Gulag

According to trustworthy information received by the military authorities, there are, among the German population living in the Volga area, thousands and tens of thousands of diversionists and spies who, on a signal being given from Germany, are to carry out sabotage in the area inhabited by the Germans of the Volga . . . [However] none of the Germans of the Volga area have reported to the Soviet authorities the existence of such a large number of diversionists and spies among the Volga Germans; consequently the German population of the Volga area conceals enemies of the Soviet people and of Soviet authority in its midst.²¹

The Soviet authorities had “trustworthy information” that there were thousands of spies, yet no spies had been reported. Ergo, everybody was guilty of hiding the enemy.

The “collaborators” included several small Caucasian nations—the Karachai, the Balkars, the Kalmyks, the Chechens, and the Ingush—as well as the Crimean Tartars and some other small minority groups: Meskhetian Turks, Kurds, and Khemshils, as well as even smaller groups of Greeks, Bulgarians, and Armenians.²² Of these, only the Chechen and Tartar deportations were ever made public in Stalin’s lifetime. Their exile, although actually carried out in 1944, was announced in the newspaper Izvestiya as having taken place in June 1946:

During the Great Patriotic War, when the peoples of the USSR were heroically defending the honor and independence of the Motherland in the struggle against the German-Fascist invaders, many Chechen and Crimean Tartars, at the instigation of German agents, joined volunteer units organized by the Germans . . . In connection with this, the Chechens and Crimean Tartars were resettled in other regions of the USSR.²³

In fact, there is no evidence of massive Chechen or Tartar collaboration, although the Germans did actively recruit Chechens and Tartars, whereas they did not actively recruit Russians. German forces stopped to the west of Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, and no more than a few hundred Chechens crossed the front line.²⁴ An NKVD report from the time speaks of only 335 “bandits” in the republic.²⁵ Similarly, although the Germans did occupy Crimea, did co-opt Tartars into the occupation regime, and did draft Tartars into the Wehrmacht—just as they drafted the French and the Dutch—there is no evidence that Tartars collaborated any more or less than did people from other occupied regions of the Soviet Union (or of Europe), or that the Tartars participated in the murder of Crimea’s Jews. One historian has pointed out, in fact, that more Tartars fought against Nazi Germany in the Red Army than fought with the Wehrmacht.²⁶

In fact, Stalin’s aim, at least in deporting the Caucasians and the Tartars, was probably not revenge for collaboration. He seems, rather, to have used the war as a form of cover story, as an excuse to carry out long-planned ethnic-cleansing operations. The Czars had dreamed of a Crimea free of the Tartars ever since Catherine the Great had incorporated the Crimean peninsula into the Russian Empire. The Chechens had also plagued Russia’s Czars, and had caused even worse trouble for the Soviet Union as well. A series of anti-Russian and anti-Soviet uprisings had taken place in Chechnya, some following the Revolution, others after collectivization in 1929. Another rebellion had occurred as recently as 1940. All the evidence seems to indicate that Stalin simply wanted to wipe his hands of this troublesome, deeply anti-Soviet people.²⁷

Like the deportations from Poland, the Volga German, Caucasian, and Crimean deportations were very large. There were, by the war’s end, 1.2 million deported Soviet Germans, 90,000 Kalmyks, 70,000 Karachai, 390,000 Chechens, 90,000 Ingush, 40,000 Balkars, and 180,000 Crimean Tartars as well as 9,000 Finns and others.²⁸