I saw someone make this claim on twitter that "Some Chechens collaborated with the Nazi invasion, so Stalin implemented collective punishment and had the entire Chechen population, men women and children (500,000 people), deported to Kazakhstan, in a process that killed about 1/4 of them."
Are there any reliable sources that can verify/validate or refute this?
There is no "alleged" here. Whether someone wants to justify it, or contextualize it or not, the deportations are well documented and no secret. You can find a lot of sources via Marxists.org though expect spin both from the texts and the works they are citing. Neither can adequately cover the whole experience of an ethnic group.
In Blackshirts and Red's Parenti makes a point of saying that these internal deportations are crimes of state and wrong, but that the numbers are often inflated. The mistreatment of the Ingush and Chechens went back a decade prior complicating things.
https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/periodicals/marxist-leninist-research-bureau/mlrb-07.pdf https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/isj2/2000/isj2-086/ferguson.htm https://www.marxists.org/archive/bland/1993/07/enforced-resettlements.pdf
The 1/4th death toll I think is correct, but that's not for the Mountain SSR deportations alone, that's for the batch of them post WW2.
more inclined to believe this than anything that has grover furr on the tin lol
Yeah I have seen that post before. I think it generally is correct in what it states in terms of what literally happened, but people need to not lead with Furr. Even if you agree with him, he is a polemicist and most of what people cite him on are his arguments, not the historical data itself. Of those marxists.org links most come to the same conclusion, but separate their justification. They are more unbiased despite being written for the Stalin society. Like everything else is good, but those sources all cover the same materials in depth so Furr is just there for affirmation I guess
The larger problem was the refusal to let people return, something that continued well through Khrushchev which shows just how little he fucking cared. His framing of the deportations is very sus, with what he excludes in terms of other groups who suffered similar fates. He cynically picked out which mistreated minorities he would acknowledge, and which he would not.
the following is from https://www.reddit.com/r/communism101/comments/316tey/forced_deportation_under_stalin/
As is the case with many anti-Stalin claims, the originator of the "forced deportation" distortion is none other than Nikita Khruschev:
Comrades, let us reach for some other facts. The Soviet Union is justly considered as a model of a multinational state because we have in practice assured the equality and friendship of all nations which live in our great Fatherland. All the more monstrous are the acts whose initiator was Stalin...the mass deportations from their native places of whole nations...without any exception...not dictated by any military considerations...
If you know your Soviet history, you should also know that many of the things Khruschev says in his "Secret Speech" are pure bullshit. This allegation is no different. I don't reject the fact that there were mass deportations of certain ethnic groups, but contrary to Khruschev's supposition, these mass deportations were actually driven by military considerations. After all, WWII was going on in the background, particularly in the rear of the Red Army.
So you want non-bourgeois sources, huh? Keep in mind that many bourgeois historians have done good work on the USSR, not every Sovietologist is Robert Conquest or Richard Pipes. But I do have a copy of Furr's book, so I'll borrow from that a bit. The first large-scale deportation of a specific ethnic group came in 1937, when about 175,000 Koreans living on the Chinese border were forcefully relocated to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan because they were allegedly spying for the Japanese. Now, I know what you're thinking: it is simply improbable that almost 175,000 people would all be spying for a foreign enemy. Furr responds by saying that if "only the guilty" were punished, the nation as a whole would split, and its survival would be threatened. Young men were usually the demographic involved in conspiracies, and if only they were deported, you could probably make an educated guess what would happen to the group altogether. So instead, tactics of mass deportation were used to keep the groups intact. Were the accusations of espionage veracious? Well, here's what Stalin said to the famous defector, Genrikh Samoilovich Lyushkov:
It is necessary to clean up the army and its rear in the most determined manner from hostile spy and pro-Japanese elements...the Far East is not Soviet, there the Japanese rule...Stalin resumed the conversation by saying it was necessary in cleansing the rear to terrorize the Korean district and the frontier so as to prevent any Japanese espionage work.
According to Lyushkov, Stalin ordered the deportations "from the standpoint of counter-intelligence". He sincerely believed that the Koreans in the Far East had spies for the Japanese in their midst. Hiroaki Kuromiya covered the topic extensively in his The Voices of the Dead: Stalin's Great Terror in the 1930s. He writes that the Soviet-Japanese border areas "had been tense for some time". One Soviet report dated December 25, 1934 describes two Chinese spies sent by the Japanese being detained on their side of the border. On December 28, a Soviet border guard was shot at by four unknown men from the "Manchu" side. And on the very next day, a Japanese plane invaded Soviet air territory near Grodekovsky (гродековский). In 1936, according to Japanese estimates, there were 203 border disputes with the Soviet Union. Still, despite all of this, Kuromiya contends that it isn't clear whether any of the ethnic Chinese and Koreans deported were actually spies. History suggests that Japan very well may have been extensively using espionage tactics, as they used them in both the Russo-Japanese War and the Siberian Civil War. Knowledge of the prevalence of black ops near the border areas combined with Stalin's conversation with Lyushkov should lead honest people to the conclusion that the mass deportations were not based on racism or hatred for Japanese culture, but fear.
Ran out of room so I'm posting the rest here:
Another ethnic group that suffered mass expulsion was the Russaki, or Russian-Germans. The population transfer was triggered by Nazi Germany's violation of Molotov-Ribbentrop in 1941. A decree from the Supreme Soviet Presidium precipitated the removal of 1.2 million Russian-Germans; most were relocated in Siberia and parts of Central Asia. Obviously the driving force behind Soviet actions in this case was the fear of a so-called "fifth column" in the country. In 1943 and 1944 Karachays, a Turkic-speaking people of the North Caucasus region, were accused of collaborating with the occupying German army. In November 1943, 68,938 persons were transferred to Kazakhstan and Kirghizia. Were these charges baseless? Not in the least. In his excellent biography of the Man of Steel, New Zealand-born historian Ian Grey writes that along with other Russian Muslims, the Karachai displayed pro-German sympathies, at least to some degree. Alexander Dallin recounts in German Rule in Russia: 1941-1945: A Study of Occupation Policies; London; 1981; pages 244, 246, 258 that early in the Soviet-German war: "...Revolts broke out among some of the Caucasian Mountaineers. Most widespread in the Muslim areas, particularly among the Chechens and Karachai, these rebellions prepared the ground for a change of regime....Faced with a concentrated German onslaught and a lack of support from the indigenous population, the Red Army retreated from Rostov to the Greater Caucasus Mountains without giving battle....In the Karachai region the bulk of the Muslim Mountaineers accorded the Germans a more genuine welcome than in most other occupied areas. The Germans...announced the formation of a Karachai voluntary squadron of horsemen to fight with the German army....During the entire occupation, there was no evidence of anti-German activity in the Karachai area".
On December 27, 1943, NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria commenced the deportation of Kalmyks, a Buddhist people living in southern Russia near the Volga river basin. Around half deported to Siberia died before being allowed to return home in 1957. Their situation was analogous to the Karachays. Ephemerally under German occupation, they were accused of collaborated with the Nazis by the Soviet leadership. The decree was signed by Kalinin and reads as follows:
In the period of occupation of the territory of the Kalmyk ASSR by German- Fascist invaders, many Kalmyks betrayed their Motherland, joined military detachments organized by the Germans for fighting against the Red Army, handed over to the Germans honest Soviet citizens, seized and handed over to the Germans livestock evacuated from collective farms in the Rostov oblast and the Ukraine, and, after the expulsion of the invaders by the Red Army, organized bands and actively opposed organs of Soviet power in the restoration of the economy destroyed by the Germans, perpetrated bandit raids on collective farms and terrorized the surrounding population.
The German army often made the clichéd promise of independence to the ethnic groups it presided over. Sometimes the people were persuaded; other times they were not. Edvard Radzinsky writes in his 1996 Stalin that "During their occupation of the Caucasus the Germans had promised independence to the Chechens, the Ingush, the Balkars, and the Kalmyks. Members of these ethnic groups did sometimes collaborate with the Germans. The same was true of the Crimean Tartars".
In 1943 there were about 450,000 Chechens and Ingush in the Chechen Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, an artificial merger of the two groups established in 1936. Furr writes of "massive collaboration" with German forces and quotes a February 2000 Radio Svoboda interview with Chechen nationalists who brag of a "pro-German" anti-Soviet rebellion in February 1943, "when the Nazi penetration towards the Caucasus was at its greatest".
In March of 1944, the deportation of 38,000 Balkars (Turkish people in the Northern Caucasus near Elbruz Mountain) began. Sent to Central Asia, between 20% and 40% of the Balkars transferred died from 1944 to 1956. Alexander Werth notes in Russia at War: 1941-1945 (1964) that "the Muslim Balkars were more outspokenly pro-German than the mostly non-Muslim (Christian) Kabardinians."
In May of 1944, the deportation of Crimean Tartars began. The forced removal began only one month after the German army withdrew from the Crimean Peninsula. Furr writes that in 1939 there were 218,000 Crimean Tartars and estimates that the proportional amount of military-aged men should be about 22,000, or 10% of the population. He says that by 1944, "20,000 Crimean Tartars had joined Nazi Forces and were fighting against the Red Army". Furr's source for the claim is researcher J. Otto Pohl, who is also cited in a 2002 article by Greta Lynn Uehling for International Committee for Crimea. Interestingly, Uehling asserts that Crimean Tartar participation in "German self-defense battalions" was not entirely voluntary, in that it was often "secured at gunpoint". Nevertheless, Uehling admits that there was a great deal of collaboration between Crimean Tartars and Nazi Forces.
I think I've covered the main deportations of the WWII era. As you can probably tell, in most cases the State had a good reason for its population transfers. The ethnic groups often contained many elements tied to foreign enemies like Germany and Japan. But I do want to make it clear that the USSR was collectively punishing these groups. As Furr says, it was not following the Enlightenment views of individual, as opposed to collective, punishment. Therefore, in some sense of the word, the deportations can be construed as "barbaric". Did the Party at this point in time really care much for the diverse groups of people in the Far East? I'm not sure. Again, WWII was going on in the background, so maybe some of us can excuse the excesses. I, for one, believe that this was a very dark time in Soviet history.
Sources:
Khruschev Lied - Grover Furr
The Voices of the Dead: Stalin's Great Terror in the 1930s - Hiroaki Kuromiya
The Crimean Tartars - Greta Lynn Uehling http://www.iccrimea.org/scholarly/krimtatars.html
Deportation of the Kalmyks (1943–1956): Stigmatized Ethnicity - Eliza Bair Guchinova
Stalin, Man of History - Ian Grey
Russia at War: 1941-1945 - Alexander Werth
Molotov Remembers - Felix Chuev
Thank you for sharing this!
