Soviet Deportations in a Poet's Eyes
PIPES, RICHARD
Soviet Deportations in a Poet's Eyes The Deportation of Nationalities. By Robert Conquest. St. Martins. 203 pp. $6.75. Reviewed by Richard Pipes Author, "The Formation of the. Soviet...
...As the author rightly points out, several circumstances add poignancy to these events...
...Finally, these deportations were carried out by a Government which to this day claims—and is supported in this claim by its foreign mouthpieces and followers—to have eliminated national animosities...
...Its interest being focussed on the moving forces, it emphasizes or dismisses events in accord with the function they perform in the general progression of things, as the historian understands it...
...The reason, I think, must be sought in the evolution historiography has undergone in the past century...
...he recounts their relations with the Soviet regime, citing numerous Soviet sources to prove that until the war these nationalities had behaved in no way differently from the other Soviet population groups...
...yet, in fact, the Germans were stopped short of their Republic and never occupied it...
...The complete disappearance of these nationalities from post-1944 Soviet publications, reports of travelers and released prisoners of war and the revelations of Khrushchev have helped to shed some light on it...
...Its main concern since then has been philosophical: It has been searching for the fundamental, invisible forces operating behind the surface of events, trying to isolate as much as possible the historic elements that are independent of time and space and treating outward "events" more and more as manifestations, not as ends in themselves...
...Its concern was traditionally with self-contained, individual events, which it tried to reconstruct as dramatically and convincingly as possible...
...It sought no abstract, invisible movers behind the external events save "Providence" or "human nature," or, beginning with the great German historians of the Romantic period, "national character...
...This action affected nearly one million Soviet citizens: the Mongol Kalmyks (135,000), the Muslim, Turkic and Crimean Tatars (200,-000), Karachais (75,000), Balkars (43.000) and Chechen-Ingush (500,-000...
...Soviet Union" BETWEEN NOVEMBER 1943 and June 1944, in the wake of the Red Armies driving the Germans from southern Russia, special detachments of the NKVD poured into several of the small Soviet Republics inhabited by Turkic and Mongol minorities...
...It takes a poet to remind us of that...
...In the process of becoming "philosophic," history has lost its eye for the infinite color and variety of human events, for the individual man and occurrence, for the glorious, infamous and sad...
...The revolution in historiography, however, has not been an unmixed blessing...
...The chapters dealing with the history of the deportations are much more interesting than the historical and theoretical discussions, which bear all the earmarks of hasty "background" reading...
...Understandably, historiography has grown increasingly abstract...
...In any case, it is a "minor" occurrence, an episode in the aftermath of World War II...
...Taking as a yardstick the rate of growth since 1939 of neighboring peoples who had not been deported—around 40 per cent—the loss of all the deported nationalities (Germans and Crimean Tatars included) might today be more correctly estimated at around 500,000...
...If the manner in which man deals with his experience is divided in two broad categories, the "poetic" and the "philosophic," then the discipline of history from its inception in classical Greece to the middle of the 19th century would clearly have belonged to the "poetic" category...
...What historian could say, as does Conquest in his introduction, that these deportations are "one of the most significant . . . episodes in modern historv...
...In the second place, the largest deported nationality, the Chechen-Ingush, was charged with collaboration with the Germans in the official Soviet announcement...
...and then analyzes all the known data dealing with the actual deportation process, the distribution of the deportees and their partial "rehabilitation" since 1956...
...The latter indicates that the population of the five deported nationalities which have been rehabilitated (Kalmyk, Chechen, Ingush, Balkar, Karachai) is today identical with that of 1939 (750,000...
...The official Soviet announcement of these actions was first issued two years later (June 25, 1946) and even then referred only to the deportation ("resettlement" was the euphemism used) of the Chechen-Ingush and Crimean Tatars...
...Conquest is neither a historian nor political scientist, but a poet and a man of letters...
...On prearranged signals, they surrounded the native settlements, ordered the inhabitants to collect a set quantity of personal belongings and marched them off to assembly points nearby from where, by truck and train, they were deported thousands of miles away...
...His figures, necessarily based on most inadequate data, show losses almost twice as large as those which have been revealed since he completed his book by the 1959 Soviet census...
...Robert Conquest has assembled all the information on this subject available in the West and written a book which is both the first full account and an indignant protest against the brutality of the Soviet regime and the indifference of the Western world to it...
...history is interested in the winners...
...In the first place, the deportations (except for the Germans) were carried out not during the war, in time of danger, but when the war was virtually over and victory assured...
...Some came disguised as civilians, others as regular troops on militarv exercises...
...Above all...
...In particular, Conquest made an unwise effort to compute the number of deportees who had perished in exile...
...From this point of view, the importance of the Soviet deportation of the nationalities lies in what it reveals of the inner tensions within the Soviet Union, as well as of the power and technical skill of the Communist regime in executing and partly concealing an action of such magnitude...
...The emphasis of traditional historiography on the external, ephemeral aspects of experience accounts for the low esteem in which the Greeks had held it, as well as for the fascination it had for such pure poets as Schiller and Pushkin...
...Briefly, what happened was that history became a "social science" (in the Comtean sense) and thereby lost its association with the poetic manner of cognition...
...An interesting feature of this book is its author's background...
...Gradually, the outside world obtained a general picture of this despicable mass punishment—for alleged collaboration—carried out in areas liberated from the enemy...
...On the basis of Soviet and non-Soviet sources, he describes the background of the nationalities involved in the 1943-44 deportations, as well as of the Volga Germans who had been deported earlier...
...But the picture is still hazy...
...It was, in other words, not a preventive but a punitive measure...
...In the middle of the 19th century the main stream of historical writing began to change its course radically...
...Why should a purely historical event find its first chronicler in a poet...
Vol. 43 • September 1960 • No. 37
