The Deportation of Peoples

   1943-1944

the soviet authorities never saw people as human and therefore did with them as they saw fit. Deportation of entire segments of the population was no rarity. During collectivization, thousands upon thousands of peasants were rounded up and sent from the land they had farmed for generations to far-off Siberia. In 1934, after Kirov was murdered, a terrible blow was delivered to Leningraders with “incorrect backgrounds,” and thousands of those who had once been members of the nobility or clergy or who had engaged in business were expelled from the city along with their children and grandchildren.

But for a long time in the land that called on the proletariat of all countries to unite, and that preached internationalism, nobody was deported due to their ethnic origins.

And so it was until the second half of the 1930s, when the Soviet Union suddenly discovered that not just individuals, but entire ethnic groups could be enemies of the people.

In 1935 the Soviet government started to deport ethnic Finns from Leningrad Oblast and Karelia, Poles and Germans from the western oblasts of Ukraine; in 1937 they deported ethnic Koreans, who looked suspiciously like the increasingly hostile Japanese. When the war began, they of course dealt with the Volga Germans, who had settled there in the 18th century and had not realized that anyone might see them as agents of the Third Reich. They were sent to Kazakhstan and the Altai, Siberia.

But the most devastating blows against entire peoples – proclaimed guilty to the last man, woman, and child – came when the war was reaching its conclusion, in late 1943 and early 1944.

In November 1943, the Karachais were deported from the Northern Caucasus for “behaving in a traitorous manner, joining detachments organized by the Germans to fight against Soviet authority… and, after the occupiers were expelled, resisting measures by the Soviet authorities…”

Approximately 80,000 people were deported to Central Asia. During the first two years of exile alone, 35 percent of the population died. Out of 25,000 children, 22,000 perished. Those who survived were allowed to return home in 1957.

There is a belief among the Karachais that one of the party leaders of the Brezhnev era, Mikhail Suslov, nurtured a personal animosity toward their people. Supposedly in his youth he had been invited to a wedding in Karachai and had insulted an elder, for which he was beaten. The Karachais believed that this animosity is what prevented their people from being completely rehabilitated.

Within the USSR and later the Russian Federation, the Karachais, beginning in 1922, have shared a single autonomous oblast and later a single republic with the Cherkess, who belong to a different linguistic and ethnic group. In recent years confrontations have erupted between the Karachais and the Cherkess, but fortunately these eruptions have yet to escalate to the level of armed conflict.

Right before the New Year of 1944 there was a decision to deport the Kalmyks, who were also accused of wholesale collaboration with the Germans.

The Kalmyks are Mongol-speaking Buddhists who lived primarily in the steppe lands around the lower reaches of the Volga. During the war, their homeland, which is not far from Stalingrad, was occupied by the Germans. A portion of nomadic Kalmyks left for unoccupied territory, but this did not save them from being labeled as Fascist collaborators. Approximately 134,000 Kalmyks were deported to Siberia, where their animal husbandry skills were of no use, and the exiles worked primarily in the fishing industry. The Kalmyk deportation was particularly cruel, since it took place in the dead of winter, leading to an exceptionally high number of deaths. According to various estimates, anywhere from one-third to half of all the deportees died. After Stalin’s death, the Kalmyks were permitted to return to their homeland, but until the 1990s a few absurd limitations were still in force. For example, the lighting of nighttime campfires was prohibited, presumably to prevent them from sending signals to saboteurs and enemies of the state.

Today the republic of Kalmykia, which is part of the Russian Federation, is ruled by Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, who first proclaimed himself president and later was given the title of “Head of the Republic of Kalmykia” by then President Vladimir Putin. Ilyumzhinov, a millionaire and chess lover, has secured for himself the post of president of FIDE, the international chess federation. He has repeatedly been accused of establishing a dictatorial regime and violating human rights, but he has yet to be called to account.

On February 23, 1944, Chechens and Ingush were invited to a public gathering to celebrate Soviet Army Day, after which approximately 800,000 people were deported from the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Republic. It was hard to accuse these peoples of collaborating with the Fascists, since the Germans never reached their lands. They were therefore deported for “participating in a terrorist movement directed against the Soviet authorities.” Chechens have always been distinguished by their fierce independence, and attempts to show resistance were not hard to find. There had been heavy snowfall in the mountains, and in many areas it was not possible to remove people. Furthermore, Chechnya is an area with a high birthrate and a large elderly population. In many places, people with large numbers of children or elderly parents simply refused to leave. As a result, several hundred people were shot or burned alive in mountain villages. Some of the victims were babies, others were as old as one hundred.

A large number of people from central Russia were resettled in the territories that had been “cleared” of Chechens, and a portion of Ingush lands, in particular the Prigorodny District of Vladikavkaz, was given to North Ossetia. These events started time bombs ticking that would go off many years later.

When the war in Chechnya started in the 1990s, many people fled the cities and went to live with their relatives in the mountains, but the Russians and some elderly residents without family had nowhere to go. They wound up paying dearly for the crimes of others.

The Prigorodny District became one of the sources of the conflict that erupted between the Ingush and the Ossetians in the early 1990s. The standoff between these two peoples continues to the present day, exacerbated by the terrorist attack that took schoolchildren hostage in Beslan, North Ossetia.

One of the things setting Ossetian public opinion against the Ingush is their purported collaboration with the Fascists – despite the fact that they were rehabilitated long ago. The Ingush, on the other hand, like to remind the Ossetians of their kinship with Stalin.

Bankrupt by several wars, Chechnya is in a state of fragile “peace” being held together by the semi-gangster regime of President Ramzan Kadyrov, while Ingushetia is being torn apart by factional fighting and a ceaseless string of revenge killings that the federal authorities do not appear to be capable of stopping for now.

In April 1944, more than 30,000 Balkars were deported. This Northern Caucasian people is a branch of the Karachais. It was Stalin’s will, however, that back in the 1920s the Karachais be united into a single oblast and later republic with the Cherkess, to whom they were completely unrelated, while the Balkars were forced to share a republic with the no less alien Kabards. The Balkars were being accused of wanting to redraw the map of the USSR and unite with the Karachais. They were also targeted for their failure to defend Mount Elbrus from the Fascists, although it was clear that defending this mighty Caucasian peak was a job for the army. Some Balkar lands were given to the Kabards and some to Georgia.

In 1956, the Balkars were rehabilitated as a people and were allowed to return to their homeland. Relations with the Kabards and the neighboring Ingush and Ossetians have been troubled, however their confrontations have not spun out of control. In recent years, political organizations occasionally demand that Balkaria be allowed to separate from the Kabardino-Balkar Republic, but these demands are not taken seriously. Perhaps Balkar ardor for independence has been somewhat dampened by the sad example of Chechnya and Ingushetia.

That same April, approximately 200,000 Crimean Tatars were deported, again for collaborating with the Fascists, even though during the years of German occupation a powerful underground resistance had been operating in Crimea. Tatars were well represented both in the resistance and among collaborators. Unlike the other deported peoples, the Crimean Tatars were not rehabilitated in 1956, and until 1989 they were not allowed to move back to Crimea, or even to visit there for short periods. Over the past decade, approximately 250,000 Tatars have returned to Crimea, which instantly created tensions in their relations with the Russians and Ukrainians who took over their houses and land in the 1940s. Now the Crimean Tatars are being used in the political struggle over Crimea. They are being pitted against its ethnic Russian inhabitants, who are eager to secede from Ukraine, and are being used to frighten both the Ukrainian and Russian populations of Crimea with the threat of the peninsula’s Islamization.

There were others who were deported – Greeks, Kurds, Meskhetian Turks, and more – peoples who were suddenly torn from their native lands only to return many decades later to houses that had long since been occupied by strangers or destroyed, or to become embroiled in bloody ethnic strife in the 1980s and 1990s, or perhaps to wind up far away in other countries, trying to forget the day when soldiers showed up at their door and gave them just a few hours to gather their things.

“The fact is that during the war we received reports about mass treason. Battalions of Caucasians opposed us at the fronts and attacked us from the rear. It was a matter of life and death; there was no time to investigate the details. Of course innocents suffered. But I hold that given the circumstances, we acted correctly.” - Vyacheslav Molotov, explaining the mass deportations during the war (Molotov Remembers, Ivan R. Dee)