The Punished Peoples by Aleksandr M. Nekrich   Translated from Russian by G. Saunders. WW Norton Company.

p.40 [Karachai Autonomous Region] ... in November 1943, the entire Karachai population was deported from their native lands and shipped in closely guarded freight cars to "special settlements" in Central Asia and Kazakhstan. The Karachai Autonomous Region was abolished. To make this dissolution irreversible, two districts -- Karachaiskii and Uchku_Lanskii-- together with the former capital of the region.. were transferred to the Georgian SSR, and became a part of the Klukhori district....

The deportation of the Karachai occurred while the overwhelming majority of the male population was serving in the Red Army.

p. 56 [Chechen-Ingush ASSR] In August 1942 the decision was made to mobilize Chechens and Ingush into the Red Army on a voluntary basis. A second mobilization was carried out from January 25 to February 5, 1943, and a third in March of that year....

In addition, 13,363 Chechens and Ingush underwent military training in the ranks of the people's militia (narodonoe opolchenie). ..

V.I. Filkin cites the data which he considers incomplete on the number of Chechens and Ingush drafted into the active army. He gives the figure of more than 18,500 not counting those drafted before the war began.

Several hundred Chechens and Ingush were a part of the garrison of the legendary Brest Fortress. But the attempts to play down this fact continues to this day.

Not long after the Germans were driven from the Caucasus reconstruction work began in Checheno-Ingushetia began as elsewhere ...

p.58 February 23,1944 was Red Army Day. Everywhere men were invited to meetings at the village Soviet buildings. No one suspected that disaster was at hand. Studebaker trucks rolled up (lend-lease from American allies to help the Red Army). Soldiers holding automatics appeared. The Chechens were held at gun point. In every village the decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet was read, announcing the total deportation of the Chechens and Ingush for treason and for collaboration with the enemy. Twenty kilograms of baggage per family was the maximum that could be taken.

p.60 The native population which had numbered 425,000 before the war.. was forcibly removed. Chechens and Ingush from Northern Ossetia and Dagestan shared their fate. Similarly, Chechens and Ingush in other cities and regions of the Soviet Union were deported. Only in Moscow did two Chechens manage to remain during the period of deportation. Part of the territory, the Prigorodnyi district primarily populated by the Ingush was transferred to the Northern Ossetian ASSR. At the same time, by the order of the authorities, tens of thousands of Russians, Avars, Dargins, Ossetians, and Ukrainians as well were resettled in Grozny region. There was one main reason for this -- to make the restoration of the Chechen- Ingush ASSR impossible in the future.

p.61 [Kabardino-Balkar ASSR] The war reached the territory of the Kabardino-Balkar ASSR in the fall of 1942.... The occupation of Kabardino-Balkaria was brief, from two to six months depending on the region....

At the beginning of the war, five-thousand Balkars joined the Red Army and many of them died fighting for their country. More than six hundred men from the Balkar village of Gundelen in the Baksanskii district, fell on various fronts of the Great Patriotic War. A number of sources mention the participation of the Balkars in the partisan movement, particularly in the United Partisan Detachment of the Republic. They also fought in the 115th Cavalry Division, formed in the fall of 1941....

On January 4, 1943 Nalchik was liberated by a Red Army regiment under Major Okhman... On January 4, 1944, the first anniversary of liberation from German occupation was triumphantly celebrated. No one suspected that disaster was imminent. But on March 8, the Balkar regiments were surrounded by troops, the Balkars driven away in trucks, and then loaded onto cattle cars and shipped off to Kazakhstan and Kirgizia. Of course, not a word of this appeared in print. ...

After another month, the newspaper appeared with an editorial entitled "Education of the National Cadres" Kabarda had need of national cadres! In the entire republic there were only three Kabardian doctors..... In 1944 a total of only sixty-two Kabardinians completed secondary school. There were only twenty- six at the pedagogical institute....

But how could this be? Where had the national cadres disappeared to? Had there been any in the first place? Perhaps the national cadres had been thoroughly eliminated during the repression of the 1930s.

p. 104 [what was the real reason for these deportations?] ... approximately 80,000 Georgian Muslims were deported from Georgia to Central Asia in 1947. Some particularly zealous Soviet propagandists of the 1940s referred to the Crimean Tatars as "Crimean Turk", thereby unwittingly agreeing with the viewpoint of the emigre Tatar nationalists. That is how far one could go to "prove" the necessity of clearing the border regions of all "hostile populations".

How can we then explain the deportation of the Greeks from the Black Sea coastal region in 1944? They certainly had nothing to do with pan-Turkist schemes. ...

And the Kurds -- that nomadic people who did nothing but wander, crossing the state borders of the USSR whenever they had a mind to. What a golden opportunity for spies! But what about those Kurds who had adopted a settled way of life? Well, what about them -- Kurds are Kurds, aren't they? And so the Kurds were sent off to Central Asia. And the Khemsins went with them. These are a settled people, to be sure, but most of them live in Turkey. And in general they are rootless cosmopolitans. But excuse us; that was later, and it referred not to the Khemsins but to the Jews!

We conclude that the deportations of peoples were regarded by the state as a preventive measure serving military needs (Volga Germans, Kurds, Turks, Khemsins, and Greeks), as a punitive measure (Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Karachai, and Crimean Tatars), but also as a measure with strategic implications, to create a more "reliable" border population. There is every reason to regard the deportations of 1943 and 1944 as a component part of Soviet foreign policy at the time. No sooner had the war ended than the Soviet government demanded of Turkey that it return Kars, Ardagan and other areas that had gone to Turkey after World War I. This border zone had already been cleared of "disloyal" Muslim peoples -- against the possibility of armed conflict.

The wartime deportations were not isolated actions carried out under emergency conditions. There were deportations both before and after the war.

In the late 1940s and 1950s preparations were begun to deport all Jews from the main industrial and political centers of the country and send them to Siberia. As a propaganda convenience the Jews were referred to as "cosmopolitans." And the "cosmopolitans" were depicted as agents of American and "Zionist" imperialism. The political, ideological, and material preliminaries for such deportations had already been made. (But Stalin's death in 1953 put an end to this danger.)

In the Baltic region there was another mass expulsion of the native population along class lines, connected with the wholesale collectivization in those areas. Also, the Greeks from other parts of the country were resettled in Central Asia. Several tens of thousands of repatriated Armenians were also expelled from Armenia. And preparations were made to deport the Abkhazians from their Black Sea coastal region.

Thus the tragic policy followed toward the small nations of the Caucasus and the Crimea was in fact a continuation of a process begun long before the war and not ended to this day.

... Shortly after the Crimean War (1854-55) tsarist officials brought wholesale charges against the Crimean Tatars for allegedly having helped Turkey. These charges were meant to divert attention from the inept performance of the tsarist government itself,and its bureaucrats, during the war. They chose the Crimean Tatars as their scapegoat. Consequently, 100,000 Tatars were expelled from the Crimea at that time.

... A well-known Russian historian of late nineteenth century, Ye. Markov, decisively refuted the lie leveled against the entire Crimean Tatar population that they had betrayed Russia...

How strange! Instead of driving out the thieving bureaucrats and shooting them on the spot, the most honorable of the Crimean tribes, the Tatars, were driven out and shot. No one was hurt more by this war than this quiet and industrious people....But I have not met a single long-time resident there who does not have the utmost contempt for all the vile allegations against the Tatars -- which resulted in such a disaster for the entire region. They agree unanimously that without the Tatars we would have lost the Crimean War -- all the means of local transport and vital necessities were entirely in their hands.

p. 107 Soon after the Crimean War a movement in favor of resettlement in Turkey began among the Caucasian Mountaineers, partly instigated by the local feudal lords and Muslim clergy who were linked with Turkey. The tsarist government not only did not try to prevent this movement but encouraged it, hoping to use the Mountaineers' lands as endowments for the Cossack villages the government was establishing in the region. From 1858 to 1865 some 500,000 Mountaineers resettled in Turkey. Half of them died from various diseases along the way...

p. 135 Meanwhile as early as 1954 the Chechens and Ingush deported to Central Asia began to "force their way" back into Chechnia. They would be removed and arrested, but others would come and everything would start all over again. In 1955 the number of those unauthorized returned increased, and after the Twentieth Congress tens of thousands of Chechens and Ingush headed for home. Alarmed by Khruschev's failure to refer to them in his speech at the Twentieth Congress,the Chechens and Ingush sent a delegation to Moscow. Thousands of Chechen families gathered at railroad stations, but an order was issued categorically forbidding the sale of train tickets to them. Despite all appeals and warnings,twenty-five to thirty thousand Chechens and Ingush returned in 1956. When they were not allowed into the homes that had belonged to them before the deportation, they made dugouts alongside them and settled in. But, above all, those who returned restored the cemeteries where their ancestors had been buried, putting up fences, cleaning up the monuments, and burying the dead they had brought back from Central Asia with them. When the Russian population saw that the cemeteries were being restored they realized that the Chechens had returned for good.