For Ubushayev, the subject was more than simply historical grazing ground. He had been a toddler in 1943 when the Kalmyks were deported, and spent his early years in Siberia. His father fought and died at the front, for the same country that would soon deport his entire family. Ubushayev recalled days as a young child spent with his grandfather scouring the frozen Siberian earth for potatoes, while his mother worked until late at night on the collective farm, each day returning home to find her daughter more and more ill, until one day she died. He was certainly a historian with a connection to his subject. 'Its the question that's bothered me my whole life,' he said, as we sat on spongy sofas in his living room, the television flickering silently in the corner. 'Why did it happen? Why us?'
Despite the fact that even mentioning the deportation publicly was not allowed until perestroika, it was a question that Ubushayev had a chance to put privately to Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister during the war, when he visited the ageing Molotov at his dacha outside Moscow in the late 1970s. Molotov recalled a 1943 meeting of the State Defence Committee, the Soviet war planning body that consisted of just a few top Soviet leaders. Stalin had a list with different nationalities on it. The military top brass criticized the 110th Kalmyk Cavalry Division, which had fought the Germans on the River Don near Stalingrad and had eventually surrendered. 'Molotov told me that Beria was in favour of deporting the Kalmyks. I asked him why he didn't speak out against it, and he said that nobody at the time had any real information, and if Beria said it, who were they to disagree?' If Molotov's story is to be believed, the fate of the Kalmyks was sealed on the basis of a few words from Lavrenty Beria, one of the most odious of Stalin's henchmen, and a flick of the Soviet leader's pencil.
I headed to a bungalow on the outskirts of town to meet Boris Ochirov, a stocky pensioner, dressed for the summer heat of the steppe in only a pair of shorts. His torso was hairless and wrinkle-free, and he had a full head of closely cropped grey hair. He greeted me cheerily, and we took seats in his kitchen, where he decanted me a cup of traditional Kalmyk tea, a lukewarm buttery brew liable to induce retching in the uninitiated.
He started to tell me about 28 December 1943. He was only seven years old at the time, but the events remained seared into his mind. It was a viciously icy morning on the steppe, and almost all the young and healthy men were away at the front, so the villages were filled with women, children, and the elderly. It was just a few days before New Year's Eve, and while few people were in a festive spirit, families were nonetheless planning small celebrations and events to humour the children and forget the difficult times in which they were living. As dawn broke, the roar of engines could be heard approaching every village in Kalmykia, and out of the mist came shiny new Studebaker trucks. Given to the Soviet war effort by the Americans through the lend-lease programme, the trucks were part of convoys shipped to Murmansk, and had been brought all the way down from the Arctic Circle to the Caspian Sea.
Out of the Studebakers hopped soldiers from the NKVD, recalled Ochirov. They read the bemused villagers a decree informing them that the entire Kalmyk people were to be deported for treason. Elista had been occupied by the Nazis in August 1942, and was under German control for around five months, until the Soviets retook it at the end of the year. The Kalmyks were accused, en masse, of collaboration. They were given about half an hour to gather their possessions and prepare for permanent exile.
Some Kalmyks were cruelly beaten and robbed by the soldiers; others, such as Ochirov's family, were treated relatively well. They were allowed to slaughter a cow and pack the meat for the journey ahead; his mother took her sewing machine. 'They put us in the trucks with our things. The dogs were barking, and the cows and sheep were stamping their feet. People think only dogs can sense this kind of thing, but the livestock also knew something bad was happening. It was such chaos, such a terrible, terrible scene. The dogs ran after the trucks as we drove away, howling like mad. I'll never forget that scene.'
They were driven to a railway station, where a long train made up of cattle cars was already waiting. The Kalmyks were told to get in, fifteen or twenty families to each wagon. Tt was absolutely freezing—the height of winter, and we were journeying into Siberia. It must have been minus thirty or minus thirty-five most of the time. The journey lasted about twelve days, and by the end we were disgusting, lice-ridden wrecks. I remember there was a hole cut into the floor of the middle of the carriage for pissing and shitting. If we stopped at a station, sometimes they would let one or two people out to get some hot water. But I didn't get out once for the whole journey.'
At each station, guards walked along the platform and called up to enquire if there were any dead bodies. 'There would often be one or two people who had succumbed to the cold. We'd throw out their bodies, and they'd be taken away.' Parents bade farewell to children this way, husbands to wives.
By 4 January 1944, Beria was able to report personally to Stalin that '26,359 families, consisting 93,139 persons, were loaded onto 46 special
^ • >14
trains.
The Kalmyks were one of many nationalities to be deported. The Chechens, Crimean Tatars, and ethnic Germans living inside the Soviet Union were deported to either Central Asia or Siberia, as well as several other smaller nationalities. In total, the Soviet Union deported around two million of its own citizens during the war.15 The Kalmyk operation alone, one of the smallest in scale, required 2,975 officers of the NKVD as well as thousands of soldiers. It also entailed the logistical challenge of freeing up the trucks required, and took dozens of trains, which could have been helping the war effort, out of action for several weeks. The deportation of the much larger Chechen and Ingush populations in early 1944 saw 83,003 regular Soviet troops and 17,698 from the NKVD move into the region in the weeks prior to the roundup, ostensibly to reinforce the rear of the Soviet war effort, but actually to prepare for the deportation.16 When it occurred, it involved 190 trains and an entire tank division.17 For a country that was stretched to breaking point fighting the Nazis, it was an extraordinary use of energy and resources.
There is no doubt that some Kalmyks had indeed welcomed the Nazis when they occupied the region, and it is not hard to see why. The Soviet regime had closed down most of Kalmykia's Buddhist temples, and the territory had suffered as much as anywhere else in the country from the previous two decades of civil war, collectivization, and terror. When the Nazis took Elista on 17 August 1942, after rounding up around eight hundred locals, mostly Jews, and shooting them on the outskirts of town, they immediately set about a 'hearts and minds' operation. Buddhist temples were reopened in many settlements, and a Kalmyk-language newspaper called New Life was set up. Some Kalmyks voluntarily went over to fight for the Germans.
But even if there was sympathy for the Nazis among certain sections of the Kalmyk population, there were also many Soviet patriots who fought to the death for their country. More than twenty-three thousand went to the front, and 22 were given the 'Hero of the Soviet Union medal, the highest military award. Kalmyk soldiers in the Red Army, who knew nothing of what was going on back home, were removed from the front as the deportation got under way—the officers were told they were being sent to form a special regiment in the east of the country. Instead, they were sent to labour camps.
Roughly two weeks after embarking on their forced journey through the coldest part of the world at the coldest time of year, those Kalmyks who had been hardy enough to survive arrived at Siberian rail hubs. There, they were divided up and scattered across remote towns and villages. A decree published in 1948 stated that the Kalmyk people had been deported 'forever, and with no right of return to the previous place of habitation.' Ubushayev estimated that about 40 per cent of those deported died either on the journey or during the first months of adaptation to their harsh new living conditions. Escape attempts were punishable by twenty years in the Gulag, and anyone caught abetting an escapee could count on five years of the same. To leave their 'special settlements' even for a few days required written permission.