Afurtherfactorwasthegrowingprospect ofthe Soviet Unionbeing involved in a major war, the fear of which increased in the late i920s and early i930s. The possibility of protracted conflict raised the importance of the loyalty of the disgruntled members of the largest nationality, the Russians.[257] The overt appeal to Russian national feeling contained in the new history books and, increasingly, in the public statements of Stalin and other leaders, underlined the shift from the development of separate national identities towards a Brotherhood of Nations united under the Soviet system and in which Russians had
pride ofplace.[258]
Connected with this new emphasis was a change in the theoretical underpinning of attitudes towards nationalities in the second half ofthe 1930s, which now tended to treat national characteristics as something primordial and unchanging.[259] This was no mere theoretical nicety. In the 1930s this thinking was manifested in campaigns of terror against specific groups, the so-called 'national operations' against Cossacks (now regarded as an ethnic group) and, from 1935, Poles, Germans and Finns. The policy reached new levels in the autumn of 1937 with the decision to deport every single ethnic Korean from a large area in the Far East. This set a precedent for even more large-scale deportations during the course of the Second World War. Between September 1941 and November 1944 the following nationalities were deported: 382,000 Germans ofthe Volga region; 73,737 Karachai; 131,271 Kalmyks; 407,690 Chechens; 92,074 Ingush; 42,666 Balkars; 202,000 Crimean Tatars; 200,000 Meskhetian Turks.[260]The operations were carried out by NKVD squads descending on towns and villages with no notice given to the population - in the Crimea, Tatars were given fifteen minutes to leave their homes[261] - and typically were completed over the course of a few days. Every man, woman and child was loaded into cattle trucks and transported by train across the country to Kazakhstan or Siberia in a journey lasting weeks. Lacking food, water and sanitation, up to half died on the journey. On arrival at their new destinations, the populations were often abandoned on arid land without housing and were left at the mercy of local officials and dependent on charity. Apart from the Meskhetians, each of the deported nationalities had inhabited an autonomous republic, which was subsequently renamed or simply disappeared from the map. The Balkars, Chechens, Ingush, Karachai and Kalmyks had their rights restored by Khrushchev in 1956. The Germans and Meskhetians were never officially allowed to return to their homelands, while many of the Crimean Tatars, after years of protest, eventually returned to the Crimea without official sanction.
Such a large expenditure of NKVD manpower, railway engines and rolling stock at a time when a war was still to be won defies rational explanation. Pre- ventative measures against ethnic Germans can perhaps be explained, and can reasonably be compared to the simultaneous internment of Japanese
Americans in the USA. Similar thinking probably underlay the deportation of the Meskhetian Turks, who inhabited an area of Georgia too close to the Turkish border for comfort. But in the Crimea, which was under German occupation for some time, it seems that anecdotal evidence of collaboration with the occupying forces on the part of a small number of Tatars was enough to convince Stalin and the head of the NKVD, Lavrentii Beria, that the entire national group was worthy of punishment.24 With the Chechens and Ingush, accusations of collaboration with the Germans were barely credible, and it is more likely that this was a matter of settling scores with peoples who had proved particularly resistant to Soviet rule before and during the war,25 while the Balkars appear to have been deported on the whim of Beria as an afterthought to the Chechen and Ingush operations.26 Whatever the exact reasoning, underpinning it was the assumption that all members of a given nationality should be tarred with the same brush.
Although most of the deported nations were eventually allowed to return to their homelands, the long-term consequences were serious. The territories from which they had been removed had been repopulated by others, causing grievances which stoked the ethnic conflicts that erupted in the North Caucasus in the 1980s and 1990s. For the Chechens in particular, the experience of exile produced a hardening of attitudes and an even deeper antipathy to Soviet or Russian rule.27
The deported peoples were not the only nationalities to suffer in the course of the Second World War. Ukraine and Belorussia witnessed some of the most destructive battles of the war and were occupied for much of it by a Nazi regime which treated all Slavs as inferior Untermenschen, and planned to rid the territories of much of their population in order to make space for Aryan settlers. Greatest suffering was reserved for the substantial Jewish population of the Soviet Union, up to a million of whom were exterminated in the Holocaust. Over 33,000 Jews were shot in the infamous Babii Yar ravine outside of Kiev, where they were joined by similar numbers of Ukrainians and Russians who had dared to put up resistance, while entire villages were wiped out in reprisal for partisan attacks - this in spite of the fact that many
24 Aleksander Nekrich, The Punished Peoples: The Deportation and Fate of Soviet Minorities at the End of the Second World War (New York: Norton, 1978), pp. 13-35.
25 Abdurahman Avtorkhanov, 'The Chechens and the Ingush during the Soviet Period and its Antecedents', in Marie Bennigsen Broxup (ed.), The North Caucasus Barrier: The Russian Advance towards the Muslim World (London: Hurst, 1992), pp. 146-94,181-4.
26 Tak eto hylo: natsional'nye repressii v SSSR 1919-1952 gody, 3 vols. (Moscow: Insan, 1993), p. 265.
27 For the whole of this section, Pavel Polian, Nepo svoei vole ... Istoriia i geografiia prinudi- tel'nykh migratsii v SSSR (Moscow: O.G.I-Memorial, 2001).
Ukrainians had initially welcomed the Germans in i94i as liberators from the suffering they had endured in the previous decade. The scale of atrocities against the local population inspired many to take up arms behind enemy lines. By mid-1942 up to 100,000 partisans were operational, concentrated in Ukraine. Whatever their initial motivation, many of these partisan groups came to embrace a fully nationalist agenda, leading them to continue to wage their guerrilla war against the Soviets after the German forces were driven out. The Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists continued to operate in the forests of Ukraine well into the 1950s.
258
Ronald Grigor Suny,
259
Terry Martin, 'Modernization or Neo-traditionalism? Ascribed Nationality and Soviet Primordialism', in Sheila Fitzpatrick (ed.),
260
Figures from Isabelle Kreindler, 'The Soviet Deportation of Nationalities: A Summary and Update',
261
Ayshe Seytmuratova, 'The Elders of the New National Movement: Recollections', in Edward A. Allworth (ed.),