Filtration Camps, Past and Present, and Russia’s War Against Ukraine

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See his short video, posted 18 March 2022 on his popular YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2Uq53_6GSk, last accessed 30 March 2023. Dmytro Hordon is also known under his Russian name Dmitrii Gordon.

2 The news was soon picked up by media outside of Ukraine, including major international media like BBC News and the New York Times, but also Russian independent media such as the online news website Meduza, based in Latvia. See, for example, “Russia Transfers Thousands of Mariupol Civilians to Its Territory,” BBC News, 27 March 2022. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60894142. Last accessed 17 November 2022. “Ukraina obviniaet Rossiiu v deportatsii 700 tysiach chelovek. Moskva nazyvaet eto evakuatsiei. Liudi rasskazyvaiut o fil'tratsionnykh lageriakh,” Meduza, 12 April 2022. https://meduza.io/feature/2022/04/12/ukraina-obvinyaet-rossiyu-v-deportatsii-700-tysyach-chelovek-moskva-nazyvaet-eto-evakuatsiey-lyudi-rasskazyvayut-o-filtratsionnyh-lageryah. Last accessed 29 November 2022.

3 For an early commentary on similarities between Soviet and Russian filtration camps (both in Chechnya and Ukraine), see Daina S. Eglitis, “Is History Repeating Itself on Ukraine's Eastern Front?”, Transitions, 3 May 2022, https://tol.org/client/article/is-history-repeating-itself-on-ukraines-eastern-front.html. Last accessed 30 March 2023.

4 Quoted from his short video, posted 18 March 2022 on his YouTube channel “V gostiakh u Gordona,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2Uq53_6GSk. Last accessed 30 March 2023.

5 In 2014, parts of Donets'k oblast (region) came under the control of the so-called Donetsk People's Republic (abbreviated as DPR or DNR), an entity created by separatist forces with the support of the Russian military in 2014. Since the Russian invasion in February 2022, the entire Donets'k oblast has come under Russian control. It was officially annexed by Russia on 20 September 2022.

6 “Mapping the Filtration System in Donetsk Oblast.” Humanitarian Research Lab, Yale School of Public Health, 25 August 2022. https://hub.conflictobservatory.org/portal/apps/sites/#/home/pages/filtration-1. Last accessed 17 November 2022.

7 “The U.S. Identified 18 Russian ‘Filtration Camps’ for Ukrainians, a Diplomat Says,” New York Times, 8 July 2022.

8 “Pochti 740 tys. chelovek pribyli v Rossiiu s Ukrainy i iz Donbassa,” TASS Russian News Agency, 11 April 2022. https://tass.ru/obschestvo/14346791. Last accessed 29 November 2022.

9 The figure was quoted in the TV documentary, which reported on the adoption of Ukrainian children by Russian families. It is unclear how Russian sources have calculated this figure. See the documentary on the military blogger's Telegram channel “Voenkor Kotenok Z” at https://t.me/voenkorKotenok/42776. Last accessed 17 November 2022. See also the analysis by the US-based Institute for the Study of War: “Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, 16 November 2022.” Institute for the Study of War, https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-november-16. Last accessed 17 November 2022.

10 “Report on Violations of International Humanitarian and Human Rights Law, War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity Committed in Ukraine (1 April – 25 June 2022).” Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, Organization for Security and Co-Operation in Europe (OSCE), 14 July 2022, p. 30. The report can be downloaded at https://www.osce.org/files/f/documents/3/e/522616.pdf. Last accessed 17 November 2022.

11 Eyal Benvenisti, The International Law of Occupation, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 11–2, 68–104.

12 Philip Spoerri, “The Law of Occupation,” in The Oxford Handbook of International Law in Armed Conflict, ed. Andrew Clapham and Paola Gaeta (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 182–205, esp. 182–96.

13 For an assessment that conduct in the Russian filtration camps violates human rights and international humanitarian law, see “Mapping the Filtration System in Donetsk Oblast.” Humanitarian Research Lab, Yale School of Public Health, 25 August 2022. https://hub.conflictobservatory.org/portal/apps/sites/#/home/pages/filtration-1. Last accessed 17 November 2022.

14 The civilians need to fall under the category of “protected persons,” which is defined in article 4 of the Fourth Geneva Convention as follows: “Persons protected by the Convention are those who, at a given moment and in any manner whatsoever, find themselves, in case of a conflict or occupation, in the hands of a Party to the conflict or Occupying Power of which they are not nationals.” Quoted from the Fourth Geneva Convention, database of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/applic/ihl/ihl.nsf/Article.xsp?action=openDocument&documentId=78EB50EAD6EE7AA1C12563CD0051B9D4. Last accessed 30 November 2022.

15 The main sources of law here are the 1929 Geneva Convention, the Third Geneva Convention of 1949, and the Additional Protocol I of 1977. According to Article 13 of the Third Geneva Convention of 1949, “prisoners of war must at all times be humanely treated. Any unlawful act or omission by the Detaining Power causing death or seriously endangering the health of a prisoner of war in its custody is prohibited, and will be regarded as a serious breach of the present Convention. (…) Likewise, prisoners of war must at all times be protected, particularly against acts of violence or intimidation and against insults and public curiosity.” Quoted from the Third Geneva Convention, database of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/applic/ihl/ihl.nsf/Article.xsp?action=openDocument&documentId=CD863DC518A5E1D7C12563CD0051AB7A. Last accessed 30 November 2022.

16 “Mapping the Filtration System in Donetsk Oblast.” Humanitarian Research Lab, Yale School of Public Health, 25 August 2022. https://hub.conflictobservatory.org/portal/apps/sites/#/home/pages/filtration-1. Last accessed 17 November 2022.

17 On Bezimenne, see ibid.

18 On Prymors’ke, see the report “‘We Had No Choice’: ‘Filtration’ and the Crime of Forcibly Transferring Ukrainian Civilians to Russia.” Human Rights Watch, 1 September 2022, 24. The report can be downloaded at: https://www.hrw.org/report/2022/09/01/we-had-no-choice/filtration-and-crime-forcibly-transferring-ukrainian-civilians. Last accessed 26 February 2023.

19 On Manhush and Nikol's'ke, see “Mapping the Filtration System in Donetsk Oblast.” Humanitarian Research Lab, Yale School of Public Health, 25 August 2022. https://hub.conflictobservatory.org/portal/apps/sites/#/home/pages/filtration-1. Last accessed 17 November 2022.

20 “‘We Had No Choice.’ ‘Filtration’ and the Crime of Forcibly Transferring Ukrainian Civilians to Russia.” Human Rights Watch, 1 September 2022, 34–5.

21 On Donetsk, see: “Mapping the Filtration System in Donetsk Oblast.” Humanitarian Research Lab, Yale School of Public Health, 25 August 2022. https://hub.conflictobservatory.org/portal/apps/sites/#/home/pages/filtration-1. Last accessed 17 November 2022. For more examples of torture, see also David Kortava, “Inside Russia's ‘Filtration Camps’ in Eastern Ukraine,” The New Yorker, 10 October 2022.

22 See article 35, “Right to Leave the Territory.” Fourth Geneva Convention, ICRC database, https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/applic/ihl/ihl.nsf/Article.xsp?action=openDocument&documentId=3ED6299567787851C12563CD0051BC67. Last accessed 30 November 2022. The civilians have to be “protected persons,” see footnote 11.

23 See article 49, “Deportations, Transfers, Evacuation.” Fourth Geneva Convention, ICRC database https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/applic/ihl/ihl.nsf/Article.xsp?action=openDocument&documentId=77068F12B8857C4DC12563CD0051BDB0. Last accessed 30 November 2022. The civilians have to be “protected persons,” see footnote 14.

24 On the abduction of Ukrainian children, see the article by Yulia Ioffe in this forum.

25 Some of them were later able to leave Russia for Estonia, where they shared their experiences with New York Times reporters. See the video “Surviving Russia's Filtration Camps,” New York Times, 20 June 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/video/world/europe/100000008396333/russia-filtration-camps.html. Last accessed 30 November 2022. On the “evacuation trains” and further screening in Russia: “Povernennia z Mordoru. Iak deportovanykh ukraïntsiv vytiaguiut’ z Rosiï,” Ukraïns’ka Pravda, 9 June 2022. https://life.pravda.com.ua/society/2022/06/9/249026/. Last accessed 30 November 2022.

26 The volunteer is quoted in “Povernennia z Mordoru. Iak deportovanykh ukraïntsiv vytiaguiut’ z Rosiï,” Ukraïns’ka Pravda, 9 June 2022. https://life.pravda.com.ua/society/2022/06/9/249026/. Last accessed 30 November 2022.

27 See the Human Rights Watch report “‘Welcome to Hell.’ Arbitrary Detention, Torture, and Extortion in Chechnya.” Human Rights Watch, October 2000, 2. The report can be downloaded at: https://www.hrw.org/reports/2000/russia_chechnya4/index.htm#TopOfPage. Last accessed 3 March 2023. See also “At Russian Camp, 2 Views of Chechen Prisoners,” New York Times, 1 March 2000; “Inside the ‘Hell’ of Chernokozovo,” The Moscow Times, 26 October 2000. In contrast to the current camps used in Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory, global knowledge of the camps in Chechnya remains more limited. Today, open-information sources like Facebook, Instagram, and Telegram make it possible for a much larger number of eyewitnesses and survivors to share their experiences with a wider public. In addition, more advanced technologies such as high-resolution satellite imagery enable researchers to accurately track and identify the location of camps from afar.

28 Yasmin Khan, “Wars of Displacement. Exile and Uprooting in the 1940s,” in The Cambridge History of the Second World War. Volume 3: Total War: Economy, Society and Culture, ed. Michael Geyer and Adam Tooze (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 277–97, here 277.

29 V.N. Zemskov, Vozvrashchenie sovetskikh peremeshchennykh lits v SSSR. 1944–1952 gg. (Moscow: Tsentr gumanitarnykh initsiativ, 2016), 16.

30 On the history of forced labour in Nazi Germany: Pavel Polian, Zhertvy dvukh diktatur. Zhizn’, trud, unizhenie i smert’ sovetskikh voennoplennykh i ostarbaiterov na chuzhbine i na rodine (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2002); Ulrich Herbert, Hitler's Foreign Workers. Enforced Foreign Labor in Germany under the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

31 Mark Edele writes that during the war, up to 1.6 million Soviet citizens, roughly half of them from Russia, went over to the German side. Most of them served as auxiliaries or soldiers in the German forces, others in SS units, and yet others in the local police forces that the German authorities had established in the occupied Soviet regions. A large part of them had been recruited from prisoner-of-war camps, which at least in the first two years of the war more closely resembled death camps, with mortality rates of more than 50 per cent. It is unclear how many of them were among the displaced persons in Central and East-Central Europe after the war. Mark Edele, Stalin's Defectors: How Red Army Soldiers Became Hitler's Collaborators, 1941–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 132.

32 Ulrike Goeken-Haidl, Der Weg zurück: Die Repatriierung sowjetischer Zwangsarbeiter während und nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg (Essen: Klartext Verlag, 2006).

33 On the ambiguity: Seth Bernstein, “Ambiguous Homecoming: Retribution, Exploitation and Social Tensions during Repatriation to the USSR, 1944–1946,” Past & Present 242 (2019), 193–226, here 194–200.

34 Sheila Fitzpatrick, “The Motherland Calls: ‘Soft’ Repatriation of Soviet Citizens from Europe, 1945–1953,” Journal of Modern History 90, no. 2 (2018), 323–50, here 328.

35 Seth Bernstein, Return to the Motherland. Displaced Soviets in WWII and the Cold War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2023), 81, 87, 190–202.

36 For a detailed analysis of this process, see Goeken-Haidl, Der Weg zurück, chapters I – IV; Bernstein, Return to the Motherland.

37 On the motives behind repatriation: Zemskov, Vozvrashchenie, 27; Fitzpatrick, “The Motherland Calls,” 344, 347–8. On human losses, see Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 402. An estimated nine million Red Army soldiers and 14–17 million Soviet civilians (counted within the 1939 borders of the country, thus including the regions that were annexed in 1939 and 1940) were killed as both a direct and indirect result of the Second World War. These numbers are estimates. They are demographic projections rather than counts.

38 On that process, see: Franziska Exeler, Ghosts of War. Nazi Occupation and Its Aftermath in Soviet Belarus (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2022). On suspicion also: Artyom Latyshev, “Almost Soviet. Integration of the Liberated Territories of the USSR, 1942–1944,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 68, nos. 3–4 (2020), 378–402. On the Soviet punishment and prosecution of civilians deemed traitors or German collaborators and/or who were accussed of having committed crimes in the name of German/Axis power, see: Diana Dumitru, “An Analysis of Soviet Postwar Investigation and Trial Documents and Their Relevance for Holocaust Studies,” in The Holocaust in the East: Local Perpetrators and Soviet Responses, ed. Michael David-Fox, Peter Holquist, and Martin Alexander (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2014), 142–157; Jeffrey Jones, Everyday Life and the “Reconstruction” of Soviet Russia during and after the Great Patriotic War, 1943–1948 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008); Oleksander Melnyk, “Stalinist Justice as a Site of Memory: Anti-Jewish Violence in Kyiv's Podil District in September 1941 through the Prism of Soviet Investigative Documents,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 61, no. 2 (2013), 223–48; Olaf Mertelsmann and Aigi Rahi-Tamm, “Cleansing and Compromise: The Estonian SSR in 1944–1945,” Cahiers du monde russe 49, no. 2 (2008), 319–40; Tanja Penter, “Local Collaborators on Trial: Soviet War Crimes Trials under Stalin (1943–1953),” Cahiers du monde russe 49, no. 2 (2008), 341–64; Vanessa Voisin, L’URSS contre ses traîtres: L’épuration soviétique, 1941–1955 (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2015).

39 On the ideological logic behind the filtration camps for repatriates: Nick Baron, “Remaking Soviet Society: The Filtration of Returnees from Nazi Germany, 1944–49,’” in Warlands: Population Resettlement and State Reconstruction in the Soviet – East European Borderlands, 1945–50, ed. Peter Gatrell and Nick Baron (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 89–116, here 90–1.

40 Zemskov, Vozvrashchenie, 23–4.

41 Masha Cerovic, “Fighters Like No Others: The Soviet Partisans in the Wake of War,” in Seeking Peace in the Wake of War: Europe, 1943–1947, ed. Stefan-Ludwig Hoffman et al. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2016), 203–16, here 208; Igor V. Govorov, “Fil'tratsiia sovetskikh repatriantov v 40-e gg. XX vv.: Tseli, metody i itogi,” Cahiers du monde russe, 49, no. 2 (2009), 365–82, here 368.

42 Over the years, the Soviet Union's state security organs underwent many complex organizational changes and shifting divisions of tasks. In 1934, the political police, the GPU-OGPU, was abolished and its functions transferred to the NKVD, the All-Union People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs. The NKVD was briefly divided into NKVD and NKGB in 1941, subsequently reunited, and separated again in 1943. In 1946, when the people's commissariats were renamed ministries, the two agencies were renamed MVD and MGB. Their tasks overlapped in practice, which is why both institutions can be called the Soviet state's security organs. Following further organizational changes after Stalin's death, from 1954 on most of their responsibilities were taken over by the newly formed Committee for State Security, best known as the KGB. After the break-up of the Soviet Union, each former republic established its own state security service. In Russia, it is called the FSB (acronym for Federal’naia Sluzhba Bezopasnosti). On the Soviet state security organs in Stalin's time: David Shearer, Policing Stalin's Socialism: Repression and Social Order in the Soviet Union, 1924–1953 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).

43 The text of the resolution is printed in Zemskov, Vozvrashchenie, 24–6.

44 Bernstein, “Ambiguous Homecoming,” 198. SMERSH is an acronym for Smert’ shpionam, “death to spies.”

45 Zemskov, Vozvrashchenie, 70–2.

46 Zemskov, Vozvrashchenie, 76, 86; Tetiana Pastushenko, Ostarbaitery z Kyivshchyny: Verbuvannia, prymusova pratsia, repatriatsiia (1942–1953) (Kyiv: Instytut istoriï Ukraïny NAN Ukraïny, 2009), 153–5. On the geographical distribution of these camps, see the map in: Polian, Zhertvy dvukh diktatur, 365.

47 Pastushenko, Ostarbaitery z Kyivshchyny, 153–5; Baron, “Remaking Soviet Society,” 92.

48 On interrogations in filtration camps as techniques of “subjectification,” see Baron, “Remaking Soviet Society,” 100–5, drawing on Michel Foucault.

49 Fitzpatrick, “The Motherland Calls,” 349.

50 According to the 14 August 1944 resolution signed by Molotov. See Zemskov, Vozvrashchenie, 24–6.

51 See her recollections in Voina i ukradennye gody: Zhivye svidetel'stva ostarbaiterov Belarusi, ed. E.I. Liul’kina (Minsk: I.P. Logvinov, 2010), 117. Her name is given in Russian, quoting from the original source.

52 Richard Bessel, “Death and Survival in the Second World War,” in Geyer and Tooze, The Cambridge History of the Second World War, 262–3. Christian Streit, Keine Kameraden: Die Wehrmacht und die sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen 1941–1945, 2nd ed. (Bonn: Dietz, 1991), 24, 187–89, writes of 2.5–3.3 million killed.

53 It is unclear how this officer escaped from the repatriation camp, but he seems to have made it over to the Western Allied occupation zone where this testimony was produced. Bakhmeteff Archives, Columbia University, Research Program on the USSR Collection, box 1, titled “Fil'tratsiia,” ll. 1–10.

54 See Klepikov's report of 18 July 1945, to the Central Committee in Minsk: National’nyi Arkhiv Respubliki Belarus’ (hereafter NARB) f. 4p, op. 29, d. 311, ll. 10–5, both quotes l. 13. On sexual violence also Bernstein, “Ambiguous Homecoming,” 211–5.

55 Upon receipt of the letter, an investigation was undertaken in November and December 1945, yet the general major in charge reported back to the Central Committee in Minsk that most of the charges were unfounded. Two officers, however, were accused of drunkenness and one of them also of having forced female repatriates to have sex with him. Another officer was accused of corruption. See the letter and the resulting investigation, NARB f. 4p, op. 29, d. 311, ll. 1–9, quotation l. 8. The authors of the letter called it a camp, but it was officially an assembly-transit point.

56 Quoted from ibid., l. 8.

57 Zemskov, Vozvrashchenie, 127.

58 The figure also included those members of ethnic groups that the Politburo had deported during the war. Returning home thus meant for them not their prewar place of residence, but to the place to which these groups had already been exiled. Zemskov, Vozvrashchenie, 127. On prohibiting repatriates to return to Moscow, Leningrad, and Kyiv: Pastushenko, Ostarbaitery z Kyivshchyny, 160–1.

59 Zemskov, Vozvrashchenie, 127.

60 Of the 25,618 repatriates who passed through the assembly-transit point at Bronnaia Hara from 10 July to 26 November 1945, 1,900 people were sent to labor battalions in the Donbas, 2,000 people to Kirovsk train station in Murmansk oblast, and 1,060 people to Magnitogorsk. NARB f. 4p, op. 29, d. 311, l. 5.

61 Zemskov, Vozvrashchenie, 127.

62 Quoted from: Vasil’ Bykov, Dolgaia doroga domoi: Kniga vospominanii (Moscow: AST, 2005), 136.

63 An argument that is also made in Bernstein, “Ambiguous Homecoming,” 215–24.

64 See the report by Zavarikin, the head of the repatriation department of the Belarusian Sovnarkom, to the Central Committee in Minsk, 9 August 1945, NARB f. 4p, op. 29, d. 3, 11. 43-46, quote l. 46.

65 Vanessa Voisin, “Retribute or Reintegrate? The Ambiguity of Soviet Policies Towards Repatriates: The Case of Kalinin Province, 1943–1950,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 55, no. 1 (2007), 35–56, here 45.

66 Quoted from Nina Kushperchik's letter as cited in the NKVD special report No. 10, 15 January 1946, in: Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Minskoi Oblasti (hereafter GAMO) f. 1p, op. 2, d. 143, l. 77. Her name is given in Russian, quoting from the original source.

67 Quoted from Dmitrii Sushko's letter, 29 December 1945, GAMO f. 1p, op. 2, d. 143, ll. 77–8. His name is given in Russian, quoting from the original source.

68 Quoted from Alekosnok's letter, 20 December 1945, GAMO f. 1p, op. 2, d. 143, ll. 76–7. Her name is given in Russian, quoting from the original source.

69 Pastushenko, Ostarbaitery z Kyivshchyny, 193–4.

70 Quoted in ibid., 193.

71 Quoted from Bykov, Dolgaia doroga, 137.

72 As cited in David Kortava, “Inside Russia's ‘Filtration Camps’ in Eastern Ukraine,” The New Yorker, 10 October 2022.

73 For numerous examples of torture, including rape, see the report by Human Rights Watch: “‘Welcome to Hell.’ Arbitrary Detention, Torture, and Extortion in Chechnya.” Human Rights Watch, October 2000, 3–4, 26–27, 36, 61.

74 “A Gray Area of Loyalties Splinters a Liberated Ukrainian Town,” New York Times, 8 December 2022; Joshua Yaffa, “The Hunt for Russian Collaborators in Ukraine,” The New Yorker, 6 February 2023.

75 Klaus-Michael Mallmann, Andrej Angrick, Jürgen Matthäus, and Martin Cüppers, eds., Die “Ereignismeldungen UdSSR” 1941: Dokumente der Einsatzgruppen in der Sowjetunion, vol. 1 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2011), 547–8; Christian Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde: Die deutsche Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungspolitik in Weißrussland 1941 bis 1944 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1999), 503–9.

76 Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, 456–79.

77 Bogdan Musial, Sowjetische Partisanen 1941–1944: Mythos und Wirklichkeit (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2009), 122–5.

78 Quoted from the report: “‘We Had No Choice’: ‘Filtration’ and the Crime of Forcibly Transferring Ukrainian Civilians to Russia.” Human Rights Watch, 1 September 2022, 22.

79 “FSB otvetila na zhaloby bezhentsev s Ukrainy na fil'tratsionnye punkty,” RBK, 24 June 2022. https://www.rbc.ru/politics/24/06/2022/62b5a4ed9a79479a7db11145. Last accessed 30 March 2023.

80 “Tak strashno mne bylo nikogda. Meduza rasskazyvaet, kak ustroena sistema ‘fil'tratsionnykh lagerei’ dlia ukraintsev, organizovannaia rossiiskimi voennymi. I chto proiskhodit s temi, kto ne smog proiti ‘fil'tratsiiu’,” Meduza, 12 May 2022. https://meduza.io/feature/2022/05/12/tak-strashno-mne-ne-bylo-nikogda. Last accessed 30 November 2022.

81 See the Memorial report: “Filtration System.” First published 4 September 2008, archived at: https://web.archive.org/web/20120314061629/http://www.memo.ru/2008/09/04/0409081eng/part61.htm. Last accessed 1 March 2023. The Russian human rights group Memorial estimated that more than two hundred thousand Chechens were directly affected by these practices, which corresponded to up to twenty percent of the entire population of Chechnya (as counted in the immediate aftermath of the second war). I thank Tanya Lokshina, associate director at Human Rights Watch, Europe and Central Asia Division, for taking the time to talk to me about the differences between the Russian filtration camps in Chechnya and Ukraine.

82 See the Memorial report: “Filtration System.” First published 4 September 2008, archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20120314061629/http://www.memo.ru/2008/09/04/0409081eng/part61.htm. Last accessed 1 March 2023.

83 “Russia ‘Ends Chechnya Operation’,” BBC News, 16 April 2009, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8001495.stm. Last accessed 3 March 2023.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Franziska Exeler

Franziska Exeler is Assistant Professor of History at Freie Universität Berlin and a Research Fellow at the Centre for History and Economics, Magdalene College, University of Cambridge. She received her PhD in History from Princeton University and held postdoctoral fellowships at the European University Institute in Florence and the International Centre for the History and Sociology of World War II and Its Consequences at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. Her book Ghosts of War: Nazi Occupation and Its Aftermath in Soviet Belarus was published in 2022 by Cornell University Press. Ghosts of War is the recipient of the 2021 Ernst Fraenkel Prize awarded by the Wiener Holocaust Library in London.