Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [258]
Perhaps “genocide” is not the proper term for these deportations, since there were no mass executions. In later years, Stalin would also seek collaborators and allies among these “enemy” groups, so his hatred was not purely racial. “Cultural genocide,” however, is not inappropriate. After they had gone, the names of all of the deported peoples were eliminated from official documents—even from the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. The authorities wiped their homelands off the map, abolishing the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Republic, the Volga-German Autonomous Republic, the Kabardino-Balkar Autonomous Republic, and the Karachai Autonomous Province. The Crimean Autonomous Republic was also liquidated, and Crimea simply became another Soviet province. Regional authorities destroyed cemeteries, renamed towns and villages, and removed the former inhabitants from the history books.33
In their new homes, all of the Muslim deportees—Chechen, Ingush, Balkar, Karachai, and Tartar—were forced to send their children to Russian-language primary schools. All of them were discouraged from using their own languages, from practicing their religions, from remembering their past. Without a doubt, the Chechens, the Tartars, the Volga Germans, the smaller Caucasian nations—and, over a longer period, the Balts and the Poles—were meant to vanish, to be absorbed into the Russian-speaking Soviet world. In the end, these nations did “reappear” after the death of Stalin, albeit slowly. Although the Chechens were allowed to return home in 1957, the Tartars could not do so until the Gorbachev era. They received their Crimean “citizenship”—their legal right to residence— only in 1994.
Given the climate of the time, the cruelty of the war, and the presence, a few thousand kilometers to the west, of another planned genocide, some have wondered why Stalin did not simply murder the ethnic groups he so despised. My guess is that the destruction of the cultures, but not of the peoples, suited his purposes better. The operation rid the USSR of what he thought of as “enemy” social structures: bourgeois, religious, and national institutions that might resist him; educated people who might oppose him. At the same time, it also preserved more “units of labor” for future use.
But the story of the foreigners in the camps does not end with the Chechens and the Poles. There were other ways for outsiders to end up in the Soviet camp system—and by far the largest numbers entered as prisoners of war.
Technically, the Red Army set up the first Soviet POW camps in 1939, following the occupation of eastern Poland. The first wartime decree on prisoner-of-war camps was issued on September 19 of that year, two days after Soviet tanks rolled across the border.34 By the end of September, the Red Army held 230,000 Polish soldiers and officers in captivity. 35 Many were released, particularly younger soldiers of lower rank, although some— those considered potential partisans—eventually made their way either into the Gulag, or into one of the 100 or so POW camps deeper in the USSR. Following the German invasion, these camps were evacuated, along with other prisons, to camps in the east.36
Infamously, not all of the Polish POWs even made it to these eastern camps. In April 1940, the NKVD secretly murdered more than 20,000 of the captured Polish officers, shooting each one in the back of the head, following Stalin’s direct orders.37 Stalin murdered the officers for the same reason he had ordered the arrests of Polish priests and schoolteachers—his intention was to eliminate the Polish elite—and then he covered it up. Despite enormous efforts, the Polish government-in-exile was unable to discover what had become of the officers—until the Germans found them. In the spring of 1943, the German occupying regime uncovered 4,000 of the bodies in Katyn forest.38 Although the Soviet Union denied responsibility for the Katyn massacre, as it later came to be known, and although