Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [256]
Bruno Bettelheim, commenting upon this particular collection of stories, unusual in their number and nature, tried to describe the special despair that they convey:
Since they were written soon after the children had reached freedom and security, it would seem reasonable for them to have spoken of their hope for liberation, if they had any. The absence of such statements suggests that they had none. These children were robbed of the freedom to vent deep and normal feelings, forced to repress them in order to survive for barely another day. A child who has been deprived of any hope for the future is a child dwelling in hell ...20
No less cruel was the fate of another group of exiles, who were to join the Poles and the Balts during the course of the war. These were the Soviet minority groups, whom Stalin either targeted early in the war as a potential fifth column, or else fingered as German “collaborators” later on. The “fifth columnists” were the Volga Germans, people whose German ancestors had been invited to live in Russia at the time of Catherine the Great (another Russian ruler who cared deeply about populating her nation’s great empty spaces) and the Finnish-speaking minority who had inhabited the Soviet republic of Karelia. Although not all of the Volga Germans even spoke German anymore, nor all of the Karelian Finns Finnish, they did live in distinct communities, and had different customs from their Russian neighbors. That was enough, in the context of war with Finland and Germany, to make them figures of suspicion. In a leap of reasoning which was convoluted even by Soviet standards, the entire Volga German people were condemned, in September 1941, on a charge of “concealing enemies”:
According to trustworthy information received by the military authorities, there are, among the German population living in the Volga area, thousands and tens of thousands of diversionists and spies who, on a signal being given from Germany, are to carry out sabotage in the area inhabited by the Germans of the Volga . . . [However] none of the Germans of the Volga area have reported to the Soviet authorities the existence of such a large number of diversionists and spies among the Volga Germans; consequently the German population of the Volga area conceals enemies of the Soviet people and of Soviet authority in its midst.21
The Soviet authorities had “trustworthy information” that there were thousands of spies, yet no spies had been reported. Ergo, everybody was guilty of hiding the enemy.
The “collaborators” included several small Caucasian nations—the Karachai, the Balkars, the Kalmyks, the Chechens, and the Ingush—as well as the Crimean Tartars and some other small minority groups: Meskhetian Turks, Kurds, and Khemshils, as well as even smaller groups of Greeks, Bulgarians, and Armenians.22 Of these, only the Chechen and Tartar deportations were ever made public in Stalin’s lifetime. Their exile, although actually carried out in 1944, was announced in the newspaper Izvestiya as having taken place in June 1946:
During the Great Patriotic War, when the peoples of the USSR were heroically defending the honor and independence of the Motherland in the struggle against the German-Fascist invaders, many Chechen and Crimean Tartars, at the instigation of German agents, joined volunteer units organized by the Germans . . . In connection with this, the Chechens and Crimean Tartars were resettled in other regions of the USSR.23
In fact, there is no evidence of massive Chechen or Tartar collaboration, although the Germans did actively recruit Chechens and Tartars, whereas they did not actively recruit Russians. German forces stopped to the west of Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, and no more than a few hundred Chechens crossed the front line.24 An NKVD report from the time speaks of only 335 “bandits” in the republic.25 Similarly, although the Germans did occupy Crimea, did co-opt Tartars into the occupation regime, and did draft Tartars into the Wehrmacht