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Punished Peoples
“A valuable and absorbing account. . . .Impressive in scope, careful in documentation, rich in fact, the study incorporates previously unpublished Soviet materials on its subject and is salted with the author’s personal memories as a Red Army officer at the time. I hope we shall see the day when the Russian original can be published in Russia itself.” ―Robert C. Tucker In late 1943 and early 1944, after the Nazi invasion of Russia had been turned back, Soviet troops descended upon the Caucasus, the Caspian steppes, and the Crimea without warning and brutally deported some one million of their people―Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Karachai, Kalmyks, and Tatars―to Central Asia, Kazakhstan, and Siberia. Hundreds were executed and thousands more were to die of malnutrition, exposure, and harsh treatment. Not until the late 1950s were some of them allowed to return to their homelands, but then, and even now, under a burden of lies and guilt for the treasonous acts of a few.
- GenresHistoryRussiaNonfiction
238 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 1978
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
October 4, 2019
Soviet emigre historian Alexandr Nekrich offered a late-Soviet revisionist account of the Stalinist cleansing of troublesome minorities during WW II, whose recriminations still linger. Accused of Nazi collaboration - wrongly, according to Nekrich - hundreds of thousands of "Asiatic" minorities were deported to Siberia in special settlements one step removed from gulag camps. In this they shared the fate of Russian-Germans on the Volga, Japanese-Americans in the US, or of the ethnic Germans in postwar Europe in greater numbers. Their "road of sorrows" parallels the Cherokee "Trail of Tears."
But while historical analogies unfortunately abound worldwide, the essential question remains: were these minorities really guilty of collaboration en masse with the "Hitlerite-Fascist Occupation?" Nekrich, as a Soviet liberal fighting the legacy of Stalinism, offers a resounding no. This was chauvinist propaganda concocted by Great Russian Stalinists saturated with wartime nationalism. Yet I sense a bit of special pleading in Nekrich's tone. Recriminating nationalisms, barely concealed beneath everyday facades, was the norm in the old USSR, and in the Russian Empire before. The German invasion brought this to the surface, exactly as glasnost would do in the next generation.
Undoubtedly Nekrich's take is right in some degree, but one suspects the record is murkier than he or the Stalinists make it. For the first rule in war is survival, especially for those who can't fight it, and aiding the stronger party of the moment is as traditional as tribal prejudice. The Nazi desire to divide and conquer, stoking anti-Russian attitudes in subject minorities, resonated from the Baltic to the Black Sea - and beyond, if we count the fortuitous excavations at Katyn, Poland. Russian chauvinism was in turn purposely stoked by the Kremlin.
Among the minorities described by Nekrich - Tatars, Kalmyks, Chechens, etc. - there seems to have been a real division between those who honestly "fell" for German/Western promises of liberation and special treatment, with anti-Russian experience and tradition behind them; and those who were ardently partisan, fighting to drive out the German occupiers regardless of Russian racism in partisan ranks. One suspects the average was a canny middle ground. The hard-bitten, all-or-nothing assertions of Crimean partisan leader Mokrousov underscore the point: since Crimean Tartars were not, in his view, collectively rising heroically as Russian patriots should, they were collectively guilty of treason. His polarized attitude - though contradicted at the time by Party Committee reports to Moscow - was shared in the Kremlin's deepest office.
Yet conscience and conviction in wartime is always as fluid as water in the hand, the documentation always partial - especially in such contested conflict zones. Nekrich's book shows that the many must not be collectively punished for the few; but sometimes those few can be a substantial minority that, unjustly, taint a whole barrel.
But while historical analogies unfortunately abound worldwide, the essential question remains: were these minorities really guilty of collaboration en masse with the "Hitlerite-Fascist Occupation?" Nekrich, as a Soviet liberal fighting the legacy of Stalinism, offers a resounding no. This was chauvinist propaganda concocted by Great Russian Stalinists saturated with wartime nationalism. Yet I sense a bit of special pleading in Nekrich's tone. Recriminating nationalisms, barely concealed beneath everyday facades, was the norm in the old USSR, and in the Russian Empire before. The German invasion brought this to the surface, exactly as glasnost would do in the next generation.
Undoubtedly Nekrich's take is right in some degree, but one suspects the record is murkier than he or the Stalinists make it. For the first rule in war is survival, especially for those who can't fight it, and aiding the stronger party of the moment is as traditional as tribal prejudice. The Nazi desire to divide and conquer, stoking anti-Russian attitudes in subject minorities, resonated from the Baltic to the Black Sea - and beyond, if we count the fortuitous excavations at Katyn, Poland. Russian chauvinism was in turn purposely stoked by the Kremlin.
Among the minorities described by Nekrich - Tatars, Kalmyks, Chechens, etc. - there seems to have been a real division between those who honestly "fell" for German/Western promises of liberation and special treatment, with anti-Russian experience and tradition behind them; and those who were ardently partisan, fighting to drive out the German occupiers regardless of Russian racism in partisan ranks. One suspects the average was a canny middle ground. The hard-bitten, all-or-nothing assertions of Crimean partisan leader Mokrousov underscore the point: since Crimean Tartars were not, in his view, collectively rising heroically as Russian patriots should, they were collectively guilty of treason. His polarized attitude - though contradicted at the time by Party Committee reports to Moscow - was shared in the Kremlin's deepest office.
Yet conscience and conviction in wartime is always as fluid as water in the hand, the documentation always partial - especially in such contested conflict zones. Nekrich's book shows that the many must not be collectively punished for the few; but sometimes those few can be a substantial minority that, unjustly, taint a whole barrel.
December 11, 2018
The book is really magnificant
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews