The present article is devoted to the problems of social adaptation of the deported peoples and the interethnic relations with the local population. Historiographic myths about a deliberate ethnocide of the “punished” peoples from the side of Soviet state were criticized from the position of historicism. The article showed that the “punished” peoples were on the verge of survival in severe conditions of Kazakhstan exile, but the local population which sent all able-bodied men to the front was under the same conditions. Representatives of the deported peoples chose various strategies of adaptation and relationship with local Kazakhs and Russians. Germans, Turks, Greeks, Karachays and Balkars as earlier deported Poles and Koreans joined local society while Chechens and Ingushs kept to the line of opposition to other people and secret resistance to the authorities. The conditions of deportation strengthened the extent of ethnic consolidation of Chechens and Ingushs and that fact gave them serious advantages. It became in its turn a source of rigid interethnic conflicts. During the subsequent period the traditions of interethnic relations between representatives of the deported peoples, Kazakhs and Russians reserved steadily up to collapse of the USSR.