Gulag

Given the numbers, the speed of these deportations was remarkable, surpassing even the rapidity of the Polish and Baltic deportations. Perhaps this was because the NKVD had, by now, a great deal of experience: this time around, there was no indecisiveness about who should be allowed to take what, who should be arrested, or what the procedure should be. In May 1944, 31,000 NKVD officers, soldiers, and operatives completed the entire deportation of 200,000 Tartars in three days, using 100 jeeps, 250 trucks, and 67 trains. Special orders, prepared in advance, limited the amount of baggage that each family could bring. As they were allowed only fifteen to twenty minutes to pack, most did not take even half of that. The vast majority of the Tartars were packed on trains and sent to Uzbekistan—men, women, children, and old people. Between 6,000 and 8,000 died before arriving.²⁹

If anything, the Chechen operation was crueler still. Many observers remember that the NKVD used American-made Studebakers in the Chechen deportations, recently purchased through the Lend-Lease program, and shipped over the border from Iran. Many have also described how the Chechens were taken off the Studebakers, and placed into sealed trains: they were not only deprived of water, like “ordinary” prisoners, but also of food. Up to 78,000 Chechens may have died on the transport trains alone.³⁰

Upon their arrival in their designated place of exile—Kazakhstan, central Asia, northern Russia—those deportees who had not been arrested separately and sent to the Gulag were placed in special villages, just like those that the Poles and the Balts had settled, and were told that an escape attempt would bring a twenty-year camp sentence. Their experiences were similar too. Disoriented, removed from their tribal and village societies, many failed to adjust. Usually despised by the local population, frequently unemployed, they rapidly grew weak and sick. Perhaps the shock of the new climate was greater: “When we arrived in Kazakhstan,” one Chechen deportee remembered, “the ground was frozen hard, and we thought we would all die.”³¹ By 1949, hundreds of thousands of the Caucasians, and between a third and a half of the Crimean Tartars were dead.³²

But from Moscow’s point of view, there was one important difference between the wartime waves of arrest and deportation, and those that had happened earlier: the choice of target was new. For the first time, Stalin had decided to eliminate not just members of particular, suspect nationalities, or categories of political “enemies,” but entire nations—men, women, children, grandparents—and wipe them off the map.

Perhaps “genocide” is not the proper term for these deportations, since there were no mass executions. In later years, Stalin would also seek collaborators and allies among these “enemy” groups, so his hatred was not purely racial. “Cultural genocide,” however, is not inappropriate. After they had gone, the names of all of the deported peoples were eliminated from official documents—even from the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. The authorities wiped their homelands off the map, abolishing the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Republic, the Volga-German Autonomous Republic, the Kabardino-Balkar Autonomous Republic, and the Karachai Autonomous Province. The Crimean Autonomous Republic was also liquidated, and Crimea simply became another Soviet province. Regional authorities destroyed cemeteries, renamed towns and villages, and removed the former inhabitants from the history books.³³

In their new homes, all of the Muslim deportees—Chechen, Ingush, Balkar, Karachai, and Tartar—were forced to send their children to Russian-language primary schools. All of them were discouraged from using their own languages, from practicing their religions, from remembering their past. Without a doubt, the Chechens, the Tartars, the Volga Germans, the smaller Caucasian nations—and, over a longer period, the Balts and the Poles—were meant to vanish, to be absorbed into the Russian-speaking Soviet world. In the end, these nations did “reappear” after the death of Stalin, albeit slowly. Although the Chechens were allowed to return home in 1957, the Tartars could not do so until the Gorbachev era. They received their Crimean “citizenship”—their legal right to residence— only in 1994.

Given the climate of the time, the cruelty of the war, and the presence, a few thousand kilometers to the west, of another planned genocide, some have wondered why Stalin did not simply murder the ethnic groups he so despised. My guess is that the destruction of the cultures, but not of the peoples, suited his purposes better. The operation rid the USSR of what he thought of as “enemy” social structures: bourgeois, religious, and national institutions that might resist him; educated people who might oppose him. At the same time, it also preserved more “units of labor” for future use.