Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

The first to suffer were Koreans living between Vladivostok and the Korean border, and elsewhere in the Far Eastern region. They had been highly regarded immigrants: some were Orthodox converts who had moved to Russian territory at the turn of the century after being threatened with beheading by the Korean emperor. Later waves were fleeing the Japanese, who colonized Korea in 1910. The Koreans had supported the Bolsheviks in 1917; they supplied most of the USSR’s rice and soybeans and underwent collectivization with less suffering than other ethnic groups. They had lost in the purges some of their intelligentsia and party leadership, but they hoped for political autonomy and, despite ominous accusations in Pravda that Chinese and Koreans were tools of the Japanese secret services, never expected to be told in August 1937 that all 180,000 of them were to be deported to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.³⁸

Soviet Koreans were better equipped, morally and physically, and luckier than later deportees. Each was allowed to take sixty-five pounds of luggage, and most chose rice and soybean seeds so as to start farming again in central Asia. Few spoke Russian, let alone Kazakh or Uzbek, but they were welcomed by the central Asian party leaders, who had not yet been purged, and they adapted to growing cotton and watermelons as well as rice. Nevertheless, some died on the slow train journey across Siberia, and many froze to death in their first central Asian winter. In 1938 they suffered further. Korean-language schools were closed, as were all their newspapers except one. A process of forced assimilation had begun that after two generations would kill the Korean language in central Asia. The land from which the Koreans had been driven was seized by NKVD frontier guards and a few thousand Russian peasant deportees.

In winter 1937 and 1938 it was the turn of the Kurds, especially those living in the enclave of Nakhichevan on the Turkish–Iranian border. A people without a state for 600 years, hounded by Turkey, Iran, the British rulers of Iraq, and the French in Syria, the 48,000 Kurds from Nakhichevan and as many more from the rest of Azerbaijan and Armenia were given twenty-four hours to get into the trains the NKVD had marshaled. They had none of the Koreans’ luck, going in summer clothing to open steppes in temperatures of −40°. They were split up, two or three families to a Kazakh village, and the senior male of each household was taken by the NKVD, never to be seen again. Only in prison and the GULAG were groups of Kurds able to support each other; the resistance of 140 Kurds who used their boots as weapons against the thieves and bandits who ran a camp barracks is celebrated in a Kurdish folk ballad. ³⁹ Statistics, if kept, have not been found, but forbidden to speak their language, to meet each other, let alone to return home, survivors believe that about 40 percent of the Kurds perished.

In February 1938 all Iranians in the USSR, refugees from the Shah or not, were marked out for arrest. Once again, numbers are unknown. That spring, as party leaders were building dachas around Sochi and in the mountains of the western Caucasus, Ezhov deported several thousand local Greeks. A few escaped to Greece; most shared the fate of the Kurds.

The open and secret protocols of the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact gave the USSR almost everything that the Tsar and Lenin had lost: the Baltic states and Poland’s eastern territories. Beria’s task was to filter out from 20 million new citizens all who would in the USSR have been purged. From September 1939, when Poland was invaded by Hitler and Stalin, to June 1941, when Hitler attacked the USSR, these new Soviet citizens were sorted by two criteria: ethnic and sociopolitical. Poland’s eastern territories were predominantly populated by Jewish townspeople, Ukrainian and Belorussian peasants, and ruled by Polish landlords, administrators, and urban intelligentsia. At first the Ukrainians and Belorussians were treated gently, collectivization being the worst they underwent. Some even welcomed liberation from their Polish overlords. The nationalist Western Ukrainians or Ruthenians, however, hated both Soviets and Poles, and were reclassified by Beria as hostile.

In the Baltic states, the Soviets removed all government employees, those who owned land or factories, or who belonged to noncommunist parties, and those whose intellectual prestige fostered national pride. Too little time was left between the Soviet invasion of June 1940 and the Nazi counterinvasion for Beria to do more than begin this task.