The Eurasian Triangle. Russia, the Caucasus and Japan, 1904-1945

The Great Terror Ë 159

dred of them.¹²⁸Little reliable aggregate data are available on the other regions of the

Caucasus. In the kulak operation, Chechnia, Ingushetia, Dagestan, and Kabardino-

Balkaria appear to have experienced harsher waves of terror,¹²⁹likely owing to the

persistence of peasant insurgencies. Altogether, according to ocial data, in Chechnia

and Ingushetia, 9,410 people were arrested in 1937 and 1938.¹³⁰This included all major

Communist leaders and government ocials (including village Soviet chairmen) who

were ethnic Chechens and Ingush. As a result, Soviet-educated local elites also joined

the ranks of insurgents in the mountainous areas.¹³¹In Dagestan, in the 1930s–1950s

(during the Stalin era), fourteen thousand people were repressed, seven thousand ve

hundred of them for political reasons.¹³²One Dagestani political leader was accused

of having proposed in 1926 that Haidar Bammat be invited back from abroad to help

develop the Dagestani economy. He was executed in 1937.¹³³

In the Caucasus as elsewhere, foreign connections were the leitmotif of the Great

Terror.¹³⁴In the sense that it meant to eliminate any and all potential internal threats,

the Great Terror functioned as “total counterespionage.”¹³⁵Germany, Poland, and

Japan were singled out as the most dangerous states intent on destroying the Soviet

Union by encouraging nationalism and separatism. Signicantly, Moscow denounced

Muslim clergy in the Caucasus as in the Crimea, Central Asia, and Bashkiria for har-

boring Japanese spies among themselves.¹³⁶Furthermore, in the case of the Caucasus,

Turkey, ostensibly on friendly terms with the Soviet Union, was also added to this list

of anti-Soviet powers. Alleged connections with Turkish intelligence were widely

used against individuals and groups.¹³⁷Similarly, an “important part of the standard

accusation of nationalism in Armenia was cooperation with the ‘anti-Soviet’ organi-

zations of the Armenian Diaspora.”¹³⁸Nationalists in the Caucasus would, according

128 Baberowski,Der Feind ist überall, 763.
129 See Iunge, Bordiugov, and Binner,Vertikal’ bol’shogo terrora, 520, 521, 522–23, 556–58, 562, 564.
For some additional details, see Alex Marshall,The Caucasus under Soviet Rule(London-New York:
Routledge, 2006), 237–38.
130 O.B. Mozokhin,Pravo na repressii. Vnesudebnye polnomochiia organov gosudarstvennoi be-
zopasnosti. Statisticheskie svedeniia o deiatel’nosti VChK-OGPU-NKVD-MGB SSSR (1918–1953)2nd ed.
(Moscow: Kuchkovo pole, 2011), 459, 463.
131 Magamadov and Kislitsyn,Politicheskaia vlast’ i povstancheskoe dvizhenie na Severnom Kavkaze,
297–99.
132 SeeRepressii 30-kh godov v Dagestane. Dokumenty i materialy(Makhachkala: Iupiter, 1997), 40.
133 Repressii 30-kh godov v Dagestane, 325.
134 On foreign connections, see Hiroaki Kuromiya, “Stalin’s Great Terror and International Espi-
onage.”The Journal of Slavic Military Studies, 24, no. 2 (2011), 238–52.
135 See Kuromiya and Pepłoński, “Stalin, Espionage, and Counterespionage,” 73–91.
136 See “Iaponskie shpiony sredi musul’manskogo dukhovenstva.”Antireligioznik, 1938, nos. 8–9,
66–67.
137 See, for example,Lubianka: Stalin i Glavnoe upravlenie gosbezopasnosti NKVD 1937–1938, 250.
138 Eduard Melkonian, “Repressions in the 1930s Soviet Armenia,”Caucasus Analytical Digest, no.
22 (1 December 2010), 7.