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

Copying Hitler’s techniques with the Jews, Beria forced the Chechen leaders and mullahs to dissuade their people from resisting. All accessible villages were surrounded by NKVD troops and the villagers called to an assembly from which a few were allowed back to the houses to fetch possessions. This time, the deportees were allowed to take half a ton of possessions per family. As a result, 14,200 carriages and 1,000 open wagons crowded the railways to the Urals and to Siberia at a time when military supplies and troops needed the tracks. Nineteen thousand troops, horses, and American trucks—brought in through Iran—were mustered; bridges and roads were repaired; Siberian and Kazakh authorities were warned of the influx. Beria sent Stalin telegrams assuring him that the operation was going smoothly. It was not. Heavy snow meant some villages could not be evacuated, so Beria’s men, determined to finish the operation in eight days, burned the villagers alive in barns, stables, and mosques. Mikeil Gvishiani flew from Vladivostok to help Beria. At Khaibakh, near Nashkh—the heart of Chechen culture and the center of resistance—Gvishiani locked several hundred villagers, from newborn babies to men of 110, in stables and set fire to them, machine-gunning those who broke out.¹⁴

The Chechen and Ingush deportees, toughened by highland life and allowed to take some possessions, stood up to deportation better than the Karachai and Kalmyks. As Dostoevsky had noticed in prison in Omsk and as Solzhenitsyn was to remark, Chechens and Ingush had the mettle necessary to endure. Even so, by October 1945, of the half-million deported, a fifth had perished. Chechnya and Ingushetia were wiped from the map: parts of the territories, like that of the Karachai, were added to Georgia, some given to the Lak people of Dagestan. For their efforts the Supreme Soviet awarded Beria, Bogdan Kobulov, Kruglov, and Serov the Order of Suvorov (first degree); Gvishiani, Merkulov, and Abakumov received less prestigious decorations.

As he received his award, Beria was deporting yet another Caucasian people, the Balkars, Turkic shepherds like the Karachai. The Balkars had suffered badly from the 37th Red Army on November 28–9, 1942: suspected of collaborating with German patrols, over 500 Balkar villagers—mostly women and children—in the Chereke valley had been shot in their houses. On March 7, 1944, the Balkars were given thirty minutes to get into the NKVD’s Studebaker trucks. In the Kabarda-Balkar capital of Nalchik, Beria informed the local Circassians that the Balkar lands would be given to Georgia. Three weeks later the Balkars were unloaded from trains in the frozen Kirgiz steppes, where they were ostracized as traitors. Of the 37,000 who had left the Caucasus, about 2,000 died on the journey or soon after. Some Kabarda Circassians had been accidentally deported and were sent back, some of them to be deported again with other Kabarda later that year.

The Crimean Tatars were next. In April 1944, Kobulov and Serov drew up for Beria an ethnic map of the Crimea and accused Tatar soldiers of deserting to the Germans.¹⁵ Beria informed Stalin of “the undesirability of Crimean Tatars residing any longer in a frontier zone” and arranged with the Uzbek authorities for them to be moved 2,000 miles across central Asia. Stalin’s State Defense Committee issued a resolution—which no Crimean Tatar saw for forty-five years—confiscating their cattle and requiring them to pay for their transportation. The NKVD and NKGB allocated 32,000 men to round them up and the government ordered 75,000 planks for the cattle wagons in which the 165,000 Tatars were to travel. The Uzbeks were allocated 400 tons of fuel to truck the Tatars to the remote villages where they would be confined under threat of twenty years’ hard labor in the camps if they moved more than three kilometers. By May 18, two weeks ahead of the deadline, Kobulov and Serov, under Beria’s direction, had deported all the Tatars, mostly children and their mothers. Some went to northern Russia as forced labor for cellulose factories; 6,000 were arrested as anti-Soviet elements, and 700 shot or hanged as “spies.”