The military men on the spot, however, thought that “it was necessary to exterminate a significant portion” to make the others surrender. In the following two decades, the Caucasus lost an estimated 2 million people; some were deported, while others fled to the Ottoman Empire. Many tens of thousands died in the process.9
In the 1930s, Stalin built on that kind of thinking, and as the Second World War ended, he applied it to some of the same areas that had been occupied by Hitler’s army. When the German invaders first came, people wanted to lash out at the Soviet system and hoped to gain a measure of independence.10 Aleksandr Nekrich, later a well-known historian, was in the Crimea when the Tatars were deported in 1944; he recalled how the official Soviet mind and rumor combined to “conclude” that all of them had collaborated with the Nazis.11 The official reason for punishing certain ethnic groups was “betrayal of the motherland,” exactly the same terminology used to name individual collaborators.12
The Soviet variety of ethnic cleansing was an ideological drive to level cultural and ethnic identities that were perceived as standing for actual or potential resistance to the motherland.13 The plan called for the smaller ethnic groups to be uprooted from their traditional communities and “dispersed among the collective farms with Russian, Kazakh, Uzbek, and Kyrgyz populations.”14 The expectation was that the evicted people were to be assimilated, as the more dominant languages and cultures took their course and erased the identities of the outsiders.
One of the first groups to be targeted was the Karachays, a Turkic Islamic people living between the Black and Caspian seas. The accusation was that “most” Karachays had “treacherously joined” the Germans against Soviet rule. One survivor later admitted that “our people” were “100 percent for liberation from the Bolsheviks and the Russians.”15 Instead of achieving liberation, most of them disappeared—even the names of villages, roads, rivers, and mountains were changed to expunge traces of their existence. The deportation took place in a single day, on November 2, 1943. Ismail Baichorov, a decorated Red Army officer who was at home because he had been wounded, was told by the NKVD that he and his entire family were going “to be moved” and had a half-hour to prepare.16
In short order, a total of 69,267 men, women, and children were shipped out. Their autonomous region had already been dissolved as of October 12, and in a pattern following the fate of the Volga Germans, the territory was redistributed among their neighbors.17
The Kalmyks, a Mongolian Buddhist people from the Lower Volga region, had resisted Communism, and some had joined the “White” counterrevolutionary armies after the Russian Revolution. These nomadic cattle herders were wholly unsuited to the collective farming that the Soviet system tried to impose. Some Kalmyks had welcomed the German invaders, who allowed for the dissolution of the collectives, but after the Battle of Stalingrad ended in early 1943, the invaders were driven out.18
Initially Soviet retribution entailed a purge of the responsible members of the party and administration, like those who stayed behind in the Kalmyk Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR) during the occupation. Soon, however, Moscow decided to deport all the Kalmyks for collaborating with the Germans, including the thousands who were fighting in the Red Army.19 Virtually all were forced out of the services and deported as well. Ivan Serov, the deputy head of the NKVD, supervised the main operation, which ran for four days (December 27–30) during which the police picked up 26,359 families or 93,139 persons. Beria told Stalin that the main action was carried out without “excesses” or “incidents.” In fact the winter took its toll, and hundreds died in transit on disease-ridden trains.20
To look at the Kalmyks as one example among many of what happened, we can see the difficulties they faced, given that their culture could not be adapted to the severe climate in the east. After a year the authorities reported that one-third of the Kalmyks could not work because they had no shoes or proper clothing. Few spoke Russian, which made matters worse. Those stuck on collective farms, where even the locals could hardly feed themselves, received practically nothing in compensation for their work. Any who labored in factories were ill at ease with modern heavy machinery and improperly paid and fed. It was officially “expected” that in Siberia thousands would die within months of their arrival. Survivors lived in mud huts or in holes in the ground. In 1946 the police wrote from Novosibirsk province that the Kalmyks were still living in unsuitable buildings like “barns, baths and some even in huts made of tree branches.”21
CHECHEVITSA
The Chechen-Ingush in the North Caucasus never had a chance to collaborate, because German invaders did not reach them. Nevertheless, they were accused of treason behind the lines.22 They were converts to Islam, and as far back as 1827, some of them had declared a jihad against the Russian government. Their popular image was of a group impossible to control, and the prejudicial saying went that if drafted into the Red Army, they would not serve, and when given weapons, they would run for the hills. In fact, like other Soviet Muslims, their service record was not uniformly negative. Nor were they alone among the nations in the USSR in their dislike for Communism and general unwillingness to fight for it. With the approach of the Germans, some certainly commenced an anti-Soviet insurgency, along with other Caucasian minorities.23
Between 1940 and 1944, according to its report, the special counterbanditry branch of the NKVD tracked down 197 “organized bands” with 4,532 “guerrillas” among Chechen and Ingush nationalists. Of them, 657 were killed, 2,762 were captured, and 1,113 were persuaded to surrender.24
By late 1943 Soviet authorities began preparing a Chechevitsa, a roundup and complete deportation of all the peoples of the North Caucasus. It would be punishment for collaboration and a solution to this ethnic problem “once and for all.” After passing through Beria’s apparatus, the appalling decision was approved on January 31, 1944. The charge was “betrayal of the Motherland in the time of the Patriotic war,” with an additional accusation tacked on: that over the years they had participated in “armed raids” and banditry against the Soviet state and its citizens. The authorities began the process by registering the population and devising a detailed, militarylike strategy.
Beria traveled to Grozny to supervise the operation, given its “importance.” The security forces mustered 100,000 troops for an attack initially aimed to pick up no fewer than half a million people. As he explained in his note to Stalin on February 17, the scale was such that “it was decided to conduct operations for eight days, with the first three to collect 300,000 people from all lowland, foothill, and some mountain settlements. In the next four days the evictions will take place in the mountains to get the remaining 150,000.” He expected resistance, so Russian, Ossetian, and other residents were mobilized to assist by watching the fields and livestock after the deportations took place.25