany, 1974), 187–88; Mergen Kichikov, “Sovetskaia Kalmykia v Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voine 1941–1945 godov,” (PhD diss., Leningrad State University imeni A.A. Zhdanov, 1972), 241.

24. Elza-Bair Guchinova, Ulitsa “Kalmuk Road”: Istoriia, kul΄tura i identichnosti kalmytskoi obschiny SShA (St. Petersburg, 2004). According to Arbakov, former chief of staff of the Kalmyk Corps, only a few men managed to escape; see Arbakov’s story in Guchinova, Ulitsa “Kalmuk Road,” 76–83.

25. See Petr Bakaev, “O demographii tragedii,” in Konstantin Maksimov and Nina Ochirova, eds., Politicheskie repressii v Kalmykii v 20–40e gg. 20 veka (Elista, 2003), 108–9. On the deportation of the Kalmyks more generally, see Nekrich, The Punished Peoples; Pavel Polian, Against Their Will: The History and Geography of Forced Migrations in the USSR (Budapest, 2004); Vladimir Ubushaev, Kalmyki: Vyselenie i vozvrashchenie, 1943–1957 gg. (Elista, 1991); Petr Bakaev, Razmyshleniia o genotside (Elista, 1992). By a decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet in January 1957, the Kalmyk autonomous oblast was reinstated and the mass return of the Kalmyks began.

26. Elza-Bair Guchinova, “Natsia i diskurs viny: Primirenie s proshlym v politike pamyati kalmykov,” Ab Imperio no. 4 (2004): 263–88.

27. Without question, many were Soviet citizens. However, this definition was highly contested, which in turn complicated the repatriation process; according to Marta Dyczok, the failure to establish the Soviet Union’s western border at Yalta “later led to disputes over who constituted a Soviet citizen and was therefore liable to forcible repatriation.” Marta Dyczok, The Grand Alliance and Ukrainian Refugees (New York, 2000), 40.

28. Proudfoot, European Refugees, 216.

29. Julius Epstein, Operation Keelhaul: The Story of Forced Repatriation from 1944 to the Present (Old Greenwich, CT, 1973), 23–26, 46–51.

30. Proudfoot, European Refugees, 215–17.

31. Proudfoot, European Refugees, 218.

32. Elliott, Pawns of Yalta, 96.

33. Mark Elliott, “The United States and Forced Repatriation of Soviet Citizens, 1944–47,” Political Science Quarterly 88, no. 2 (June 1973): 253–75.

34. Elliott, Pawns of Yalta, 92–3.

35. Wyman, DPs, 62.

36. Viktor Zemskov, “K voprosu o repatriatsii sovetskikh grazhdan 1944–1951,” Istoriia SSSR, no. 4 (1990): 26–41, 35. Zemskov vaguely cites figures from the Collection of Documents of TsGAOR SSSR (Central State Archive of the October Revolution of the Soviet Union). In a later paper Zemskov provides the same figures and cites Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF); State Archive of the Russian Federation, fond 9526, opis 4a, delo 1, listy 226–29 (see Viktor Zemskov, “Repatriatsiia sovetskikh grazhdan i ikh dal΄neishaia sud΄ba,” Sotsiologicheskiie Issledovaniia, no. 5[1995]: 3–13, 12).

37. Konstantin Maksimov, “Sud΄by voennoplennykh kalmykov v 1940–1950 Gody,” Voprosy Istorii, no. 5 (2018): 43–56.

38. “Kalmuk Resettlement in the United States” report, September 24, 1951, BHLA, “Kalmuck Refugees,” Series 4/1/6, Box 1, Folder 31: Kalmuks 1959.

39. Polian gives a figure of 2,796 such individuals; Polian, Zhertvy dvukh diktatur: Zhizn′, trud, unizhenie i smert′ sovetskikh voennoplennykh i ostarbaiterov na chuzhbine i na rodine (Moscow, 2002), 537–38. See also Praskovia Alekseeva, “Deportatsiia kalmytskogo naroda i sud΄ba frontovikov kalmytskoi natsional΄nosti,” in Konstantin Maksimov and Nina Ochirova, eds., Politicheskie repressii v Kalmykii, 197. On the fate of repatriated Kalmyk POWs, see Maksimov, “Sud΄by voennoplennykh kalmykov.”

40. Maksimov, “Sud΄by voennoplennykh kalmykov,” 54.

41. Baron, “Remaking Soviet Society,” 91.

42. Fitzpatrick argues the filtering process was set up not only to punish and socialize the displaced, but also “had the important practical function of sorting out repatriants in terms of their future labor use.” Sheila Fitzpatrick, “The Motherland Calls: ‘Soft’ Repatriation of Soviet Citizens from Europe, 1945–1953,” The Journal of Modern History 90, no. 2 (June 2018): 323–50, 344.

43. Ballinger, “Impossible Returns, Enduring Legacies,” notes the top-down approach of Cohen, In War’s Wake and Ben Shephard, The Long Road Home: The Aftermath of the Second World War (New York, 2010). Taylor argues that much of the early work (Proudfoot, European Refugees and Eugene M. Kulischer, Europe on the Move: War and Population Changes, 1917–47 [New York, 1948]) privileged DPs and their stories; see Lynne Taylor, In the Children’s Best Interests: Unaccompanied Children in American-Occupied Germany (Toronto, 2017), 8.

44. Liisa Malkki, “Refugees and Exile: From “Refugee Studies” to the National Order of Things,” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 495–523, 498.

45. Cohen, In War’s Wake, 66.

46. US DP Commission, Displaced Persons and the International Refugee Organization (Washington D.C., 1949), 3.

47. Andrew Janco, “‘Unwilling’: The One-Word Revolution in Refugee Status, 1940–51,” Contemporary European History 23, no. 3 (June 2014): 429–46, 445.

48. Cohen, In War’s Wake, 83.

49. Janco, “Unwilling,” 441.

50. Ruth Balint, “The Use and Abuse of History: Displaced Persons in the ITS Archive,” in Rebecca Boehling, Susanne Urban, Elizabeth Anthony, and Suzanne Brown-Fleming, eds., Spiegelungen der NS-Verfolgung und ihrer Konsequenzen, (Göttingen, Germany, 2015), 173–88, 176.

51. Elena Remilev, email correspondence with Elvira Churyumova, February 24, 2019. Remilev was part of the first group that traveled from Berlin in February 1945; see also Elena Remilev, Propavshie karavany kalmytskoi stepi. Obzor istorii kalmytskoi emigratsii. 1923–1952 (Moscow, 2020), 184.

52. Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System. Schedule B, Vol. 10, Case 76 (interviewer A.D.). Widener Library, Harvard University at https://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:FHCL:965396 (accessed April 26, 2020), 10. On Ostministerium’s national committees, see Alexander Dallin, “German Policy and the Occupation of the Soviet Union, 1941–1944,” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1956), 1149–55. In his PhD dissertation Dallin provides the names of some refugee informants whom he interviewed as part of the Harvard Project, including the name of Shamba Balinov, 1326. On the Kalmyk National Committee see also Guchinova, Ulitsa “Kalmuk Road.” On the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System, see Sam Prendergast, “Revisiting the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System,” Oral History Review 44, no. 1 (Winter/Spring 2017): 19–38.

53. Cohen, In War’s Wake, 35.

54. There are 287 unique record folders for Kalmyks identified in the ITS archive. We classified any individual record as “undetermined” if it does not contain either a T/USA form or one of the IRO forms, which prevents us from determining the consistency of the narrative over time.

55. Leonard Borman, “Kalmuk Resettlement in America,” in George Weber and Lucy Cohen, eds., Beliefs and Self-help: Cross-Cultural Perspectives and Approaches (New York, 1982), 31–74, 40.

56. Tara Zahra, The Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe’s Families after World War II (Cambridge, Mass., 2011), 23.

57. Cohen, In War’s Wake, 39.

58. Zahra, The Lost Children, 22.

59. A Nansen passport gave its holder the right to travel in Europe to find work and to be readmitted to the country of issuance. It was devised for the legal protection of refugees by Fridtjof Nansen, the League of Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, in June 1921. Subject to renewal and valid for up to one year, Nansen passports were issued until 1942.

60. The fact that Kalmyks changed their age and birth date was also mentioned by Sanj Altan Kuldinow during an interview with one of the authors in March 2019 (Baasanjav Terbish and Edward Holland, “Erdene and Sanj Altan Kuldinow, interview,” Kalmyk Cultural Heritage Documentation Project [Video file]. https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.56118); see also T/USA for Marchada Hordjanikow, dated December 20, 1946, which shows a birthdate of 1886 (see 3.2.1.1/79189644#1/ITS Digital Archive, USHMM), whereas his IRO Resettlement Registration form, dated August 15, 1951, shows it as 1903 (see 3.2.1.1/79189648#1). Marchada’s place of birth was also changed from Khal-khil-khol [Khalkhin-Gol], Mongolia, to Ketchenery, Russia.

61. The following Kalmyk DPs worked as interviewers and registrars for IRO: Saran Badminov, Peter Yamanov, Pata Pereborov, and Lelya Dalantinova. They each signed CM/1 forms that they completed for others. Among them, Saran Badminov signed the largest number of forms for Kalmyk DPs—thirteen—including the CM/1 form for David Doldunov, dated February 20, 1948 (see 3.2.1.1/78988079#4/ITS Digital Archive, USHMM). Part of the first wave, Badminov worked as an architect in Belgrade until 1942. The majority of Kalmyk DPs’ IRO forms, however, were signed by interviewers who were presumably Russian speakers, with surnames such as Sudakov, Grudzinsky, Russakov, and Neumann.

62. CM/1 form for Andrei Burlakov, 3.2.1.1/78978662#1/ITS Digital Archive, USHMM; see also note 20 above.

63. Jayne Persian, “Displaced Persons and the Politics of International Categorisation(s),” Australian Journal of Politics & History 58, no. 4 (December 2012): 481–96, 486. See also Cohen, In War’s Wake, 39.

64. “O Voprose Nasil’stvennoi Repatriatsii,” Mana Zyang [Kalm. Our News] 19, no. 2 (February 20, 1947), 5. Georgij Sanji Zagadinow Collection of Kalmyk Materials (1834–1999), Ms. Coll. 1318, Box 6, Folder 5: Mana Zange—Refugee Publication, 1946–47.

65. International Refugee Organization, Manual for Eligibility Officers, No. 185, at https://digital-library.arolsen-archives.org/content/titleinfo/7259570?query=manual (accessed May 1, 2020) (Geneva, 194-), 8.

66. Elliott, Pawns of Yalta, 173.

67. That many DPs avoided humanitarian agencies until they registered for resettlement is noted by Anna Holian, “A Missing Narrative: Displaced Persons in the History of Postwar West Germany” in Cornelia Wilhelm, ed., Migration, Memory, and Diversity: Germany from 1945 to the Present (New York, 2017), 32–55, 35.

68. Cohen, In War’s Wake, 71.

69. Franck Gosselin, “Les Kalmouks de France. Itinéraires d’une immigration méconnue,” Revue Européenne des Migrations Internationales 17, no. 3 (2001): 211–34, 220–21. On the Kalmyk colony in France, see also Françoise Aubin, “Une société d’émigrés: la Colonie des kalmouks de France,” Année Sociologique 17 (1966): 133–212.

70. CM/1 form for Wasilije Zandanow [Vasilii Zandanov], July 20, 1951, 3.2.1.1/79946324#1/ITS Digital Archive, USHMM.

71. ‘Life history’ of Iwan Saspinow [Ivan Saspinov], May 25, 1951, 3.2.1.1/78864487#1/ITS Digital Archive, USHMM.

72. On economic motives of resettlement schemes see Wyman, DPs, 188–92; On specific countries’ recruitment efforts in DP Camps, for example on Australia, see Ruth Balint, “Industry and Sunshine: Australia as Home in the Displaced Persons’ Camps of Postwar Europe,” History Australia 11, no. 1 (January 2014): 102–27.

73. In our database, out of a total number of 47 foreign wives 27 married second-wave Kalmyk men.

74. “Kalmuk Resettlement in the United States” report, September 24, 1951, BHLA, “Kalmuck Refugees,” Series 4/1/6, Box 1, Folder 31: Kalmuks 1959.

75. CM/1 form for Walburga Chapurtinov (nee Steinsberger), November 14, 1949, 3.2.1.1/78991042#2/ITS Digital Archive, USHMM.

76. Social History of Nikolai Goripov, October 12, 1951, 6.3.2.1/84246769#1–2/ITS Digital Archive, USHMM.

77. Ibid. Other orphaned siblings who faced difficulties in resettlement because of their race were Vera and Stojan Scharapow. For more information, see Brown-Fleming, Nazi Persecution, 208–11.

78. Koldong Sodnom mentions four priests of the first wave who lived in DP camps, namely Sandzha Umaldinov, Sanzha Ignatov, Sanzha Menkov, and Zamba Pereborov. We did not find any information on Zamba Pereborov in the ITS archive. According to Sodnom, Pereborov came from France to Germany where he mixed with Kalmyk refugees. The other three priests were all of the first wave. Ignatov, Menkov, and Pereborov all immigrated to the US in 1951–52. Umaldinov died in 1946 in DP Camp Krumbach. See Kol΄dong Sodnom, Sud΄ba donskikh kalmykov, ikh very i dukhovenstva (USA, 1984), 150–51.

79. We have been able to verify the ITS files of some of the persecuted priests mentioned in Galina Dordzhieva’s book. See Galina Dordzhieva, Repressirovannoe buddiiskoe dukhovenstvo Kalmykii (Elista, 2014).

80. “Kalmuks Balked in Search for Home,” The Christian Science Monitor, July 1, 1950, Kalmyk Resettlement Committee Records, Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archive, New York University, TAM 029, Box 1, Folder 1: Correspondence.

81. David Martin [Director, International Rescue Committee] to Members of the Consultative Committee on Kalmuk Refugees, “Kalmuks,” May 17, 1951, Kalmyk Resettlement Committee Records, Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archive, New York University, TAM 029, Box 1, Folder 2: Correspondence.

82. The Nationality Act of 1940, October 14, 1940, H.R. 9980, Section 303, https://www.loc.gov/law/help/statutes-at-large/76th-congress/session-3/c76s3ch876.pdf (accessed May 1, 2020), 1140.

83. “In Re: Darsha Remilev and wife, Samsona. Before the Attorney General in Exclusion Proceedings,” July 28, 1951, BHLA, “Kalmuck Refugees,” Series 4/1/6, Box 1, Folder 26: Kalmuk Cases.

84. Excerpt from Alexi Narmajew’s [Alexei Narmaev] ‘Statement in lieu of an oath,’ August 29, 1951, 3.2.1.1/79517848#1/ITS Digital Archive, USHMM. For other Kalmyk DPs, the document entitled “Declaration in lieu of an oath” served the same function. See note 71 above.

85. James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, 1998).

86. IRO CM/1 for Moti Erendzhenov, May 14, 1948, 3.2.1.1/79069054#1/ITS Digital Archive, USHMM.

87. IRO CM/1 for Nikolai Surmanov, March 20, 1951, 3.2.1.1/79824511#2/ITS Digital Archive, USHMM.

88. Castles, Stephen, de Haas, Hein, and Miller, Mark J., The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World, 5th ed., (New York, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On Europe during the age of migration, see Peter Gatrell, The Unsettling of Europe: How Migration Reshaped a Continent (New York, 2019).