The Red Army most definitely liberated concentration camps, the most famous of which would be Auschwitz, which was liberated on this day 75 years ago by the 322nd Rifle Division. The people which were found there, about 7000 in total, were either ill or quite young and were given food and medical attention by the Red Army and Polish Red Cross.

While the Soviet-Union practised deportation and punishment along ethnic lines, they did not set up true death camps with the purpose of just killing people. Under the rule of Stalin especially deportation of native peoples to Siberia and Central Asia took place on a massive scale.

Sometimes it was done because it was feared that the locals would gain too much influence in the region, as was the reason for the expulsion of ethnic Koreans from the Russian Far East to Kazachstan and Uzbekistan in 1937, the first mass deportation of this kind. Especially during and after the Second World War, many peoples were deported from their homeland because some had aided the German military forces, as had happened to the Kalmyks, Tartars and Chechens. Or there was a resistance movement, fighting a guerrilla war against the Soviets, as happened in the Baltics. And after the war, almost all Germans from the newly annexed region of East Prussia were expelled to Soviet-occupied East Germany.

During the deportation and arrival in their new homeland these people had to face immense hardships, often many perished during the journey or the early years of settlement, as the new lands were generally underdeveloped. But the express function of the deportation was not to commit complete genocide but rather to get these people somewhere else where they could do no harm and still be somewhat useful in the Soviet system and serve as an example to those who remained behind.

In many cases, other peoples from the Soviet Union, often Russians, Ukrainians or Belorussians, migrated to these now depopulated places and filled in the void. The effects of this can still be seen in the population of many countries today, such as Estonia, Moldova and Ukraine.

Now while the Soviets did have forced labour camps, gulags, they were once again not purposefully made to kill entire groups of people. Conditions could be extreme as prisoners held there faced famine and repression and many people did not make it out. Inmates send there served as an example to society, what would happen to criminals, collaborators and those trying to undermine the state and were made to do forced labour such as mining, building railroads or other work.

That's not to say that the Soviets didn't kill large groups of a single ethnicity, an example would be the Katyn Massacre, where 22.000 Polish prisoners of war were executed after the invasion of Poland in 1939.