Stalin's Genocides (11 page)

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The Korean deportation was an important milestone in the history of Soviet actions against the nationalities, even though there were some notable exceptions to their generally harsh treatment.11 Soviet officials learned lessons about how to conduct military-like operations against their own people, using surprise and speed as their most valuable weapons to uproot masses of unsuspecting citizens.

They developed techniques—if still imperfect—for transporting at once large numbers of people by rail. NKVD

special units both at the point of embarkation in the Far East and on arrival in Central Asia learned the business of the mass deportation of an entire people, old and young, workers and peasants, party members and not.

Stalin’s campaign against foreign nationalities subsided as the war appeared imminent. The Great Terror against other categories of “enemies of the people” was also called off when Beria replaced Yezhov as head of the NKVD in November 1938 on the eve of the war. Beria then proceeded to purge the entire NKVD organization, much as Yezhov had purged the Yagoda-led security police. With deceptive innocence, Beria accused the NKVD’s previous leaders of allowing excesses against perfectly loyal Soviet citizens, engaging in torture to extract false confessions, and unjustly punishing family members.

As a consequence of the secret protocols of the Nazi–

Soviet Pact of August 23, 1939, whose existence Soviet authorities denied until December 1989, the Soviet army occupied Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, eastern Poland (western Belorussia and western Ukraine), and Bessarabia (Moldova). During the period 1940–41 Soviet authorities removing nations 89

seized control of these territories and incorporated them into the Soviet Union, deporting hundreds of thousands of people in the process. Some scholars from the Baltic states today regard the deportations (6,000 Estonians, 17,000

Latvians, and 17,500 Lithuanians) as the first stage of genocide, especially when combined with murderous military actions against Baltic resistance fighters (the “forest brethren”) resulting from the reconquest of these territories in 1944–45, and renewed deportations in association with collectivization and dekulakization in 1948–49.12

The total number of Baltic peoples deported to Siberia, Central Asia, and the Far North in this period was 118,599 from Lithuania, 52,541 from Latvia, and 32,540

from Estonia.13 The majority of those deported in the initial period of the Nazi–Soviet Pact were members of the ruling elite and intelligentsia; in the period 1948–49 the majority of those sent off were kulaks and middle-class townspeople. They were all told that the deportations were

“forever,” and many tens of thousands died in exile. In other words, the forced deportations of the Baltic peoples were not so much punishment for crimes against the Soviet state as they were part of the Soviet effort to refashion the Baltic social structure and absorb these countries into the Soviet polity.

During World War II Stalin and the Soviet government intensified the attacks against the Poles that had characterized the previous decade of repressions. Whereas in the 1930s Soviet Poles were the primary targets, during the war Polish citizens located in Soviet-occupied territories were arrested, deported, and sometimes executed 90

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by the Soviet authorities. But the language, the style, and form of the repressions were the same. In 1940–41 over 300,000 Poles, mostly women and children, were forcibly deported from their homes in Soviet-occupied eastern Poland (western Belorussia and western Ukraine) to special settlements in Central Asia, the Far North, and Siberia.

Many thousands of women and children died in the pitiful circumstances of exile, even after a formal “amnesty” was proclaimed in the summer of 1941.14 Many other Poles were seized and imprisoned, including approximately 22,000 army officers, as well as government officials, religious leaders, and professionals, most of whom were also reserve officers in the Polish army.

We now have the documents to fill in the details of what officials of the Polish Government-in-Exile suspected from the very beginning: that Stalin and Beria ordered the execution of these detainees with the justification that

“they are all,” in Beria’s words, “sworn and incontrovert-ible enemies of the Soviet state” and would sooner or later cause trouble for the Soviet authorities. The cases would be “processed without summonses, statements of accusations, preliminary investigations, or bringing of charges.”

Instead, a Politburo resolution of March 5, 1940, approved the “maximum penalty: death by shooting”; and special NKVD troikas confirmed the predetermined outcome. 15

In April 1940 the Polish officers and men, located at three major NKVD detention camps, Kozelsk (east of Smolensk), Ostashkov (near Kalinin/Tver), and Staro-belsk (near Khar’kov), and several additional locations in western Ukraine and western Belorussia, were driven by removing nations 91

trucks to isolated local forests and fields, executed with a shot in the back of the head, and buried in mass graves.

Some were killed right away in various NKVD installa-tions. A few escaped execution by convincing their NKVD

interrogators that they would work for the Soviet cause.

When the Nazis discovered the graves of 4,400 victims in the Katyn forest in the early spring of 1943 and tried to exploit the killing for anti-Soviet propaganda purposes, Stalin and his lieutenants were able to convince their Western allies that this was all a Nazi hoax. At Nuremberg and after, Soviet denial was a major source of justifiable Polish anger, frustration, and enmity toward the Soviet Union, to be sure, but also toward the Western Allies, who had refused to take up the cause of the murdered Poles, even when they began to suspect that the Soviets had murdered the officers.

What became known in subsequent accounts as the

Katyn Forest massacre was a mirror action to the Nazi Operation Tannenberg, carried out in the first months of the German occupation of Poland. In that operation the SS had assembled lists of sixty thousand members of the Polish intelligentsia to be hunted down and executed. Hitler’s idea was to decapitate the Polish nation by destroying its leadership: priests, schoolteachers, government officials, and military officers, among others. Deprived of its elite, the Polish nation would serve the Third Reich as workers, helots. Stalin’s idea was pretty much the same: to destroy the ability of the Poles to resist the Soviet takeover of their eastern territory. Molotov could scarcely contain his glee at the signing of the Nazi–Soviet Pact and its con-92

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sequences, when he stated in October 1939: “One swift blow to Poland, first by the German Army, and then by the Red Army, and nothing was left of this ugly offspring of the Versailles Treaty.”16

There can be no question that Stalin and Beria ordered the mass executions of the 21,857 Polish officers and men for the purposes of mutilating the Polish nation. It also was the culmination of a decade of actions against Polish citizens of the Soviet Union and of Poland that were ratio-nalized by the ostensible Polish threat to Soviet territorial integrity. There is good reason to think that these actions, when looked at as a whole, derived from deeply embedded Russian and Soviet prejudices of anti-Polonism—the Pole as nobleman (“
Pan
”), as the effete yet dangerous, inherently exploitative, and untrustworthy neighbor of the East Slavic peoples—Russians, Ukrainians, and Belorussians.

The Katyn act of mass murder in June 1940, denied by the Soviet regime until the very end of its existence and skimmed over by Western commentators during the war, at Nuremberg, and even after, should be considered one of the most unambiguous cases of genocide in the history of the twentieth century. On December 29, 1989, the Congress of People’s Deputies publicly recognized the secret protocols for the first time in Soviet history and apolo-gized for them. However, during the Putin era, especially, one hears very little about the Soviet depredations during that infamous period of occupation, forced deportation of peoples, and genocide. The Russian government has criticized recent commemorations of the seventieth anniver-sary of the Nazi–Soviet Pact for one-sidedly ignoring the removing nations 93

Soviet Union’s difficult strategic situation in 1939 and unjustly criticizing its attempts to defend its Soviet territory.

Stalin’s animus toward the Poles, Germans, and Koreans was matched by his growing mistrust of many non-Russian peoples inside the Soviet Union. These nations did not have “homelands” outside the USSR’s borders to spy for, which might lead one to think that perhaps it was not the real threat of these or other peoples’ treachery that motivated Stalin’s actions against them. The mistrusted nations—the “punished peoples” in Alexander Nekrich’s pioneering work—included, perhaps most importantly, the Ukrainians.17 But the terrible mass starvation of the killer famine of 1932–33 could not be followed by a full-scale deportation to Siberia and the Far North; there were quite simply too many Ukrainians to deport them all, and too much fertile agricultural land in the Ukrainian steppe that needed able farmhands.

During the war Stalin focused his campaign against suspected traitorous nations on the Muslim peoples of the northern Caucasus and Black Sea littoral. There is no necessary reason to think that Stalin developed his suspicions about these nations as a consequence of his Georgian background, though this may well have played a role.

Much more salient was his mistrust of the independence and stalwart opposition of Chechens and Ingush (related northern Caucasus peoples), Balkars, Karachaevtsy, Crimean Tatars, and others to collectivization and to the general regimentation of political, cultural, and social life emanating from Moscow. Archival materials from the 1930s show that even Chechen party leaders refused to 94

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allow their wives to be engaged in the economy, and that Chechen mountaineers (
gortsy
) fought collectivizers and labor recruiters from Grozny, who desperately needed able-bodied men for the petroleum industry. At the same time, the NKVD reported that hundreds of illegal armed Chechen groups operated in the Caucasus, sometimes engaging in pitched battles with NKVD units.18 Some historians have argued that a major source of Soviet violence was the overwhelming need for homogeneity from the center and an antagonism toward genuine autonomy, real cultural difference, and idiosyncratic arrangements of any kind. Stalin’s attacks on these non-Russian peoples can be partly explained in this framework.

Already in the late 1930s, Stalin began a campaign to extol the virtues of the Great Russian people. History books reversed the earlier Soviet condemnation of Russian imperialism in Central Asia and the Caucasus and increasingly lauded the Russian nation for bringing civilization and development to the backward peoples of the Russian Empire. Soviet patriotism, as it developed during the war, tried to absorb the experience of the subject nations into that of the Russians. Numerous non-Slavic soldiers served shoulder to shoulder with Russians, Belorussians, and Ukrainians, learning Russian for the first time, while taking great pride in common victories. But any nation that stood in the way of the melding of Soviet and Russian patriotism was imperiled. The deportations of the peoples of the northern Caucasus and Crimea in 1944 can be understood only in this context.

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As usual, Stalin and Beria used security issues as the justification for deporting the peoples of the northern Caucasus, whom they accused of collaborating, or at least sympathizing with, the Nazis during their invasion of the Soviet Union.19 No doubt Stalin and Beria were convinced of Chechen and Ingush treachery. In concise, factual communications, Beria described to Stalin the efficient, military-like assault on the Chechens and Ingush that began on the night of February 23–24, 1944. “According to your orders,” the mission was accomplished, wrote Beria, making it clear to posterity that this action took place on Stalin’s initiative.20 The entire Chechen and Ingush nations, 496,460 men, women, and children, party members and heroes of the Soviet Union, as well as simple sheep-herders, oil workers, and mountaineers, were rounded up in a matter of days and deported first in guarded trucks to railheads and then in sealed trains, often little more than cattle cars, to Kazakhstan and Kirghizia.

As was so often the case in the history of forced deportations, there was a very high rate of mortality during the transport itself. Some ten thousand Chechens and Ingush died en route. There was little food or water available to the deportees, and the conditions of sanitation were primitive and inhuman. Periodically, the trains would halt by the sidings and the dead bodies would be thrown out of the train cars and quickly buried (and sometimes not) before the trains continued on the deadly trek. NKVD

medical officials complained that normal provisions for the health and welfare of the deportees were completely 96

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lacking. When the trains arrived at their destinations and the survivors were transported to the special settlements that were to accommodate them, the familiar story pre-vailed: there were no supplies to build shelters, no food to fill their bellies, and no tools to begin work. The local Kazakhs, themselves in no shape to provide help to anyone, refused to allow the Chechens and Ingush into their kolkhozes and scattered settlements. The deportees had to scrape in the dirt for food, were beset by the spread of typhus, and died—according to Chechen and Ingush historians—by the hundreds of thousands, up to 40 percent of the population. NKVD data indicate that between 20 and 25 percent of the Chechens and Ingush died during the first four years of exile, with child mortality higher than the rest.21

We know that Stalin ordered the operation and Beria carried it out. We also know that the Chechens and Ingush were scattered throughout the Kazakh population for the purpose of denationalizing them, if not eliminating them as people. Chechen and Ingush historians to this day consider this a case of genocide. There is much to recommend their assertion. The land of the Chechens was to be re-populated by other nationalities; the Chechen and Ingush culture was to vanish in the steppes of Kazakhstan. At the very least, then, this was a case of attempted cultural genocide. Even after 1956, when Nikita Khrushchev rehabilitated many of the other “punished peoples” in his speech at the Twentieth Party Congress and allowed them to return to their homelands, the Chechens and Ingush were told they were to remain in exile. However, they paid removing nations 97