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.