Deportation of peoples of Caucasus during World War II highlights contradictions in Stalin’s policy

During World War II, Stalin made decisions to deport the Caucasian peoples despite the Soviet propaganda of internationalism, and in the regions where the deportees were sent, the Soviet authorities deliberately marginalized people from the Caucasus, historians interviewed by the "Caucasian Knot" say.

The decision on which peoples to be subjected to repression depended directly on Stalin, since collaborationism to one degree or another occurred among representatives of all the peoples of the USSR, says Doctor of Philological Science Boris Sokolov, a historian and a member of the Association of Russian Society Researchers.

“Slavic peoples – Belarusians, Ukrainians, Russians, as well as Cossacks – were not subject to total expulsion. Among them, only those who were accused of collaborationism or suspected of disloyalty were expelled. The same selective deportation took place among the three peoples of the Baltic States. Stalin did not want to quarrel with the West, where the annexation of the Baltic states was not recognized. But Stalin wanted to completely Slavicize the Caucasus and Crimea, because he was going to fight with Turkey. So, he removed all non-Slavic and mostly Muslim peoples from the region. After the war, the Meskhetian Turks were deported, and they were not involved in collaborationism in any way,” Boris Sokolov told the “Caucasian Knot” correspondent.

All deportation decisions contradicted the fundamental doctrine of the Soviet state on proletarian internationalism, which did not allow blaming entire nations and persecuting people on the basis of their ethnicity, the “Caucasian Knot” correspondent has been told by Timur Matiev, a leading researcher at the Ingush Research Institute for Humanitarian Studies.

He also noted that “the level of desertion and other military crimes among the peoples subjected to repressions in no way exceeded the average statistics among other peoples of the USSR, which were not subjected to any collective repressions.”

This article was originally published on the Russian page of 24/7 Internet agency ‘Caucasian Knot’ on June 23, 2022 at 03:50 pm MSK. To access the full text of the article, click here.