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

Several peoples of the USSR were branded as collaborators. First came the Turkic shepherds of the northwest Caucasus, the Karachai. In the winter of 1942–3 they had allegedly shown German patrols the mountain passes into Georgia and joined Nazi militias. Like many Caucasian peoples, some Karachai had hoped that Hitler would free them after twenty years of terror. Even after the Germans left, a Karachai national committee, fewer than a hundred desperadoes, fought a guerrilla war. But most Karachai did not collaborate: many families in the mountains even hid evacuated Russian Jewish children. During the brief German occupation, Colonel Unukh Kochkarov, the leader of the Karachai Red partisans, had been captured. When he escaped and rejoined the Red Army he was shot by the NKVD. Beria and his deputy Ivan Serov were interested only in the fiction of a “traitor-nation.” Serov and Mikhail Suslov, the NKVD controller of partisans, personally led the repression. In mid-October 1943 the Karachai autonomous district was abolished and 53,000 NKVD troops moved in to deport 69,267 Karachai, mostly women and children, to Kazakhstan. They were joined by their menfolk when the latter were demobilized. The deportation was cruel: no possessions, even warm clothing, were allowed. A million sheep were left untended. On the long freezing rail journey to Kazakhstan and on the central Asian steppes, 40 percent of the deportees, including 22,000 children, perished.

Then it was the turn of the Kalmyks. These Buddhist Mongols whose land lies between Volgograd and the Caspian Sea had been for centuries a football kicked between the Russian and Chinese empires. On December 27, 1943, they were accused of handing over their cattle to the Germans and their autonomous republic was also abolished. The Kalmyks were to be scattered from the Arctic to eastern Siberia, steppe cattle herders used as forced laborers in forestry and dam building. With one hour’s notice, without clothing or food and in terrible cold, over 90,000 Kalmyks were deported, to be followed by 20,000 of their menfolk still fighting in the Red Army. The trucks taking the Kalmyks to the railheads were American war aid.

On April 2, 1944, Beria reported to Stalin that the deportation had been carried out “without events or excesses.”¹³ The Kalmyks were so dispersed that any figure for the number of dead must be guesswork but the 1953 census located only 53,019. In 1939 there had been 134,000. In some areas only one in fifteen families survived, eating grass and twigs. On discharge, Kalmyk soldiers were treated worse than GULAG prisoners—forced to labor all day for 700 grams of bread. In November 1944 Beria was compelled by complaints from the Siberian authorities to ask Anastas Mikoyan to provide 36 tons of soap, 18 tons of tea, 90 tons of salt, some wool and cotton so that survivors might last through the next winter. Molotov, in the name of the Council of Commissars, insisted that the destitute Kalmyks pay.

Solomon Milshtein boasted to Bogdan Kobulov that, by banning baggage and cutting space, as half the deportees were children, he had cut the number of trains to 194, each of 64 carriages, to deport 150,000 Karachai and Kalmyks; the typhus that broke out was not, in his view, his fault.

Two successful genocidal operations led Beria to undertake a more difficult deportation: that of the Ingush and Chechens. These two related peoples (the Vainakh) had for 200 years fought a guerrilla war against the Russian invaders. In Soviet times the resistance, particularly of the eastern Vainakh, the Chechens, had been fierce. Chechen rebellions in the 1920s and 1930s, when they captured whole towns and drove out the GPU and Red Army, had not been forgiven by Stalin; nor had the Chechens and Ingush forgotten the NKVD’s violence against them. Some educated Chechens looked to Germany. Hitler’s ideologists had declared Chechens, Circassians, and other indigenous Caucasians proto-Aryans, and the Germans promised recognition as human beings, even political autonomy.

As Georgians, Stalin, Beria, and Kobulov detested the Ingush and Chechens with that antipathy of lowland townsmen to highland warriors that goes back to the dawn of history and is still felt in Georgia. The NKVD chiefs who conducted the Chechen and Ingush operation were also predominantly Georgian. On February 17, 1944, Beria announced that he would deport 459,486 people in eight days; as well as Chechen and Ingush, some of their Osetian, Dagestani, and even Russian neighbors would be rounded up. Beria requested leave for this “serious operation”; he wanted to take personal part.