Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [257]
In fact, Stalin’s aim, at least in deporting the Caucasians and the Tartars, was probably not revenge for collaboration. He seems, rather, to have used the war as a form of cover story, as an excuse to carry out long-planned ethnic-cleansing operations. The Czars had dreamed of a Crimea free of the Tartars ever since Catherine the Great had incorporated the Crimean peninsula into the Russian Empire. The Chechens had also plagued Russia’s Czars, and had caused even worse trouble for the Soviet Union as well. A series of anti-Russian and anti-Soviet uprisings had taken place in Chechnya, some following the Revolution, others after collectivization in 1929. Another rebellion had occurred as recently as 1940. All the evidence seems to indicate that Stalin simply wanted to wipe his hands of this troublesome, deeply anti-Soviet people.27
Like the deportations from Poland, the Volga German, Caucasian, and Crimean deportations were very large. There were, by the war’s end, 1.2 million deported Soviet Germans, 90,000 Kalmyks, 70,000 Karachai, 390,000 Chechens, 90,000 Ingush, 40,000 Balkars, and 180,000 Crimean Tartars as well as 9,000 Finns and others.28
Given the numbers, the speed of these deportations was remarkable, surpassing even the rapidity of the Polish and Baltic deportations. Perhaps this was because the NKVD had, by now, a great deal of experience: this time around, there was no indecisiveness about who should be allowed to take what, who should be arrested, or what the procedure should be. In May 1944, 31,000 NKVD officers, soldiers, and operatives completed the entire deportation of 200,000 Tartars in three days, using 100 jeeps, 250 trucks, and 67 trains. Special orders, prepared in advance, limited the amount of baggage that each family could bring. As they were allowed only fifteen to twenty minutes to pack, most did not take even half of that. The vast majority of the Tartars were packed on trains and sent to Uzbekistan—men, women, children, and old people. Between 6,000 and 8,000 died before arriving.29
If anything, the Chechen operation was crueler still. Many observers remember that the NKVD used American-made Studebakers in the Chechen deportations, recently purchased through the Lend-Lease program, and shipped over the border from Iran. Many have also described how the Chechens were taken off the Studebakers, and placed into sealed trains: they were not only deprived of water, like “ordinary” prisoners, but also of food. Up to 78,000 Chechens may have died on the transport trains alone.30
Upon their arrival in their designated place of exile—Kazakhstan, central Asia, northern Russia—those deportees who had not been arrested separately and sent to the Gulag were placed in special villages, just like those that the Poles and the Balts had settled, and were told that an escape attempt would bring a twenty-year camp sentence. Their experiences were similar too. Disoriented, removed from their tribal and village societies, many failed to adjust. Usually despised by the local population, frequently unemployed, they rapidly grew weak and sick. Perhaps the shock of the new climate was greater: “When we arrived in Kazakhstan,” one Chechen deportee remembered, “the ground was frozen hard, and we thought we would all die.”31 By 1949, hundreds of thousands of the Caucasians, and between a third and a half of the Crimean Tartars were dead.32
But from Moscow’s point of view, there was one important difference between the wartime waves of arrest and deportation, and those that had happened earlier: the choice of target was new. For the first time, Stalin had decided to eliminate not just members of particular, suspect nationalities,