The USSR's Uprooted Nations

...This served as a pretext "for accusing these entire peoples of high treason and . . . with collaboration on a massive scale...

...None [of them] rose from their seats to ask what had happened to their colleagues, the deputies from the autonomous areas of the Northern Caucasus, or why such a massive relocation had taken place, or for what reason, after all, the autonomous areas had been liquidated...

...In 1967 the Tatars were officially rehabilitated, but they have not been permitted to return from exile, and their republic, made part of the Ukrainian SSR, has not been restored...

...Now a fellow at the Russian Research Center of Harvard University, Nekrich has produced a book that recounts the story behind the events he witnessed over 30 years ago...

...Many of them rushed back even before official authorization came through and gradually, if not easily, reestablished their interrupted economic and cultural life...

...For example, in the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Republic, Studebaker trucks (lend-lease from the American allies to help the Red Army) rolled into the center of the villages on February 23, 1944...

...And in the late 1940s and the early 1950s there were plans to deport all Jews from the main industrial and political centers of the country to Siberia...

...Nekrich comments: "If you are a historian and are curious about this, take a look at the local newspapers...

...abroad...

...Moreover, Nazi Germany, for a time, approved Turkey's schemes concerning the Muslim population of the USSR, and several Turkish emissaries did visit the Crimea and the Caucasus during the German occupation...

...From the 1943 newspapers you will learn about the people's joy on the occasion of their liberation from enemy occupation and the feats of arms of the sons of Checheno-Ingushetia, Kabardino-Balkaria, Cherkessia and Kalmykia...

...The Punished Peoples is important for its restoration of the historical truth...

...Indeed, during the late 1950s most of the punished peoples were rehabilitated, their regions were restored, and the survivors of the harsh exile in the "special settlements" returned home...

...Many Baits, Armenians, Volga Germans, and members of other minorities were also expelled from their homelands...

...It is not likely that this will happen in the near future...

...The autonomous republic was abolished and the native population of Chechen and Ingush, numbering 425,000 before the War, was forcibly removed...

...the Chechen sniper Khanashpe Nura-dilov...

...and many, many others...

...You will read about the exploits of the Crimean partisans and such Red Army soldiers as the famed pilot Sultan-Khan, a Crimean Tatar who twice became a Hero of the Soviet Union...

...Except, that is, for the Crimean Tatars...

...And you will not find a single word there about the deportations—neither in the central press nor in the local press...

...Nevertheless, several thousand members of these nations did betray the Soviet government by joining German military formations...

...Characteristically," Nekrich observes, "Khrushchev did not refer to the fact that the overwhelming majority of the deportees were women and children, but he did not forget to stress the fact that there were Communists and Komsomols among them...

...The last chapter of the book, entitled "Decisions That Cannot Be Avoided," focuses on their plight...

...The pattern in the case of each of the punished peoples was repeated with little variation...

...Equally important, though, is its documentation of the current regime's discriminatory nationality measures...

...Soldiers held the populace at gunpoint as the decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet was read...

...Professor Robert C. Tucker of Princeton, after reading The Punished Peoples, expressed the hope that "we shall see the day when the Russian original can be published in Russia itself...

...Thus arose the stereotype of the Crimean Tatar as an enemy of Russia and an agent of Turkey...

...These, Nekrich reports, range "from the stamp in the internal passport indicating the nationality of the bearer (of all the civilized countries, it seems, ours is the only one where such a barbarity survives) to the restrictions on residence permits on grounds of nationality, to quotas for admission to higher educational institutions and every kind of oral or written propaganda directed against a particular people, no matter what ideological camouflage it may be disguised in...

...Every family was allowed to take a maximum of 20 kilograms of baggage...

...In the meantime, the book will be issued in Russian this summer by Khronika Press in New York...

...But from the newspapers of 1944 you will not learn much...

...the Hero of the Soviet Union Ibraikhan Beibulatov...

...The mass uprootings were shrouded in silence...

...Nekrich rightly calls the nationalities policy "one of the most important symptoms of the profound political and moral crisis that Soviet society and the Soviet state were passing through...

...He notes, finally, that the savage reprisals against participants in the movement on behalf of the Tatars have considerably harmed the international reputation of the Soviet Union...

...Similar deportations occurred late in 1943 and early in 1944 in the Northern Caucasus, where hundreds of thousands of Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Karachai, and Kalmyks were brutally herded into freight cars and dispatched to the east...

...But in 1967 he was expelled from the Communist Party for refusing to acknowledge "errors" in a work he published two years earlier, entitled June 22, 1941, which sharply criticized the Soviet Union's lack of preparedness for the German invasion and placed the blame directly on Stalin...

...for 1943 and 1944...

...and other dissidents who have defended the rights of the Crimean Tatars as "the best representatives of democratic public opinion in our country...

...Thus, a samizdat work will gain wider circulation in the Soviet Union by becoming tamizdat (published "over there," i.e...

...During the postwar period, Nekrich became a distinguished doctor of historical sciences at the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences...

...The English version, ably translated by George Saunders, is essentially the same as the Russian original...

...The silence continued until three years after Stalin's death...

...They will appear again, but only 14 years later, in the newspapers of 1957-58...

...For almost a decade after that his academic writing was so strictly limited—an unstated quota of one article per year in an obscure journal was set—that he finally decided to leave the Soviet Union in 1976...

...It combines the author's painstaking scholarly research—accomplished under difficult conditions, for he was not allowed access to Soviet archives or foreign scholars—with his feeling of moral indignation at a miscarriage of justice by Stalin that is still being covered up by Leonid I. Brezhnev: "There is a need, long overdue, for this unhappy and shameful part of our recent past to be examined with the eyes of the historian...

...As a member of the Second Guards Army engaged in liberating the peninsula from German occupation forces, he witnessed preparations by the secret police, on orders from Moscow, to deport the entire Tatar population of the Crimea to Central Asia and Kazakhstan...

...Let us remember these names...

...Reviewed by Gene Sosin Director of Program Planning, Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty, New York In May 1944, Aleksandr M. Nekrich was 24 years old and serving with the Soviet troops on the Black Sea Coast in the Crimea...

...I have carried it out at my own risk, because in the USSR there is an unspoken ban on discussion of matters involving official lawlessness or arbitrary acts...

...Then, at the 20th Party Congress in 1956, Nikita S. Khrushchev revealed that the deportations were arbitrary acts associated with Stalin's "cult of personality...

...the Balkar Kon-koshev...

...This ready-made stereotype has found its way into the arsenal of propaganda against the Crimean Tatars in our day as well...

...Nekrich condemns this as a violation of the Soviet Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and he praises General Pyotr G. Grigorenko (now in exile in the U.S...

...Nekrich reminds us that during the Crimean War "the Tatars were invariably accused by Tsarist officials and other rank chauvinists of collaborating with the Turks...

...Not surprisingly, the subject does not appear in any plans for scientific research work of the USSR Academy of Sciences...

...He believes, however, that the "leading elements" of the Khrushchev regime had a sincere desire to correct the Stalinist approach and defuse the mounting crisis...

...It is Nekrich's thesis that the vast majority of the North Caucasian minorities and Crimean Tatars opposed the Nazis: "The bestial and inhuman nature of the ideology, policies, and practices of the Third Reich absolutely ruled out any prolonged collaboration between it and even small groups of the Soviet population, let alone entire nations...

...Nor did Khrushchev reveal that the wartime deportations were an essential component of Stalin's nationalities policy in the final years of his rule, not isolated actions carried out in the face of emergency conditions...

...All these minority groups had been accused en masse of collaborating with the Nazis...

...The author adds that the deputies to the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federated Republic from other areas were silent as well in those days...

...Actually, the Punished Peoples was composed in 1975 as a samizdat manuscript and sent to the West...